June 14, 2022 • 36 mins
The body of Gloria Satterfield, longtime housekeeper for disgraced South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh, will be exhumed. Satterfield died after a trip and fall accident at the Murdaugh home. No autopsy was performed and her manner of death listed as natural. Now, after the string of deaths linked to the Murdaugh name, investigators want to know more. Exhumations are not ordered for just any old case, but when a court orders the embalmed remains of a human being be uninterred, everyone pays attention, including our forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan. In this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss what exhumation is, and why exhumation must be handled with the utmost of care.
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Show Notes:
Introduction [02:00]
Events that lead to the pending exhumation of Gloria Satterfield [03:32]
Judiciary regulations regarding exhumations [05:58]
The effect that embalming (or not) has on exhumations, and factors that impact a successful exhumation and investigation [08:31]
Joseph Scott Morgan describes the investigative process, vital medical records, and test results he would study prior to the exhumation of Gloria Satterfield [17:08]
The impact that medical intervention, autopsy, and body preparation for burial have on the investigation of a trauma-related death, and the particular problem with the Gloria Satterfield case [20:24]
Information investigators will be looking for when reviewing Gloria’s body [27:27]
The types of professionals who perform autopsies of exhumed bodies, and concerns regarding the omission of the South Carolina medical-legal community in the Satterfield case [29:46]
Kathleen Savio, Shele Danishefsky Covlin, and other high-profile exhumation cases in the US [32:36]
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. We spend time thinking
about those that we honor that have passed on to
the other side. One of the ways we do that
(00:29):
as a people is memorializing, and I guess probably for
most of us that involves a burial, that is setting
up a location perhaps where we can go and visit
time to time remember the people that surrounded us. People
(00:49):
have impacted our lives. But when it comes to death,
many times some things are hidden. We've heard that old phrase,
They're gonna take it to the grave with him. That's
where the practice of exhimation comes in. And today we're
gonna talk about Gloria Sadderfield. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
(01:15):
this his body backs. Joining me today is Jackie Howard,
executive producer Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackiet, I think
one of the things I'd like to explore with you
today is Gloria Sadderfield and her apparent pending exhimation. The
(01:37):
Glorious Sadderfield exhamation is coming about because of the investigation
into Alec Myrtle. So many deaths surrounding this prominent family
in South Carolina since the death of Maggie and Paul
Myrtle both were murdered outside their family home, discovered by
the father, Alex Murdle. Since then, he is in jail
(01:58):
charged with setting up a murder for hire on himself
to ensure that his remaining son would get millions in
life insurance policies that hit failed. Murdoch survived. He has
also been charged with stealing millions of dollars from his
law firm, and that included a four point three million
(02:21):
dollar ruling award for Glorious Sadderfield's children. Gloria Sadderfield, she
was the Murdoch housekeeper for over twenty years. She died
during a trip and fall accident in the Murdoch family home. Reportedly,
Gloria Sadderfield fell over dogs on the outside brick stairs
(02:42):
of the home and hit her head. Paul and Maggie
Murdoch called nine one and tell the operator that that
while she is breathing, she is setting up she is mumbling,
she's not making much sense. E mts arrived. They take
Gloria Sadderfield to the hospital. She is in I see
you for a lengthy period of time and ultimately died
(03:02):
as a result of a stroke. Her cause of death
listed on the death certificate is natural. That's the first
thing that I want to talk about, Joe, How does
that happen? But now sled officials have asked for permission,
which has been given by the sadder Field next to Keen,
to exume her body. So many deaths centered on the
(03:25):
Murdoch family and now police want to review this death.
No autopsy was done on Gloria Sadderfield at the time
of her death, and as I just mentioned, her cause
of death was listed as natural. I can't imagine that
a trip and fall is a natural death. But let's
talk about exhamation first, and then we'll talk about how
(03:47):
it relates to Gloria. What happens when you exume a body.
It's an interesting world to enter into, and for me,
as a medical legal death investigator, it's one of the
most fascinating because you're you're actually burying witness to those
things that have long since been buried. And of course
that's variable depending upon the type of case you're talking about.
(04:08):
I've been involved in cases that go back sixty years
many times where bodies have been exhumed. And let's think
about the root of that word. The root. Actually it
comes from the Latin, which means x you know, out
of and then pumas, which actually means ground, so you're
removing the body from the ground. There's other terms that
are used that people here, disinter but that's kind of
(04:30):
separate to this. But it's a it's a tough thing
to do. I think that many people in general public
think that you can just you know, run out, maybe
grab an attorney and say, look, I want my loved
one disinterred or exhumed, or the court investigators even say
we want this body exhumed. The problem is is that
(04:51):
there is kind of a gatekeeper here, and that is
the judiciary. There's a judge that actually has to approve
this and or what is referred to literally as an
order of exhamation. It's not something you know, judges don't
want to be tied to this idea that folks can
just kind of willy nearly run around and crack open
(05:12):
graves and bring out the dead, because first off, you know,
it's as I said in my in my opening, you know,
we talked about honoring the dead, and they have a
sense of that. The judiciary always has because you know,
when you have people that will come along and they'll say,
you know, while I have this question or that question,
the body needs to be exhumed. Well, you can't just
(05:33):
essentially throw that out there without logical purpose in what
you're doing, and that has to be presented. It has
to be presented by an attorney before the judge where
there is kind of this linear logic that takes place
where it can be explained very exactingly. Because keep this
in mind, every person that is buried at some point
(05:57):
in time has kind of passed through this memorane of
government approval on some level where they have decided either
by the corner, the medical examiner, the police, that this
body is good to go. We can have this individual
embombed and then placed into their grave, and so that
can be problematic. It's really hard to go into a
(06:18):
graveyard and essentially put shottle to soil. Some of those
regulations that you're talking about, Joe, have to do with embalming.
You can in some jurisdictions request for religious reasons or
by explaining your reasons for wanting this not be embalmed.
So how does that affect the exhamation, Joe, whether you're
(06:39):
embalmed or not significantly, because the process of body prep
of embalming, you know, and preparing the body, even clothing
the body, all the sorts of things in casketing the body,
I'll play an integral role in preservation and absent say,
for instance, embalming, the body is going to take a
(07:02):
normal course of decomposition and will begin to break down.
You know, people don't realize that when we die, and
it doesn't matter where we are, the process of decomposition
actually begins in that moment. Once all cellular respiration has ceased,
we begin to break down. Now that might be at
a molecular level, you might not can appreciate it. So
(07:24):
time is of the essence. If there is some type
of religious prohibition against uh embalming, for instance, then those
involved in this will will have the body buried in
a very short order. And of course, you know, right
now I'm reflecting back to Tammy day Bell that probably
in recent memory, that's one of the most famous disinterminents
(07:46):
or exhamations that has taken place. In that case is
still pending. She had been buried for some time, and
but the key to her case was the fact that
she went from Idaho to Utah in order to cross
state lines, she had to be embalmed. So in that sense,
the investigators were very fortunate if there was any kind
of physical findings. But when you place somebody into the
(08:09):
ground unembalmed, and then there's a problem because all of
that evidentry, ever, anything that contains evidentry value, begins to
kind of wither away and and and nature just essentially
consumes it. So you're hoping that the body has been
involved and not just embalmed, but also to a high
(08:30):
professional standard. I've I've worked many cases of exhamation where
we've retrieved the body from the ground, taking the body
out of the casket, placed the body onto the ise
typsy table, and because the embalming was so poor, you
sit there and you kind of scratch your head and say, well,
why do you even bother in the first place, Why
(08:50):
do you even charge the family for this? Because you've
done a very bad job. But there are other cases
out there where the preservation is so re markable that
when you open that casket up and removed body, it
literally looks like this individual just passed away within the
last few days. An image comes to mind for me.
(09:13):
I had a gentleman that was a pastor that was
alleged to have been beaten by someone and the family
got an order of exhimation. And you know, he was
dressed all in white. He had a white jacket, white pants,
white shirt, even a white tie, white socks, and white
shoes on. And he had a single carnation that a
(09:34):
red carnation that had been placed in his lapel, and
everything on his body was perfectly intact. The only thing
that had changed was the status of the carnation and
it had kind of melded into the fabric where it
left this kind of dark, deep red stain. But she
could still appreciate the stem. So preservation is key here.
(09:56):
So what do you mean by it's gone wrong that
it was not well? What does that mean? Exactly? Just
like you know, in any kind of professional practice, there
are people that are really at the top of their
game when they're doing anything, and there are those that
might not pay a close of attention. Was the body
sufficiently preserved? And that means were the incisions made correctly
(10:20):
where the profusion items were placed into the body, and
then there was a successful embalming where you're seeing that
all of the tissues have been you know, touched if
you will, by the embalming fluid, and sometimes there's not
the best job that is done under those circumstances. And
(10:42):
so any area, let's say you have one portion of
the body that has been pretty sufficiently involved and then
another area where the embalming fluids, say, did not reach
that particular area, that area will be markedly decomposed and
compared to the rest of the body, and so that
generates a problem if you're looking at at this at
this exhumed body from a forensic standpoint, in that area
(11:06):
that has been touched by decomposition is key to your investigation,
then all is lost at that point. But again you
have groups of individuals that do and for the most part,
do find work. You know, it only comes to light
during exhamations relative to the quality of the preservation that's
left behind, because as we know, most bodies don't get exhumed.
(11:29):
Most people do not expect their body or the bodies
of their loved ones to be exhumed, and so that
can be problematic when that when you're faced with that.
The other issue here that you're faced with in in
burials is when the body is placed in the ground.
Remember when a casket is placed in the ground, you
(11:50):
don't simply just dig a hole and then drop the
casket in there. There's an entire process that takes place.
They actually put a crypt in the ground. And when
I say crip and I'm talking about a vault, it's
a large concrete box. And so the casket is not
just set into bare earth. Because the earth consumes everything,
(12:10):
it's not these caskets contrary to what you might have heard,
or not as resilient sometimes as advertised. So the casket
is actually lowered into this vault, this concrete vault that
has been placed in the whole prior to the casket
going in, and then a concrete lid is placed on
top of the vault after the casket has been placed inside.
(12:33):
So you've got this kind of double level of protection.
But one of the things that folks don't necessarily count on,
and I don't know that any of us do, is
the impact, say for instance, of groundwater, flooding, all these
sorts of things, and you can't it's really hard, if
you will, to defeat nature. Many times these vaults actually
fill up with water, and even if a body has
(12:54):
been sufficiently embombed. Then water is an another factor that
can impact the status of the body because with water
comes in all kinds of microbial life and those sorts
of things that embalming is not necessarily going to defeat,
and it will just kind of spur this decomposition on
(13:15):
it will just appear slightly different. And then you know,
you begin to think about, you know, the structure, the
structure of of the the quality of say a vault.
Has it been placed in there appropriately, does it cave
in on itself? There are any number of cases where
the vault itself was a poor quality in the earth
begins to kind of cave in around the thing, crushing
(13:37):
the casket. And of course when that happens, you're creating
these huge defects in this environment. So anything that's on
the outside is going to seek seek out those points
of entry relative to so any remains that are contained
in there can be compromised greatly. As you think about
(14:13):
burials and our our efforts to try to preserve are dead,
and it's kind of understandable that, uh, you've got a
lot of elements working against you. I mean everything from
from weather to poor mortuary practices to the wishes of families,
not warning bodies involved. And even something I didn't mention earlier,
(14:34):
you begin to think that there's actually tiny little insects
called coffin flies that can You can't defeat them, they
will actually make their way into the coffin. So there's
a lot running against you at this period of time
if you're a forensic scientist and you're trying to seek
out information about someone that has long since been dead
and buried. You were talking about the exhimation process, and
(14:54):
once the body is exhumed and moved into the morgue
for further autopsy investigation, about what the investigators the EMMY
would see. Obviously, continuing your discussion on quality versus ineffectual
embalming practices, what are the investigators going to see? And
(15:15):
I would have to imagine that because of the embalming,
that any toxicological findings are basically moot because there's no
blood and the body is filled with artificial fluids. Yeah,
and that that does certainly present a problem. And let's
keep in mind that these investigators, relative to Glorious Sadderfield,
(15:39):
are going into this case armed with a knowledge, And
keep in mind, this is a physician that has made
this determination that they're dealing with a natural death, and
I gotta go back just for a second kind of
correct something that you said, Jackie. You talked about that
the cause of death was natural, well natural, that it's
(16:00):
one of the five components of actual manners of death.
And this is kind of fascinating in this particular case
because in Glorious sadder Field's case, they ruled her death
as the manner as natural, but they listed the cause
as head trauma, and those two things don't marry up.
(16:20):
You don't naturally sustain head trauma. Logic has to be
applied to this. You know, my first stop along along
the continuum here as an investigator, it's certainly going to
be the medical records department where Glory unfortunately passed away.
I'm gonna want to see everything they have. And she's
(16:41):
been in the hospital for a couple of days by
the time she finally succumbs, I'm gonna want to see
any kind of imaging that means X ray, CT scans,
m R eyes, PET scans, it doesn't matter. I want
to see it. I want to see all of her
toxicology because remember anything, any blood that was drawn at
that particular time and they ran hospital test on her.
(17:03):
That blood's gone. Now, you know, we got to think
about this. In the process of embalming, you're going from
high to low. There's a gravitational you know, element to this.
When an individual is placed onto an embalming table, the
head is pitched up, feet are lower than the head.
And when this process starts of drawing out the blood
out of the body, it's being pushed out of the
body through the pressure of the embalming fluid coming in.
(17:27):
And you know, once the body is embombed, all of
that blood that would tell the tale if you if you,
if you will is now gone. You can't use it.
So in Miss Sadder Fields in case, the issue here
is what types of samples did they draw from her
when they finally got her to the hospital, and did
they run appropriate testing at that point in time, you know,
(17:50):
looking for anything any kind of of toxicological issues relative
to drugs that were on board, any kind of things
like cardiac enzymes what they call a CBC handle, all
those things that you standardly do in the hospital. What
was that telling us? Because now it's all gone at
this point in time, and so that creates a problem
for the investigators. And if they have an opportunity to
(18:10):
review all of that prior to doing the examination on
the exhumed body, they're gonna be much better armed. So
when investigators start there, I guess new autopsy, for lack
of a better way to say it, they're going to
see the injuries, the cleaned up injuries that Glorious Sadderfield has.
(18:31):
How is the preparation of the body for burial going
to impact that, because we do know they do body putty,
they do make up. Depending on where her injuries are,
these may or may not have had to be done.
So how how do they go about removing what they
can to get to the actual wounds. That's an excellent question,
(18:53):
And and here here's what will happen. First off, let's
go back to that nine one one call that Paul
and his mother were involved in. And one of the
things that Paul stated, of course he's now deceased, that
he stated in that nine one one call was that
she was bleeding from her head and where else her ear.
(19:13):
So when you're looking at this year, you know, for me,
if you have blood coming out of your ear, you're
you're talking about kind of a fracture potentially of the
floor of the skull. It's not just simply going to
be the top of the head. So she's got perhaps
multiple fractures are what they refer to as communicating fracture.
That means that the that the blow that was sustained
(19:37):
creates such a fracture that the initial point of impact
creates this kind of cracking that goes all the way
through to the floor of the skull. So that's going
to be very important. But here's here's the problem. She
wasn't autopsy at the time you said new autopsy. There
hasn't been an original autopsy. Can you imagine this that
they're taking this woman who is sustained this kind of
(19:58):
trauma and in essentially burying her. And it's by no
fault of the of the family. You know, the families
don't do this every single day. Who is to be
held in account here, uh held responsible for this is
the hospital because it wasn't reported to the corner. The
corner can investigated death unless they have been summoned, unless
they have been notified. And to me, that's that's a
(20:22):
very very critical issue here that you have this multitude
of a learned medical individuals that know that this is
a trauma related death, and they didn't think to call
the corner because these these kinds of cases are mandatory
that they be reported. In her case, it was not so. Now,
(20:42):
when she's going to come in after they have exhumed
her body and they bring her back to the medical
examiner's office for the examination, and trust me, you're gonna
have all eyes on her body that that room will
be filled with all manner of people. You'll have forensic
scientists there, you might be and have a couple of
forensic pathologies there, and of course the police are gonna
(21:03):
have a tremendous presence there and they're going to go
through everything that they can as they remove her body
and try to appreciate these injuries. And one of the
things that you have to cut through the veil with
here is the fact that not only was their funeral
or mortuary preparation of her body, but there was also
(21:23):
medical intervention that took place prior to that. And let
me give you kind of a low down on this.
If you're talking about blunt force trauma, which we are,
that means that you're looking at a potential laceration to
the scalt well, if there's a laceration, the medical team
(21:44):
will essentially either staple or suiture that up. Well, that
has to be factored in to her treatment course. And
then if the funeral home did anything to that particular area,
you know, as you mentioned applying any kind of of makeup,
the putty that you had mentioned, those sorts of things
to make her viewable, then that's also going to have
(22:05):
to That layer is also going to have to remove.
So you know, in my experience of working on exhumed
bodies and doing their autopsies, I don't know of any
other any other cases that take as much time as
exhumed bodies do. I can recall spending up to eight
to nine hours on a single body once you have it.
(22:27):
Because listen, once that body is out of the ground,
everybody's interested. You've got a lot of eyes on you
at that point in time, and so there will be
a lot of post mortal X rays that will be taken.
In this particular case, all kinds of imaging will go on.
It would not surprise me if maybe they had access
to a cat scan, that they would run the body
through the cat scan while they had the body and
(22:49):
all all of these little nuanced areas that they're going
to have to dig into, because once they're complete with this,
the judge is going to require that they re inter
the body at that time. They're not just gonna leave
her there, so they're gonna have to put her back
into her casket and back into her burial space, and
so they have to capture as much information as they
(23:10):
possibly can at that moment in time. You said that
the wounds would have been sutured closed at the hospital
after her death. Isn't that going to degrade the wound area?
I mean, isn't that going to change the topography of
the head of what actually happened. How does that impact
you being able to tell what happened? Yeah, it does.
(23:33):
And this is you've got a couple of elements working here.
First off, you have medical intervention, which I had mentioned.
And when these these edges which are gonna be very jagged,
Remember we're talking about blunt force trauma. This is not
a sharp force event. They're gonna be very jagged, and
so you're going to have and people can, you know,
think back to their own personal experiences where they've had
(23:53):
some kind of impact injury on their body that required suturing.
They're not clean and neat, and so it's going to
take this kind of what we refer to as a
curvilinear and yeah, that's a real word that's used in
forensic science, a curvilinear pattern many times. And if she's
been struck multiple times, which I don't know if she
was or not, you might have multiple lacerations along the way,
(24:13):
and all of those are going to have to be
suited up, because remember before this became a forensics case,
this is a medical case. You're trying to save her life.
So they're going to go to any means they can possibly.
I think all of us would want them to to
try to make sure that she is going to survive.
And unfortunately she didn't. So it's going to change the
initial appearance as opposed to if we had a body
(24:36):
of some unfortunate person that had beaten to death out
on the street. You could appreciate that readily. You know
where that body is taken directly to the Mulligan examined.
But now not only do you have the su train
that's taking place, you potentially have some healing that may
have taken place as well. And what does that mean
for us, because one of the key things we're gonna
(24:56):
be looking for here are going to be evidence of
hemorrhage in the soft tissues of the skull and also
overlying what we call the external table of the skull
and any kind of pattern that may have been there.
Let's say, you know, they're saying that when miss Adderfield
felt that, and it's kind of non specific at this point,
(25:18):
but when she fell, she was on a set of
stairs and they were external stairs, So we can kind
of put forth our supposition is that they're either brick
or they're either concrete. Either way, it's a hard surface
that you're going to strike. If there are edges there,
you could appreciate a pattern of an edge, for instance,
if it's blunted, say like kind of a curved concrete step,
(25:38):
that's going to have a completely different appearance and it's
going to be very rich and say an abraided or
an abrasion that might be there where that point of
impact is. All of that's gonna be compromised at this
point in time. So they're gonna be heavily reliant upon
all of the anti mortan records, that is, those records
that were generated prior to her death, and then they
(26:01):
have to factor in the treatment course along with They're
gonna they would literally, and I have to say this,
they're gonna have to bring in probably the mortuary science
person that tended to her body and question them at length.
You have to tell us specifically what you did to
her remains when you received them from the hospital, because
(26:24):
we have to know what you saw at that point
in time, did you change anything at all? And they
should have a record of their preparation at that point
in time. And then what you're left with essentially is
what comes up out of the burial. You know, what
can you observe that can be tied back to a
specific point of origin relative to this impact injury that
(26:47):
she is has sustained. This is going to be a
very very involved examination. And granted, exclamations don't don't take
(27:17):
place every single day, but there have been enough of
them over the years that have actually changed the course
of cases that have gotten people off the streets that
committed horrible crimes that they thought that they had gotten
away with. And you know, Gloria Sadderfield's case is an
example of having to go back in and take a look,
(27:37):
and they're right on the edge of this right now.
But there's a few of the cases that I think
that we can examine. Wouldn't you agree, Jackie? I would
in those cases obviously Tammy Day Bell, which we still
don't have the resolution of this yet. You mentioned that earlier.
Let's also talk about Kathleen Savio and Shelley Danishchevski. But
I wanted to ask you first, Joe, who does the
(27:59):
atop the on an exhumed body, obviously performing an autopsy?
Is a pathologist? Are there pathologists who specialize in just exhumations?
You know, I can't imagine if you're just looking at
from a practical standpoint, there's they're not forensic pathologists out
there that essentially make their living doing exhimations. You probably
(28:19):
start to death that was the case. However, I think
that they're depended upon how how skilled the pathologist is.
People have advanced skill sets in this area, and you know,
obviously the more autopsies you're involved in, the higher the
likelihood is that you're going to come across an opportunity
to do an exhumation case. What I do know, and
this is quite fascinating, is that the medical legal community
(28:44):
in South Carolina and just just let's sink your teeth
into this, just for a second, has been left completely out,
completely out of glorious adder Field case period. Now, they've
been involved in all these their desks that kind of
swirl around the Murdoc family, but her case in particular
(29:05):
was not even on the radar of you know, of
of of the medical legal community. I'm talking about the corners,
the medical examiners, the forensic pathologists in state of South Carolina.
So I can tell you this about this particular case.
First off, the corner for this particular county is gonna
be front and center in this They're going to request
(29:27):
that the forensic pathologists that they normally work with do
this examination, and it would not surprise me at all
if they bring in consulting forensic pathologist as well, so
that they've got another set of eyes on this particular case,
because this thing is so very complex that you need
as many professionals on this case to take a look
(29:49):
at it with. Of course, the primary medical examiner is
going to be the one that is in charge the
primary forensic pathologists, but they very well might have others
that are in the room. Just to make sure that
they get everything, because time is of the essence. Let's
look at what might actually come out of this and
any other exhimation. We know. In the Tammy Day Bell case,
(30:11):
they were looking for evans that she had been killed
or poisoned by her then husband. This investigation into Gloria
Sadderfield because the manner of death was considered natural, but
she had head trauma as a cause in relation to
all the other deaths that seemed to be circling around
the Murdoch family. Now, in the Kathleen Savio case, she
(30:36):
was the third wife of Chicago police officer Drew Peterson.
The investigation into Kathleen Savio's death started when Drew Peterson's
fourth wife disappear. Now, Kathleen Savio died in her bathtub
of a head wound. She had, I believe a one
(30:57):
inch dash in her head, and it was surmised that
she hit her head, fell into the bathtub and drowned.
But the problem was the bathtub was dry. Investigator's surmise
that well, okay, the water drained out, but we find
that wasn't the case. Jokes, So investigators exhumed Kathleen Savio's
(31:18):
body what did they find. Yeah, well, when when they
you know, they didn't think that this you know, kind
of met and muster if you will. And these dry
drowning cases are real head scratchers to begin with. One
of the first things you're gonna look for at autopsy
on somebody that you are actually opining had drowned is
that the water might be out of the tub. But
(31:39):
guess what doesn't change. That's the weight of the lungs.
If an individual has essentially inhalated water into their lungs,
the lungs will be heavy and congested more so than normal.
So I think that that would be my first question. Yeah,
she might have had a head injury that you're listing
as the fatal event, But how did you arrive at
this drowning proposition that you put or But when they
(32:00):
finally did exhume Umsavio's body, one of the things that
they determined was the fact that she didn't just have
one one blow to the back of her head. There
was one, you know, significant lacerated area that initial point
of contact, and I'm sure that it stood out. But
you know, as they were going through this case, they
(32:21):
they suddenly determined that they had at least six or
maybe even seven other points of impact on her head
that were not that we're not lacerated, but they had
these deep bruises that were there. So you know, you
can understand, I think and and certainly are our listeners
can that if you fall one time, you strike your head,
(32:41):
that's understandable, but you're not going to fall six to
seven times, generating each individual bruising, you know. And in conclusion,
that's that's how they wound up determining that this was
not as advertised, this is not an an accidental death.
They knew just sently based upon these injuries that they
(33:02):
discovered at the autopsy, per the exhimation that she had
been struck multiple times. And this is a fine example
of what can be left behind even after she had
been embalmed and buried. The one thing about the particularly
hemorrhage that you can never get past in a case
like this is it it doesn't disappear. Do you know why? Well,
(33:22):
because when you know, we were talking about how when
the embalming fluid is traversing through the body, right, it's
it's it's essentially going through our vascular system, it's going
through the veins, and arteries and all these sorts of things.
But when blunt force takes place and you generate a hemorrhage,
a point of hemorrhage or or bruise, if you will,
(33:43):
the reason it bruises is because that little capillary bed area,
that specific area has been compromised. It's been ruptured, and
so now it's out into what's referred to I'm gonna
say this very very slowly, it's called the interstitial tissue.
You're literally bleeding out into the soft tissue surrounding that
point of impact. So the embalming fluid is not going
(34:06):
to eradicate that it will still be there. And didn't
that fascinating with Saba's case because they still saw evidence
of this after she had been dead and buried for
some time. Shelley Denishevsky's case is very similar in that
Denishevsky was found by her daughter in the bathtub and
it was thought that she had slipped, fallen and hit
(34:28):
her head. Danishevsky was not autopsied either, because she and
her family are Orthodox Jews. So as this case progressed,
investigators requested the exhimation of Danishevsky's body and they found
something totally different that it was not caused by hitting
(34:50):
her head and drowning. Shelley's death was caused by a
net compression, meaning what well, that there was direct pressure
apply to her neck, and therefore, you know this is
going to be consistent with the say, for instance, someone
pinning her to the floor and pressing down on her neck,
perhaps a strangulation of some type where you're actually applying
(35:14):
pressure directly by the palm of the hand. You know,
any any number of things can create a net compression.
But we do know this. Again, You're back to this
issue someone slipping and falling in the bathtub, and you
you want to try to honor the family's wishes as
best you possibly can. But this again goes to show
(35:36):
if someone has sustained trauma, it needs to be further investigated,
because if you cannot validate the origin of that trauma specifically,
I mean really scientifically validated, it's gonna wind up in
a problem going down the road, just like it did
in this case. I've actually been involved in another case
(35:56):
similar to this that involved our Orthodox community in the
New Orleans area when I was there, and again that
case slipped under the radar and it turned out later
to be Hamsa. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body Backs.
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. We spend time thinking
about those that we honor that have passed on to
the other side. One of the ways we do that
(00:29):
as a people is memorializing, and I guess probably for
most of us that involves a burial, that is setting
up a location perhaps where we can go and visit
time to time remember the people that surrounded us. People
(00:49):
have impacted our lives. But when it comes to death,
many times some things are hidden. We've heard that old phrase,
They're gonna take it to the grave with him. That's
where the practice of exhimation comes in. And today we're
gonna talk about Gloria Sadderfield. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
(01:15):
this his body backs. Joining me today is Jackie Howard,
executive producer Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackiet, I think
one of the things I'd like to explore with you
today is Gloria Sadderfield and her apparent pending exhimation. The
(01:37):
Glorious Sadderfield exhamation is coming about because of the investigation
into Alec Myrtle. So many deaths surrounding this prominent family
in South Carolina since the death of Maggie and Paul
Myrtle both were murdered outside their family home, discovered by
the father, Alex Murdle. Since then, he is in jail
(01:58):
charged with setting up a murder for hire on himself
to ensure that his remaining son would get millions in
life insurance policies that hit failed. Murdoch survived. He has
also been charged with stealing millions of dollars from his
law firm, and that included a four point three million
(02:21):
dollar ruling award for Glorious Sadderfield's children. Gloria Sadderfield, she
was the Murdoch housekeeper for over twenty years. She died
during a trip and fall accident in the Murdoch family home. Reportedly,
Gloria Sadderfield fell over dogs on the outside brick stairs
(02:42):
of the home and hit her head. Paul and Maggie
Murdoch called nine one and tell the operator that that
while she is breathing, she is setting up she is mumbling,
she's not making much sense. E mts arrived. They take
Gloria Sadderfield to the hospital. She is in I see
you for a lengthy period of time and ultimately died
(03:02):
as a result of a stroke. Her cause of death
listed on the death certificate is natural. That's the first
thing that I want to talk about, Joe, How does
that happen? But now sled officials have asked for permission,
which has been given by the sadder Field next to Keen,
to exume her body. So many deaths centered on the
(03:25):
Murdoch family and now police want to review this death.
No autopsy was done on Gloria Sadderfield at the time
of her death, and as I just mentioned, her cause
of death was listed as natural. I can't imagine that
a trip and fall is a natural death. But let's
talk about exhamation first, and then we'll talk about how
(03:47):
it relates to Gloria. What happens when you exume a body.
It's an interesting world to enter into, and for me,
as a medical legal death investigator, it's one of the
most fascinating because you're you're actually burying witness to those
things that have long since been buried. And of course
that's variable depending upon the type of case you're talking about.
(04:08):
I've been involved in cases that go back sixty years
many times where bodies have been exhumed. And let's think
about the root of that word. The root. Actually it
comes from the Latin, which means x you know, out
of and then pumas, which actually means ground, so you're
removing the body from the ground. There's other terms that
are used that people here, disinter but that's kind of
(04:30):
separate to this. But it's a it's a tough thing
to do. I think that many people in general public
think that you can just you know, run out, maybe
grab an attorney and say, look, I want my loved
one disinterred or exhumed, or the court investigators even say
we want this body exhumed. The problem is is that
(04:51):
there is kind of a gatekeeper here, and that is
the judiciary. There's a judge that actually has to approve
this and or what is referred to literally as an
order of exhamation. It's not something you know, judges don't
want to be tied to this idea that folks can
just kind of willy nearly run around and crack open
(05:12):
graves and bring out the dead, because first off, you know,
it's as I said in my in my opening, you know,
we talked about honoring the dead, and they have a
sense of that. The judiciary always has because you know,
when you have people that will come along and they'll say,
you know, while I have this question or that question,
the body needs to be exhumed. Well, you can't just
(05:33):
essentially throw that out there without logical purpose in what
you're doing, and that has to be presented. It has
to be presented by an attorney before the judge where
there is kind of this linear logic that takes place
where it can be explained very exactingly. Because keep this
in mind, every person that is buried at some point
(05:57):
in time has kind of passed through this memorane of
government approval on some level where they have decided either
by the corner, the medical examiner, the police, that this
body is good to go. We can have this individual
embombed and then placed into their grave, and so that
can be problematic. It's really hard to go into a
(06:18):
graveyard and essentially put shottle to soil. Some of those
regulations that you're talking about, Joe, have to do with embalming.
You can in some jurisdictions request for religious reasons or
by explaining your reasons for wanting this not be embalmed.
So how does that affect the exhamation, Joe, whether you're
(06:39):
embalmed or not significantly, because the process of body prep
of embalming, you know, and preparing the body, even clothing
the body, all the sorts of things in casketing the body,
I'll play an integral role in preservation and absent say,
for instance, embalming, the body is going to take a
(07:02):
normal course of decomposition and will begin to break down.
You know, people don't realize that when we die, and
it doesn't matter where we are, the process of decomposition
actually begins in that moment. Once all cellular respiration has ceased,
we begin to break down. Now that might be at
a molecular level, you might not can appreciate it. So
(07:24):
time is of the essence. If there is some type
of religious prohibition against uh embalming, for instance, then those
involved in this will will have the body buried in
a very short order. And of course, you know, right
now I'm reflecting back to Tammy day Bell that probably
in recent memory, that's one of the most famous disinterminents
(07:46):
or exhamations that has taken place. In that case is
still pending. She had been buried for some time, and
but the key to her case was the fact that
she went from Idaho to Utah in order to cross
state lines, she had to be embalmed. So in that sense,
the investigators were very fortunate if there was any kind
of physical findings. But when you place somebody into the
(08:09):
ground unembalmed, and then there's a problem because all of
that evidentry, ever, anything that contains evidentry value, begins to
kind of wither away and and and nature just essentially
consumes it. So you're hoping that the body has been
involved and not just embalmed, but also to a high
(08:30):
professional standard. I've I've worked many cases of exhamation where
we've retrieved the body from the ground, taking the body
out of the casket, placed the body onto the ise
typsy table, and because the embalming was so poor, you
sit there and you kind of scratch your head and say, well,
why do you even bother in the first place, Why
(08:50):
do you even charge the family for this? Because you've
done a very bad job. But there are other cases
out there where the preservation is so re markable that
when you open that casket up and removed body, it
literally looks like this individual just passed away within the
last few days. An image comes to mind for me.
(09:13):
I had a gentleman that was a pastor that was
alleged to have been beaten by someone and the family
got an order of exhimation. And you know, he was
dressed all in white. He had a white jacket, white pants,
white shirt, even a white tie, white socks, and white
shoes on. And he had a single carnation that a
(09:34):
red carnation that had been placed in his lapel, and
everything on his body was perfectly intact. The only thing
that had changed was the status of the carnation and
it had kind of melded into the fabric where it
left this kind of dark, deep red stain. But she
could still appreciate the stem. So preservation is key here.
(09:56):
So what do you mean by it's gone wrong that
it was not well? What does that mean? Exactly? Just
like you know, in any kind of professional practice, there
are people that are really at the top of their
game when they're doing anything, and there are those that
might not pay a close of attention. Was the body
sufficiently preserved? And that means were the incisions made correctly
(10:20):
where the profusion items were placed into the body, and
then there was a successful embalming where you're seeing that
all of the tissues have been you know, touched if
you will, by the embalming fluid, and sometimes there's not
the best job that is done under those circumstances. And
(10:42):
so any area, let's say you have one portion of
the body that has been pretty sufficiently involved and then
another area where the embalming fluids, say, did not reach
that particular area, that area will be markedly decomposed and
compared to the rest of the body, and so that
generates a problem if you're looking at at this at
this exhumed body from a forensic standpoint, in that area
(11:06):
that has been touched by decomposition is key to your investigation,
then all is lost at that point. But again you
have groups of individuals that do and for the most part,
do find work. You know, it only comes to light
during exhamations relative to the quality of the preservation that's
left behind, because as we know, most bodies don't get exhumed.
(11:29):
Most people do not expect their body or the bodies
of their loved ones to be exhumed, and so that
can be problematic when that when you're faced with that.
The other issue here that you're faced with in in
burials is when the body is placed in the ground.
Remember when a casket is placed in the ground, you
(11:50):
don't simply just dig a hole and then drop the
casket in there. There's an entire process that takes place.
They actually put a crypt in the ground. And when
I say crip and I'm talking about a vault, it's
a large concrete box. And so the casket is not
just set into bare earth. Because the earth consumes everything,
(12:10):
it's not these caskets contrary to what you might have heard,
or not as resilient sometimes as advertised. So the casket
is actually lowered into this vault, this concrete vault that
has been placed in the whole prior to the casket
going in, and then a concrete lid is placed on
top of the vault after the casket has been placed inside.
(12:33):
So you've got this kind of double level of protection.
But one of the things that folks don't necessarily count on,
and I don't know that any of us do, is
the impact, say for instance, of groundwater, flooding, all these
sorts of things, and you can't it's really hard, if
you will, to defeat nature. Many times these vaults actually
fill up with water, and even if a body has
(12:54):
been sufficiently embombed. Then water is an another factor that
can impact the status of the body because with water
comes in all kinds of microbial life and those sorts
of things that embalming is not necessarily going to defeat,
and it will just kind of spur this decomposition on
(13:15):
it will just appear slightly different. And then you know,
you begin to think about, you know, the structure, the
structure of of the the quality of say a vault.
Has it been placed in there appropriately, does it cave
in on itself? There are any number of cases where
the vault itself was a poor quality in the earth
begins to kind of cave in around the thing, crushing
(13:37):
the casket. And of course when that happens, you're creating
these huge defects in this environment. So anything that's on
the outside is going to seek seek out those points
of entry relative to so any remains that are contained
in there can be compromised greatly. As you think about
(14:13):
burials and our our efforts to try to preserve are dead,
and it's kind of understandable that, uh, you've got a
lot of elements working against you. I mean everything from
from weather to poor mortuary practices to the wishes of families,
not warning bodies involved. And even something I didn't mention earlier,
(14:34):
you begin to think that there's actually tiny little insects
called coffin flies that can You can't defeat them, they
will actually make their way into the coffin. So there's
a lot running against you at this period of time
if you're a forensic scientist and you're trying to seek
out information about someone that has long since been dead
and buried. You were talking about the exhimation process, and
(14:54):
once the body is exhumed and moved into the morgue
for further autopsy investigation, about what the investigators the EMMY
would see. Obviously, continuing your discussion on quality versus ineffectual
embalming practices, what are the investigators going to see? And
(15:15):
I would have to imagine that because of the embalming,
that any toxicological findings are basically moot because there's no
blood and the body is filled with artificial fluids. Yeah,
and that that does certainly present a problem. And let's
keep in mind that these investigators, relative to Glorious Sadderfield,
(15:39):
are going into this case armed with a knowledge, And
keep in mind, this is a physician that has made
this determination that they're dealing with a natural death, and
I gotta go back just for a second kind of
correct something that you said, Jackie. You talked about that
the cause of death was natural, well natural, that it's
(16:00):
one of the five components of actual manners of death.
And this is kind of fascinating in this particular case
because in Glorious sadder Field's case, they ruled her death
as the manner as natural, but they listed the cause
as head trauma, and those two things don't marry up.
(16:20):
You don't naturally sustain head trauma. Logic has to be
applied to this. You know, my first stop along along
the continuum here as an investigator, it's certainly going to
be the medical records department where Glory unfortunately passed away.
I'm gonna want to see everything they have. And she's
(16:41):
been in the hospital for a couple of days by
the time she finally succumbs, I'm gonna want to see
any kind of imaging that means X ray, CT scans,
m R eyes, PET scans, it doesn't matter. I want
to see it. I want to see all of her
toxicology because remember anything, any blood that was drawn at
that particular time and they ran hospital test on her.
(17:03):
That blood's gone. Now, you know, we got to think
about this. In the process of embalming, you're going from
high to low. There's a gravitational you know, element to this.
When an individual is placed onto an embalming table, the
head is pitched up, feet are lower than the head.
And when this process starts of drawing out the blood
out of the body, it's being pushed out of the
body through the pressure of the embalming fluid coming in.
(17:27):
And you know, once the body is embombed, all of
that blood that would tell the tale if you if you,
if you will is now gone. You can't use it.
So in Miss Sadder Fields in case, the issue here
is what types of samples did they draw from her
when they finally got her to the hospital, and did
they run appropriate testing at that point in time, you know,
(17:50):
looking for anything any kind of of toxicological issues relative
to drugs that were on board, any kind of things
like cardiac enzymes what they call a CBC handle, all
those things that you standardly do in the hospital. What
was that telling us? Because now it's all gone at
this point in time, and so that creates a problem
for the investigators. And if they have an opportunity to
(18:10):
review all of that prior to doing the examination on
the exhumed body, they're gonna be much better armed. So
when investigators start there, I guess new autopsy, for lack
of a better way to say it, they're going to
see the injuries, the cleaned up injuries that Glorious Sadderfield has.
(18:31):
How is the preparation of the body for burial going
to impact that, because we do know they do body putty,
they do make up. Depending on where her injuries are,
these may or may not have had to be done.
So how how do they go about removing what they
can to get to the actual wounds. That's an excellent question,
(18:53):
And and here here's what will happen. First off, let's
go back to that nine one one call that Paul
and his mother were involved in. And one of the
things that Paul stated, of course he's now deceased, that
he stated in that nine one one call was that
she was bleeding from her head and where else her ear.
(19:13):
So when you're looking at this year, you know, for me,
if you have blood coming out of your ear, you're
you're talking about kind of a fracture potentially of the
floor of the skull. It's not just simply going to
be the top of the head. So she's got perhaps
multiple fractures are what they refer to as communicating fracture.
That means that the that the blow that was sustained
(19:37):
creates such a fracture that the initial point of impact
creates this kind of cracking that goes all the way
through to the floor of the skull. So that's going
to be very important. But here's here's the problem. She
wasn't autopsy at the time you said new autopsy. There
hasn't been an original autopsy. Can you imagine this that
they're taking this woman who is sustained this kind of
(19:58):
trauma and in essentially burying her. And it's by no
fault of the of the family. You know, the families
don't do this every single day. Who is to be
held in account here, uh held responsible for this is
the hospital because it wasn't reported to the corner. The
corner can investigated death unless they have been summoned, unless
they have been notified. And to me, that's that's a
(20:22):
very very critical issue here that you have this multitude
of a learned medical individuals that know that this is
a trauma related death, and they didn't think to call
the corner because these these kinds of cases are mandatory
that they be reported. In her case, it was not so. Now,
(20:42):
when she's going to come in after they have exhumed
her body and they bring her back to the medical
examiner's office for the examination, and trust me, you're gonna
have all eyes on her body that that room will
be filled with all manner of people. You'll have forensic
scientists there, you might be and have a couple of
forensic pathologies there, and of course the police are gonna
(21:03):
have a tremendous presence there and they're going to go
through everything that they can as they remove her body
and try to appreciate these injuries. And one of the
things that you have to cut through the veil with
here is the fact that not only was their funeral
or mortuary preparation of her body, but there was also
(21:23):
medical intervention that took place prior to that. And let
me give you kind of a low down on this.
If you're talking about blunt force trauma, which we are,
that means that you're looking at a potential laceration to
the scalt well, if there's a laceration, the medical team
(21:44):
will essentially either staple or suiture that up. Well, that
has to be factored in to her treatment course. And
then if the funeral home did anything to that particular area,
you know, as you mentioned applying any kind of of makeup,
the putty that you had mentioned, those sorts of things
to make her viewable, then that's also going to have
(22:05):
to That layer is also going to have to remove.
So you know, in my experience of working on exhumed
bodies and doing their autopsies, I don't know of any
other any other cases that take as much time as
exhumed bodies do. I can recall spending up to eight
to nine hours on a single body once you have it.
(22:27):
Because listen, once that body is out of the ground,
everybody's interested. You've got a lot of eyes on you
at that point in time, and so there will be
a lot of post mortal X rays that will be taken.
In this particular case, all kinds of imaging will go on.
It would not surprise me if maybe they had access
to a cat scan, that they would run the body
through the cat scan while they had the body and
(22:49):
all all of these little nuanced areas that they're going
to have to dig into, because once they're complete with this,
the judge is going to require that they re inter
the body at that time. They're not just gonna leave
her there, so they're gonna have to put her back
into her casket and back into her burial space, and
so they have to capture as much information as they
(23:10):
possibly can at that moment in time. You said that
the wounds would have been sutured closed at the hospital
after her death. Isn't that going to degrade the wound area?
I mean, isn't that going to change the topography of
the head of what actually happened. How does that impact
you being able to tell what happened? Yeah, it does.
(23:33):
And this is you've got a couple of elements working here.
First off, you have medical intervention, which I had mentioned.
And when these these edges which are gonna be very jagged,
Remember we're talking about blunt force trauma. This is not
a sharp force event. They're gonna be very jagged, and
so you're going to have and people can, you know,
think back to their own personal experiences where they've had
(23:53):
some kind of impact injury on their body that required suturing.
They're not clean and neat, and so it's going to
take this kind of what we refer to as a
curvilinear and yeah, that's a real word that's used in
forensic science, a curvilinear pattern many times. And if she's
been struck multiple times, which I don't know if she
was or not, you might have multiple lacerations along the way,
(24:13):
and all of those are going to have to be
suited up, because remember before this became a forensics case,
this is a medical case. You're trying to save her life.
So they're going to go to any means they can possibly.
I think all of us would want them to to
try to make sure that she is going to survive.
And unfortunately she didn't. So it's going to change the
initial appearance as opposed to if we had a body
(24:36):
of some unfortunate person that had beaten to death out
on the street. You could appreciate that readily. You know
where that body is taken directly to the Mulligan examined.
But now not only do you have the su train
that's taking place, you potentially have some healing that may
have taken place as well. And what does that mean
for us, because one of the key things we're gonna
(24:56):
be looking for here are going to be evidence of
hemorrhage in the soft tissues of the skull and also
overlying what we call the external table of the skull
and any kind of pattern that may have been there.
Let's say, you know, they're saying that when miss Adderfield
felt that, and it's kind of non specific at this point,
(25:18):
but when she fell, she was on a set of
stairs and they were external stairs, So we can kind
of put forth our supposition is that they're either brick
or they're either concrete. Either way, it's a hard surface
that you're going to strike. If there are edges there,
you could appreciate a pattern of an edge, for instance,
if it's blunted, say like kind of a curved concrete step,
(25:38):
that's going to have a completely different appearance and it's
going to be very rich and say an abraided or
an abrasion that might be there where that point of
impact is. All of that's gonna be compromised at this
point in time. So they're gonna be heavily reliant upon
all of the anti mortan records, that is, those records
that were generated prior to her death, and then they
(26:01):
have to factor in the treatment course along with They're
gonna they would literally, and I have to say this,
they're gonna have to bring in probably the mortuary science
person that tended to her body and question them at length.
You have to tell us specifically what you did to
her remains when you received them from the hospital, because
(26:24):
we have to know what you saw at that point
in time, did you change anything at all? And they
should have a record of their preparation at that point
in time. And then what you're left with essentially is
what comes up out of the burial. You know, what
can you observe that can be tied back to a
specific point of origin relative to this impact injury that
(26:47):
she is has sustained. This is going to be a
very very involved examination. And granted, exclamations don't don't take
(27:17):
place every single day, but there have been enough of
them over the years that have actually changed the course
of cases that have gotten people off the streets that
committed horrible crimes that they thought that they had gotten
away with. And you know, Gloria Sadderfield's case is an
example of having to go back in and take a look,
(27:37):
and they're right on the edge of this right now.
But there's a few of the cases that I think
that we can examine. Wouldn't you agree, Jackie? I would
in those cases obviously Tammy Day Bell, which we still
don't have the resolution of this yet. You mentioned that earlier.
Let's also talk about Kathleen Savio and Shelley Danishchevski. But
I wanted to ask you first, Joe, who does the
(27:59):
atop the on an exhumed body, obviously performing an autopsy?
Is a pathologist? Are there pathologists who specialize in just exhumations?
You know, I can't imagine if you're just looking at
from a practical standpoint, there's they're not forensic pathologists out
there that essentially make their living doing exhimations. You probably
(28:19):
start to death that was the case. However, I think
that they're depended upon how how skilled the pathologist is.
People have advanced skill sets in this area, and you know,
obviously the more autopsies you're involved in, the higher the
likelihood is that you're going to come across an opportunity
to do an exhumation case. What I do know, and
this is quite fascinating, is that the medical legal community
(28:44):
in South Carolina and just just let's sink your teeth
into this, just for a second, has been left completely out,
completely out of glorious adder Field case period. Now, they've
been involved in all these their desks that kind of
swirl around the Murdoc family, but her case in particular
(29:05):
was not even on the radar of you know, of
of of the medical legal community. I'm talking about the corners,
the medical examiners, the forensic pathologists in state of South Carolina.
So I can tell you this about this particular case.
First off, the corner for this particular county is gonna
be front and center in this They're going to request
(29:27):
that the forensic pathologists that they normally work with do
this examination, and it would not surprise me at all
if they bring in consulting forensic pathologist as well, so
that they've got another set of eyes on this particular case,
because this thing is so very complex that you need
as many professionals on this case to take a look
(29:49):
at it with. Of course, the primary medical examiner is
going to be the one that is in charge the
primary forensic pathologists, but they very well might have others
that are in the room. Just to make sure that
they get everything, because time is of the essence. Let's
look at what might actually come out of this and
any other exhimation. We know. In the Tammy Day Bell case,
(30:11):
they were looking for evans that she had been killed
or poisoned by her then husband. This investigation into Gloria
Sadderfield because the manner of death was considered natural, but
she had head trauma as a cause in relation to
all the other deaths that seemed to be circling around
the Murdoch family. Now, in the Kathleen Savio case, she
(30:36):
was the third wife of Chicago police officer Drew Peterson.
The investigation into Kathleen Savio's death started when Drew Peterson's
fourth wife disappear. Now, Kathleen Savio died in her bathtub
of a head wound. She had, I believe a one
(30:57):
inch dash in her head, and it was surmised that
she hit her head, fell into the bathtub and drowned.
But the problem was the bathtub was dry. Investigator's surmise
that well, okay, the water drained out, but we find
that wasn't the case. Jokes, So investigators exhumed Kathleen Savio's
(31:18):
body what did they find. Yeah, well, when when they
you know, they didn't think that this you know, kind
of met and muster if you will. And these dry
drowning cases are real head scratchers to begin with. One
of the first things you're gonna look for at autopsy
on somebody that you are actually opining had drowned is
that the water might be out of the tub. But
(31:39):
guess what doesn't change. That's the weight of the lungs.
If an individual has essentially inhalated water into their lungs,
the lungs will be heavy and congested more so than normal.
So I think that that would be my first question. Yeah,
she might have had a head injury that you're listing
as the fatal event, But how did you arrive at
this drowning proposition that you put or But when they
(32:00):
finally did exhume Umsavio's body, one of the things that
they determined was the fact that she didn't just have
one one blow to the back of her head. There
was one, you know, significant lacerated area that initial point
of contact, and I'm sure that it stood out. But
you know, as they were going through this case, they
(32:21):
they suddenly determined that they had at least six or
maybe even seven other points of impact on her head
that were not that we're not lacerated, but they had
these deep bruises that were there. So you know, you
can understand, I think and and certainly are our listeners
can that if you fall one time, you strike your head,
(32:41):
that's understandable, but you're not going to fall six to
seven times, generating each individual bruising, you know. And in conclusion,
that's that's how they wound up determining that this was
not as advertised, this is not an an accidental death.
They knew just sently based upon these injuries that they
(33:02):
discovered at the autopsy, per the exhimation that she had
been struck multiple times. And this is a fine example
of what can be left behind even after she had
been embalmed and buried. The one thing about the particularly
hemorrhage that you can never get past in a case
like this is it it doesn't disappear. Do you know why? Well,
(33:22):
because when you know, we were talking about how when
the embalming fluid is traversing through the body, right, it's
it's it's essentially going through our vascular system, it's going
through the veins, and arteries and all these sorts of things.
But when blunt force takes place and you generate a hemorrhage,
a point of hemorrhage or or bruise, if you will,
(33:43):
the reason it bruises is because that little capillary bed area,
that specific area has been compromised. It's been ruptured, and
so now it's out into what's referred to I'm gonna
say this very very slowly, it's called the interstitial tissue.
You're literally bleeding out into the soft tissue surrounding that
point of impact. So the embalming fluid is not going
(34:06):
to eradicate that it will still be there. And didn't
that fascinating with Saba's case because they still saw evidence
of this after she had been dead and buried for
some time. Shelley Denishevsky's case is very similar in that
Denishevsky was found by her daughter in the bathtub and
it was thought that she had slipped, fallen and hit
(34:28):
her head. Danishevsky was not autopsied either, because she and
her family are Orthodox Jews. So as this case progressed,
investigators requested the exhimation of Danishevsky's body and they found
something totally different that it was not caused by hitting
(34:50):
her head and drowning. Shelley's death was caused by a
net compression, meaning what well, that there was direct pressure
apply to her neck, and therefore, you know this is
going to be consistent with the say, for instance, someone
pinning her to the floor and pressing down on her neck,
perhaps a strangulation of some type where you're actually applying
(35:14):
pressure directly by the palm of the hand. You know,
any any number of things can create a net compression.
But we do know this. Again, You're back to this
issue someone slipping and falling in the bathtub, and you
you want to try to honor the family's wishes as
best you possibly can. But this again goes to show
(35:36):
if someone has sustained trauma, it needs to be further investigated,
because if you cannot validate the origin of that trauma specifically,
I mean really scientifically validated, it's gonna wind up in
a problem going down the road, just like it did
in this case. I've actually been involved in another case
(35:56):
similar to this that involved our Orthodox community in the
New Orleans area when I was there, and again that
case slipped under the radar and it turned out later
to be Hamsa. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body Backs.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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