September 13, 2022 • 46 mins
Dr. Amie Harwick, a sex therapist and former fiancé of actor Drew Carey, is found unresponsive under a balcony in her Hollywood Hills home on the morning of February 15th, 2020. She is rushed to the hospital, but unfortunately, passes away. The evidence at the crime scene and on Harwick’s body indicated signs of a struggle and her having been thrown from the balcony.
In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss blunt force trauma, the difference between falling/being thrown from a great height, how to tell in what order injuries occur, and why a nicotine syringe became a major factor in this case.
Show Notes:
0:00 - Intro
1:25 - Background and overview of the case
3:45 - Where do you start with a case like this?
5:10 - Amie Harwick being thrown from her balcony
7:30 - How do we know she was thrown off the balcony?
15:45 - Do the injuries differ depending on whether you are thrown from a great height or fall from one?
19:00 - Blunt force trauma
20:10 - How does the M.E. go about examining all the injuries?
25:50 - Is it possible that Amie was beaten and that caused the injuries to her liver, not the fall?
29:40 - How can you tell what order the injuries happened in?
32:00 - If Amie fell, and was not thrown, would her death still be considered blunt force trauma?
34:00 - Suspects in Amie’s case
34:55 - How investigators suspect the murder played out
36:40 - Finding a nicotine filled syringe and what that signifies
42:10 - Harwick’s ex-boyfriend, Gareth Pursehouse, becomes the prime suspect
44:45 - Pursehouse has been charged with murder, first degree residential burglary, and special circumstance allegation of lying in wait.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. I've been out to
l A a a few times in my in my career,
I've had to film different things out there and interact
with folks out in Hollywood. And one of the odd
(00:28):
little asides about l A is this location there called
the Hollywood Hills. It's strange for somebody like me that
lives down here in the Deep South, but you go
there and it the roads just kind of snake around you.
You never know where you're gonna wind up. But I
(00:49):
gotta tell you, you know, when you begin to take
it all in and you look down and you can
see the city kind of laying out there before you,
it's quite breathtaking. It's it almost looked as though it's
not real. It almost does, in fact, seem like in
that setting that the city is a movie set. The
(01:12):
views are fantastic. Today, we're going to talk about a
lady that lived there, that was part and parcel of
that community that people knew, people in very high echelns
out in Hollywood. We're going to talk about the death
of Amy Hardwick. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
(01:35):
body Backs. Some of the toughest scenes that I've had
to work have taken place as a result of falls
from great height because I don't know. You you look
at it and you try to make heads or tails
out of what actually happened, because sometimes that trauma is
(01:57):
just so extensive, it's very hard to kind of make
your way through everything that you have to analyze. Jackie Howard,
executive producer of Crown Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, I
gotta tell you this case is is one of those
cases for me. I can only imagine the trouble that
the corner had kind of deciphering what they were seeing
before them. I have so many questions for you, Joe
(02:20):
about this case related to that fall. But let's look
a little bit at the life of Amy Harwick. She
was a well known sex therapist in Hollywood. She was
the ex fiance of Drew Carey, actor and host of
The Price Is Right. And the night Amy Harwick died,
she had gone with friends to see a burlesque show
(02:41):
and she had got home around one o'clock in the morning,
and at that time she texted a friend that said,
send me pictures on the green couch and the location
where they had gone there is a green couch and
I guess she wanted to see that her friend got
there and she was having a good time. Amy had
decided to go home, so as Amy went to her
(03:04):
third floor apartment, she was attacked. Police theorized that the
assailant had been waiting on her for hours. We'll talk
a little more in depth in a minute about the
scene and what was found. But Joe Amy Hardwick was
thrown off of the balcony of her third floor apartment.
(03:25):
That's about a twenty fall. But we also know that
she was assaulted and attacked in her apartment. How can,
how does how will this type of investigation be conducted?
Because an emmy has to distinguish between the injuries caused
(03:46):
by the assault and the injuries caused by the fall.
Where do you start? The first place you started is
at the scene. You want to see if there's any
kind of evidence, you know, at the scene that would
give you an indication of, you know, any kind of
struggle that had happened there, and that certainly you know
was the case. There was disruption at the scene, There
(04:07):
was evidence that a door had been breached and broken through.
There was even blood on the door. They haven't released
a lot of information in regards to that blood as
to actually who the blood belonged to, but that is significant.
It's a significant bit of information. That's something that is
totally atypical. You don't expect to walk into a well
maintained living area, and from the accounts that are friends
(04:31):
have put forward alight, this apartment is absolutely gorgeous. I mean,
it's it's beautiful. If you could see this building, it's
it's kind of got a tutor appearance to it, you know,
a high pitched roof. It's very well maintained and I'm
sure very high end. We talked about the Hollywood Hills
people have talked about. Even her bedroom was very striking.
You know, she's a sex therapist. I'm sure that it's,
(04:54):
you know, very luxurious in all those things. She's putting
forth an image in this environment, and you look for
things there that are going to give you clues as
to what happened. Obviously, we know where she wound up.
You know, she struck a hard surface, you know, after
a twenty ft fall, But how did she come to
(05:14):
wind up there? And it's interesting you use the term
thrown off of the balcony that's not something that we
just you know, conjured up out of the air. That's
something that apparently the corner had actually reported to the
local media. Thrown, you know, that's that's an active word.
That's that's different than fell. You know, he begin to
(05:36):
think about thrown. That means that someone in fact has
to enter into the equation and propel that individual through
the air and over the balcony. And that's not something
that's easily accomplished. That's something that takes strength. It's something
that takes force of will in order to do, and
it's something that you have to be purposed at. I
would think, you know, there's any number of other places
(05:57):
that she could have been thrown, thrown through the floor,
thrown through a window, thrown onto the bed, thrown into
the bathtub, I don't know, but thrown over a balcony railing.
And when you see the balcony, for folks that haven't
seen it, I'll kind of paint a picture for you.
It gives you the distinct impression of kind of a
larger form of what's referred to as a Juliette balcony,
(06:20):
that classic image that we think of Romeo and Juliette
highly romanticized. It's not a place you would go out
and take coffee and toast in the morning, and there's
not a lot of space to it, but it does
open into her bedroom and so it's a feature of
this home. And so you've got to make it through
several levels here, you know, because it's on the third floor,
(06:42):
her her bedrooms up there on the third floor. You're
not going to access it, you know, from the top floor.
You have to access it down below. So whoever did
this would have had specific knowledge about that area and
where she lived. I think that that's that's quite fascinating
(07:02):
in a very interesting piece of evidence and evidence of
a life that has been lived, that an individual would
have to have familiarity with it where to find her
in this particular location, and not a lot of people
would have been out and about. This happened in the
wee we hours. It's it's after midnight, two am. Yeah,
(07:24):
it's at two am. And I think one little aside
here that's very very important that we can certainly address,
has happened on the fifteenth of February. Jackie. She had
been out celebrating with these friends at the burlesque show
on Valentine's Night. Well, you were talking about how the
emmy announced to the press that she was thrown off
(07:45):
of the balcony, before we get back to the body
and talk about the injuries, how would he have known that?
I know it has to do with the angle of
where the body is found, the distance from the building.
It's good old geometry, trigonometry, all those elm trees that
I am really no good at. Yeah, you would think that, Well,
(08:07):
first off, did you have witness to it? You know,
if that is the font or the well spring from
where that data is coming from. From an investigative standpoint,
did somebody physically witness her be projected off of the balcony,
then you have to think about, well, at what point
did she pitch off of the balcony? Did she make
(08:29):
contact with the rail? Is there any evidence that there
was any kind of blood transfer on the rail? Is
there any evidence that maybe someone had put their hands
on the rail, put their hands on her maybe if
she's wearing clothing, was the back of her collar clutched
with a bloody handprint, or maybe her backside or maybe
her ankles. Where you get this idea that maybe she
(08:51):
was pitched out. A person that is just falling will
not generally have the ability to project themselves. And another
thing that you have to factor in here, and you
had mentioned this earlier, is that the corner actually stated
that she had sustained two types of trauma. She not
(09:11):
only sustained blunt force trauma, which is generally associated with
the fall and impact injury. Okay, and we can dig
dig into that, but also there was evidence in the
soft tissue of her neck that she had been a
strangled or manually throttled in some way. That there was
deep tissue hemorrhage there and a significant enough so that
(09:32):
the corner made note of it and thought that it
was genuine finding something that's not associated with a fall.
When we look at these types of injuries like this,
and people that have listened to bodybags now they know
that we talked about things like anti mortem injuries before death.
We talked about perimortem injuries, and then we talked about
(09:55):
post mortalm injuries. And you know, just to kind of
break that down, if you have an anti mortem injury
that gives you some kind of indication that when the
person sustained the injury which is obviously prior to death,
that there's been time for that to begin, at least
even at a cellular level, for healing to start. Okay,
(10:15):
where the traumatized area gives evidence that you know, there's
some type of work being done at a cellular level.
With perimortem injury, what you'll have and this distinguishes it
from post mortem perimortem. You have focal areas of hemorrhage, okay,
but there's no evidence of healing. So you know that
the moment time, that time when the person lost their life,
(10:39):
you think about you know, there's probably a lot of
fracturing that's associated with this, and then you've got the
soft tissue hemorrhage. You began to look at this thing
as logically as you possibly can't think, well, would somebody
hurt their neck, particularly like their anterior neck, and when
I say anterior, I mean front okay, blow the chin.
Would they have injured that area in a well, there's
(11:01):
not a likelihood of that. Okay, you can strike something
and leave a linear mark. But I think what the
emmy saw relative to her neck is possibly and I
have no way to prove this at this moment time,
but that Emmy may have seen a contused area, are
(11:21):
bruised area that may very well may have matched up
with shape that appear consistent with the human hand. I
need to back up on you for just a second
job because we are going to talk very in depth
about the injuries to the body, but I got to
talk about this idea of her being thrown again. The
Emmy is going to measure where the body fell, the
(11:43):
distance from the building, because usually if it's an accidental fall,
if I'm understanding things as I've learned from you and
Nancy through the years and and her panel of experts,
usually if you fall, then you are going to tell
yourself is pretty much straight down. It's not gonna be
(12:05):
ten or fifteen feet or and I'm I'm sorry, I'm
distance challenge, it's not, you know, but it's not going
to be at an angle from the building and at
a distance, right, yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right when an
individual free falls, essentially particularly from the short of a height.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not diminishing the trauma
(12:27):
that that was inflicted upon Amy's body, but when you
think about you know, twenty ft is a lot different
than two feet Okay, so it's easier to kind of
size this up if you will. When you begin to fall,
you were doing the greatest battle in the world from
a physics standpoint, with one of the most overwhelming forces
(12:49):
in nature, and that's gravity. Remember gravity, It's not like,
you know, when we talk about other elements that factor
into death investigation, we're not talking about things like heat
and environmental changes. We're talking about a constant and that's
in your universal Gravity is going to impact us all
no pun intended. We know what it's like to fall down. Generally,
when we fall, our people pass out. For instance, say
if you're deprived of of oxygen and you just kind
(13:13):
of fall over, you're gonna fall essentially straight down. But
when you get this kind of projected event, you have
to begin to think about, well, how far away from
that leading edge of the balcony would you have had
to have kind of been propelled out from in order
to wind up this particular distance away or forward of
(13:38):
of the edge the leading edge of that balcony. And
I think that that's probably what they're looking at. It's
going to be variable. None of these numbers are static
because there's too many variables to factor into But I
think that you can kind of classify by looking at
it and think, well, if if she was pitched and
we don't know what position her body was in, that's
you know, one of the reasons I was saying earlier,
(13:59):
you know, is their evidence that she was grabbed by
a collar by her backside and just kind of thrown
up in the air like a you know, like a
bail of hay, where she pitched outward maybe three to
five ft. And how much strength would it take to
propel a woman who probably weighed roughly about a pounds.
How far can you toss someone like that? And apparently
(14:22):
it was significant enough to get the idea that she
was out away from the balcony, that she didn't just
simply tip over the edge and fall straight now, and
you know, with gravity having the totality of the effect
relative to her death, this is something where she would
have had to have been propelled out from the edge
(14:42):
and she fell through the air perhaps I don't know,
three to four feet away from the balcony, And that's
one of the things that the emmy struggles with. The
key here though, and I find this quite interesting, is
again back to this idea that they released this information, Jackie,
How are they able to draw these conclusions because guess what,
(15:02):
when folks first arrived at the scene relative to Amy
and they did the initial assessment, she's still alive. They
extricated her from that scene, They extricated her from the
ground beneath that balcony, and removed her from her home
to Cedar Sin. I speculatively, how do you make that?
(15:27):
Because it is numbers. You know, you've mentioned trigonometry. It
is numbers. When you begin to think about this, how
exactly do you come up with a formula when you're
absent a body, just as kind of an outside observer.
It makes you think that, well, maybe maybe the police
had more information, or maybe the m E has more
information than we're fully aware of. Is there a difference
(15:48):
in the injuries from whether you are thrown at this
height or fall from this height? Does the force that
propelled you had in difference in the impact and the
damage it makes to the body. I think that perhaps
you have what's referred to as kind of a inertial
(16:08):
energy that you know, given the mass of your body,
when you tip over and fall, you generate a certain
a certain velocity. Okay, and maybe that could be sped
up to a certain degree if you're cast and when
I say cast, pitched, thrown, propelled, but it's gonna be negligible.
(16:28):
What's really going to dictate most injuries, and I talked
about this with people that I teach my classes, What
really dictates the type of injury that you're gonna have
is the surface that you strike. You think about anybody
that falls and they strike, say a pile of leaves,
all right, a lot of that energy is going to
(16:49):
be absorbed by that soft surface. But if you strike
say a poor concrete area and assphalt area, that energy
is not going to dissipate as read. It's not going
to kind of range out away from the body, is
going to be self contained and kind of focal to
wherever you make these points of impact. That's one of
the ways that we tell many times when people will
(17:11):
come up with these stories about, yeah, well my kid
he fell and he broke his leg. Okay, You've got
some person that comes into emergency room and they make
that comment about you know, broken leg on a on
a child or a shoulder or something like that, and well, okay,
it's pretty nasty injury. They've got a compound common uty fracture,
you've got the bone protruding. Okay, I see that maybe
(17:36):
they fell and they struck that one location, but how
do you get all these other non associated bruises, these
points of impact. That means that something else has been
going on. So if it's a one off event where
let's say she falls, Amy falls and strikes, say the
point of contact, and I don't know this for a fact,
(17:56):
but the point of contact is, say the top of
her head, all right, Well, then you will have a
focal area of hemorrhage. It'll be probably an underlying fracture
that's going to center on the top of her head
and it will kind of extend out. That fracture will
extend out. You might even have what's referred to as
a depressed skull fracture at that point in time, and
(18:19):
it's it's extending out almost like a cracked eggshell. You
wouldn't expect to see multiple fractures that are from multiple strikes.
It's a single strike, all right, And according to what
the corner is saying, at least at this point in time,
she had trauma to both her head and her of
her body. So maybe just maybe we're not talking about
(18:41):
a single strike to the top of the head. Maybe
when she impacted, not only did she impact the side
of her head, perhaps, but she also impacted her shoulder,
and so these things are gonna be kind of married
up as the single event, those two single points of contact,
and she fell with such ferocity that she sustained fractures,
and certainly it was enough to bring about her death.
(19:21):
I don't think that the public at large understands that
one of the leading causes of death in our country
is blunt force trauma when it comes down to traumatic events,
because you know, there are more people that are involved
in fatal car accidents than just about any other kind
of trauma related event that's out there, and so we
deal a lot in the medical legal world with blunt
(19:44):
force trauma in car accidents in particular, blunt force trauma
is in fact the leading cause of death, but it
can be very confusing because the injuries that are sustained
with blunt forced trauma are so extensive, and you know,
you'll your people described them as being massive. I don't
know at this point in time, Jackie, if I can
(20:06):
say that her injuries are massive because what we do
understand is that when the authorities arrived at the scene,
she at least had what's referred to as an agonal respiration.
She had some sign of life enough that they tried
to resuscitate her and took her to the hospital, and
of course she eventually died there at Cedar Suna. Let's
(20:26):
look closer at Harwick's injuries. She had injuries to her brain,
to her liver, and to her pelvis from her fall
in the apartment balcony to the ground was about twenty
She also had severe injuries and deep marks on her neck, indicating,
as you mentioned earlier, that she had been strangled before
(20:49):
she fell. Then you have, as you were talking about,
before the break, all of these injuries from the fall itself.
How does an emmy go about laying those out? I
think that one of the things that you have to consider,
because one of the questions that will come up is,
(21:10):
you know, we're we're talking about these locations of injuries.
We talked about the head, when we talked about the liver.
You mentioned the liver, and certainly talked about the pelvis.
So that gives you an indication as to perhaps how
she impacted. If it's a single one off. All. Let's
say that they were able to rule out that she
(21:31):
had been You mentioned the liver for instance. Liver is
a particular area that you can see when somebody has
been beaten in the abdomen. If our listeners will essentially
find the bottom of your rib cage on the right
side of your body kind of snugged up in that
area is your liver, all right, and it's not completely
(21:52):
protected by the rib cage. It's there, it's exposed, so
it's really easy to get to and I've I've had
cases where people have been kicked to death in the liver.
Liver can be very fragile. People find this kind of odd.
One of the things that we talked about in UM
in forensic pathology medical legal death investigation is that you'll
hear pathologists or reed pathologists do an examination of the
(22:15):
organs of the body and the liver in particular. They'll
refer to as these injuries of the of the liver
as a laceration, but they'll also call it a hepatic
fracture hepatic having to do with the liver. And when
you see the liver and the surface of it after
it's sustained an impact injury, it actually has the appearance
Jackie of a fracture. It kind of radiates out, it
(22:37):
will be very jagged, and the gut itself will begin
to fill up with blood. And people will die very
very quickly as a result of this, because you know,
the liver has a tremendous amount of blood supply, so
you begin to clip those little vessels in there. If
you don't get treated, you'll essentially lose blood and you'll
die of internal bleeding. But let's think about if this
(23:00):
is a one off fall where she's got head injury,
she's got a liver injury, and she's got a pelvic injury. Well,
how would you sustain that in a single fall. Well,
the only thing I can really think about is that
if you are falling through the air, you're not tipped
toward the top of your head or to the soles
(23:23):
of your feet. You're essentially pancaking in at this moment time.
So one of two things, you will either essentially imagine
somebody doing a belly flop off of a diving board
and we know what kind of impact that creates. And
certainly the surface that Amy fell onto was not forgiving
that energy as a result of that impact would transfer
(23:43):
to these points of contact, you know, where she struck
the ground with her head and the hepatic region of
her abdomen and certainly her pelvic region, So it would
have to come about simultaneously. Some people say, well, could
she have landed on her back flat and had this happened? Yeah,
I supposed that she could have. But you know, the
way we're kind of designed with our spine is that
(24:06):
often equated to you know, when we curl up, you know,
we kind of almost take on a tortoise like appearance.
You know, our our spine creates this kind of shell
like position for us. It would be very difficult, I think,
to generate that kind of injury to the liver. My
money would either be she would strike facedown or perhaps
on her right side, so that you've got involvement with
(24:29):
the pelvis, the hepatic region, and of course the head
injury and all of these these specific areas. You know,
I talked about how vascular the liver is, and you've
got tons of tiny vessels in there that cause you
to bleed out into the gut. What do you have
in the pelvis? Oh, my gosh. Well, there's all kinds
of vessels in there, and the pelvis is an odd bone.
(24:50):
When you you break it, it's oddly shaved, it's an
irregular bone, and so it fractures in these odd kind
of ways. And there's a lot of vest in there,
and most obvious you have the femoral artery is rooted
up in there. It kind of passes through what you
call a frayman. A frameman is a ten dollar word
(25:11):
that physicians and anatomus to use for a hole in
the bone, and it passes through these areas through there,
and so the from for moral artery can be clipped,
and if that happens, that's deadly. And then not to
mention what's going on in the skull with a closed
head injury again very vascular region. You begin to bleed
(25:32):
out essentially see page is taking place, and blood will
kind of leach out into those soft tissues around the
brain within the brain, and the brain begins to swell
and the person eventually dies. So you take all of
those injuries that we have just enumerated the possibility of,
(25:53):
and then when you finally receive Amy's remains, to take
a look at them, they've got a devil a job
on their hands because they begin to look at this
extensive trauma that she sustained to her torso, but yet
you still have the neck hang on Joe. I got
another question about the liver. Is it likely or possible
(26:13):
that she was beaten and that is part of what
gave her these injuries to her liver, or is it
likely those injuries were just caused from the fall. That's
an excellent question in that you know, I talked about
blunt force trauma and car accidents a little while ago,
and I'd say, I know that there will be debate
(26:35):
about this if people hear this, but one of the
organs that's really impacted by blunt force trauma in cars
many times is the liver. It's so close to the
surface and again, if you find the bottom of your
rib cage on the right hand side, it's just tucked
right there. And it's essentially the largest organ in the body.
It's massive, and it's got a lot of surface area
(26:58):
and again a lot of vessels running passing through it.
When you have a traumatized liver, the surgeons that can
get to the liver that begin to repair it have
got a devil of the time, because there are all
these little microfractures that you get in there, and you've
got these little beaty vessels that have been ruptured. Many
times the surgeons will go back and say, well, we're
(27:18):
still looking blood into the gut. We've got to figure
out what the origin of this is. I could do it,
it's about my pay grade. I'm not bright enough to
do that. So my hats off to trauma surgeons that
are able to do that to assess it. To your point, though,
I have seen people that have been kicked to death
in the abdomen, and that point of impact many times
has been the liver. It's an interesting proposition when you
(27:43):
begin to think about this that you've already got a
young lady that, according to the corner, has got trauma
to her neck. You begin to think, well, gee, you
know what, what other kind of trauma did she sustain?
Because there is an ear witness to this event that
actually heard what they described as bodies not singular but
(28:07):
bodise falling to the ground. There's a struggle going on,
and it's within earshot of a roommate, and they've heard this,
and you begin to think, okay, well, you're saying there's
a struggle. Uh, there's apparently an associated scream that apparently
emanated from amy. Well what else going on here? You
(28:29):
know how many? How many layers are we gonna have
to peel back here to try to understand. Many times, though,
when you see abdominal trauma, the abdomen is not necessarily
gonna be opened up. It's not like a gunshot one
where you've got an open wound, but overlying the hepatic region,
you know that area that I talked about, this arrival
(28:51):
of the right rib cage at the base. Many times
you'll see an overlying contusion. Okay, you'll see an area
that is read and irritated, are possibly even bruised. And
you can track this when we open at autopsy and
reflect back that tissue that's overlying the liver, you'll see
(29:12):
on the back side of the wall of the abdomen
there will be a big area of hemorrhage right there
overlying that area. And then of course it will be
lying right on top of the liver that's been traumatized.
And there's a term that we use for this when
the liver is like are even the spling to you
hear this a lot. Is a term called maceration, and
(29:33):
it just it's a fancy term for saying that the
organ has been beaten to bits. It's been almost pulpified.
You know. I don't know that that's necessarily the case
in Amy's case, but she apparently sustained significant abdominal trauma.
We know that. The trick here, though, I think for
the pathologist is going to be able to delineate the
order at which this occurred and when it occurred, because
(29:55):
that this person is going to be asked these questions
if this case goes to trial, they will be asked,
what order, doctor, did these injuries take place in? You know,
you're saying you've got trauma to the neck. It looks
like there's a strangulation that's going on. Are you sure
that this happened before she went over the balcony? Or
did going over the balcony cause this injury? Or was
(30:17):
this something that happened before she went over the balcony?
Keep going, Joe, how are they going to It's like
reading a mystery novel. Don't leave me in And how
are they going to know this? It's gonna be very
difficult to know it because you've got to traumatic events
that by their own admission the corner saying that happened
(30:38):
in a perimortem state, Okay, that it happened during the
throes of death. And that's what's gonna make this case
so difficult. I think for the Emmy to try to
describe the forensic pathologists that has to sit on the stand,
are they going to be able to say definitively? You know.
One of the things that we talked about with Nancy
he began to have forensic experts that come up on
(31:00):
the stand. You never talk in absolutes when you're understand
you say absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, you
know this is what happened, because that's how you get
into big trouble. You have to make comments like within
a degree of scientific certainty. And so I don't know
that they will be able to say definitively that they
(31:22):
can give you the order in which these occurred unless
they're seeing something microscopically. You know. Again, I go back
to anti mortem injuries and the perimortem injuries. Remember, we've
got an ear witness to this. It's gonna be real key.
I think at least that when they have this ear
witness to this event, can they measure out the time?
(31:47):
What was the amount of time that we're talking about
in linear time? You know, from you know, this moment
time to the last sound that you heard? How long
did that take to happen? And then it based upon
that because you've got to bay slide. At that point, scientifically,
you go back to the pathologist and say, okay, doc,
are these injuries consistent with what you're seeing here, you know,
(32:08):
demonstrated on the autopsy table. And it's going to be
I think at least it's going to be a point
of contention if this thing comes to trial. Amy Harwick's
cause of death was listed as blunt force trauma. If
you have a fall like this, and I'm not talking
about being thrown, I'm just talking about a fall, would
(32:29):
it still be listed as blunt force trauma. There's the
old joke that people make about the fall is not
that's not what kills you. It's a sudden stop. And
this this is actually true. There's truth in in that
bit of morbid humor, and many times, particularly with motor
vehicle accidents, there's a kind of a way that in
medical legal death investigation. We frame these things are called
(32:51):
rapid deceleration injuries, and sometimes that's associated with things like
striking a fixed object as you're moving through space, you know,
like in a car. If you're not belted in a
car and you slam into a bridge abutment. Okay, well
the car stopped moving. Your body essentially stopped moving when
(33:12):
you struck the steering wheel or the windshield. But guess what,
your organs are still moving. People don't think about that.
For a middlesecond, your organs still moving in your body
and they get ripped to shreds as this weird event
that takes place. And I think that you can have
this kind of event occur with a fall as well.
The trick is being able to explain this in terms
(33:35):
that a layman will be able to understand it, particularly
in a chord, because that's where this really matters. How
do you frame this so that people understand that it
was in fact the fall that killed her as opposed
to this um manual stringulation event, because they're gonna be
questions that are going to arise relative to that. And
it seems like you've got all of the information here,
But sometimes in cases you get so it's such a
(33:58):
glut of information that it can be confused, and particularly
for the layman that occupied the jury box, you know,
they're going to have to be able to make a
decision based on this information that's coming to them from
the medical examiner. And investigators in cases involving someone like
(34:33):
Amy Harwick, she led a very interesting life and came
in contact with a lot of people that brought her
into the lens of the public. She was strikingly beautiful
and it was a sex therapist. And so when you
see her life coming to an end in such a
violent way, you begin to think about things, well, who
(34:56):
would be on your short list as far as suspects,
you know who when she come in contact with Is
there a history of somebody that's out there that's this
lurking about in her life, that's harassing her, that's making
her life pure health, that has left her in fear
or the restraining orders, And as investigators, that's one of
the first places you're going to go to because where
(35:17):
she died is not a place prone to this kind
of violence. It almost appears like she was targeted in
some way. Jackie Well, that is exactly what investigators suspect happen.
In fact, Joe Amy Harwick told family and friends at
one point, if anything ever happens to me, it's him,
(35:39):
and that him is an ex boyfriend. His name is
Gareth purse House. He has now been charged with murder
and residential burglary with special circumstances allegations of lying in wait,
and that comes from the fact that police believe that
he was waiting for Harwick for hours now. When police
(36:03):
were called, they were called by her downstairs roommate. He
tells police that he woke up and heard something. I'm
not really sure what he heard. He just assumed that
it was Hardwick coming home from her evening out. Then,
he says, he goes back to sleep and then is
woken up by a woman's screams and he was able
(36:27):
to tell that the screams were coming from above him
and that it was Amy. He tried to find his
phone but couldn't so he couldn't call the police. He
tried to get upstairs and couldn't, and he ended up
having to climb a fence to get to a neighbor
to be able to get her some help. And when
the police came, that's when they found her Amy Hardwick,
(36:47):
on the ground after being tossed from her balcony. Now
in the apartment, there were several things that were found.
She had a rosary and it was broke, and the
beads were scattered in multiple rooms of her apartment, which
tells us that this assault happened basically all over the apartment.
(37:10):
And then there was another very potent piece of evidence
that was found, and that was a syringe full of nicotine.
How do you get a syringeful of nicotine when we
know that harrowit did not do drugs, did not smoke.
(37:31):
This obviously was not hers, but brought allegedly, police say,
by purse house. Yeah, you know a few years ago
we would have been scratching our head a lot more
over this. You know, the presence of this nicotine filled
syringe is what the police have kind of identified this as.
But nowadays, where you have people that are vaping, they're
(37:51):
vaping liquids, and you know nicotine is a component, it's
not that difficult to get. The question is how is
it acquired from where was it acquired and how was
it drawn up? Because they specifically say syringe, which means
that more than likely that there is a needle that's
associated with this. And one of the things it's quite
(38:12):
fascinating with this is that the syringe was actually located
out on the balcony. You know the balcony that we've
mentioned now several times that she went over the side on.
Why would it be there was the perpetrator attempting to
administer this to her, and Jackie you've mentioned the broken
(38:34):
rosary beads. The beads lead from what are being called
her TV room, through her bedroom and again out onto
the balcony. So you've almost got this trail of bread crumbs,
if you will, evidentially bread crumbs that are giving you
an indication of what may have happened. But let's get
back to that nicotine syringe. Of your purpose to use
(38:54):
nicotine in order to do harm to an individual, I
think that rule you're gonna need an injection of about
sixty milligrams for an adult that you know might wagh
about twenty pounds. And you know what kind of effect, Well,
first off, it's with a concentration of nicotine. It's gonna
blow your your blood pressure up through through the roof
(39:17):
and it will cause you to have a cardiac potentially
a cardiac event. You know, it's kind of certainly into
my way of thinking, is certainly kind of an interesting
way of going about taking somebody's life. Nicotine is something
that we do, in fact screen for. It's in a
standard panel. You hear a lot, you know how many
times if we talked about on Nancy Show, where they'll say, well,
(39:37):
it's pending toxicology. Well, nicotine is one of the things
that some office is actually screened for in their standard panel.
And you say, why do you need to know nicotine, Well,
it gets to the lifestyle of the individual. What are
they engaged in, you know, what are they taking into
their body? And Amy had no history of cigarette use,
didn't have any history of vaping. She was not druggie
(40:00):
news drugs. And she's also teetotaler as well. I don't
know if that's been mentioned, but she didn't imbobe with alcohol,
so apparently she led a pretty clean lifestyle was relative
to what she was going to be putting into her body.
To that point, the corner has not indicated at all
that there was any nicotine found in her post examination,
(40:21):
certainly in her toxicology, but it does go to a
bigger issue here. That means for me at least that
whoever this perpetrator is, they should have prepared. They showed
up to do harm. And if you're aiming to do
harm and you want to use nicotine, which I'm not
(40:42):
going to say it's something it's an exotic toxin. You know,
some exotic fish that you've drawn you know, some kind
of toxic uh substance from to inject somebody where it's
not exotic like that, but it's a typical. That indicates
to me that you've done some study, you thought about this,
that you've kind of planned this out. Well, hang on,
(41:04):
you wouldn't if you brought a syringe with you filled
with nicotine. You're not intending to use that to get
high or experience some kind of euphoria. That's not what
that would do to your body, right lord? No, No,
with lethal concentration of nicotine is deadly. I mean it's
(41:25):
it's deadly. I don't know for whatever purpose you would
use liquified nicotine for drawn up in a syringe. Now, obviously,
you know we've talked about vaping where people want that
boost of nicotine. Because of nicotine, one of the addictive
factors in is it kind of gives you that euphoric
feeling when you take it on in your system, but
that's in smaller dosages. When you're talking to a bump
(41:47):
of something like sixty milligrams, And again they haven't really
released how how much was found. But when you start
to talk about, you know, an injection of that amount
of bollus that size, I think it would give a
reasonable person pause to think, why in the world would
the syringe be in Amy's home. She doesn't have a
(42:07):
nicotine habit. It's not like I don't think she's juicing
up her her non existent vapes that she doesn't possess.
So how did it miraculously appear there? And that's a
huge question. Well, when you begin to think about pure nicotine,
the only thing I can think of is that you're
either trying to incapacitate them some way to the point
(42:28):
where they can't fend you off, which would be an
odd selection, I would think, or you're trying to kill them.
We know that Amy Harwick and Gareth purse House dated
for quite some time. We also know that when they
broke up, he began to stalk her. He began to
(42:50):
harass her. Reviews of her business and her practice began
showing up online very detrimental, and she was worried about that.
And again I mentioned earlier she had told people, She
had told friends and family that if something happened to her,
(43:11):
it was him. And in fact, investigators saw that Mr
Pearce House had similar scratches and bruises on him, and
his DNA was found at Amy Hardwick's home. Now, of
course they had been dating for quite some time. Still,
how long it had been since he had been at
(43:34):
the home, So how is that going to play in? Joe?
I think that it would like to say down south,
that dog won't hunt, I think is what that comes
down to, because you know there's been separation. My god,
she she had restraining war on this guy. I'm not
saying that there could not be residual DNA in her dwelling,
But if you've got kind of a robust deposits of
(43:55):
his DNA in that environment, and he's got a restraining
order and she is stating unequivocally that she's afraid of him,
you know, how did it wind up in the apartment
You talked about how they had charged him with this
idea of laying in weight. If he's laying in weight
at that moment in time, has he been visiting her
(44:16):
at other times? You know, to are there depositions there
within that apartment of his DNA that would give an
investigator pause to think, well, maybe he's been in this
dwelling when she's not here, kind of wandering around if
you will. But yeah, I think that that would be
(44:36):
very difficult because that relationship has been ended for some
time and there was a lot of violent acting out
with this. I think that there's even a couple of
accounts where he may have pushed drive a vehicle and
all these other things and menacing and threatening and you know,
all that sort of stalking behavior that goes on many
(44:56):
times with these kinds of cases. So from me, I
think that that would be very very difficult to try
to say, well, yeah, his his DNA. I mean, you
can say it, you know, but that doesn't mean that,
you know, you're going to get a jury to buy
into that line of logic. Gareth purce House has been
charged with murder and first degree residential burglary. Additionally, he
(45:19):
has been charged with special circumstances allegation of lying in Wait.
A judge has ruled that this case can go forward again.
This case has not been adjudicated. Purse House is innocent
until proven guilty by court of law. If he has
found guilty, however, of these charges, he could be sentenced
to life in prison without the possibility of parole. I'm
(45:46):
Joseph Scott Morgen and this is body Backs.
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. I've been out to
l A a a few times in my in my career,
I've had to film different things out there and interact
with folks out in Hollywood. And one of the odd
(00:28):
little asides about l A is this location there called
the Hollywood Hills. It's strange for somebody like me that
lives down here in the Deep South, but you go
there and it the roads just kind of snake around you.
You never know where you're gonna wind up. But I
(00:49):
gotta tell you, you know, when you begin to take
it all in and you look down and you can
see the city kind of laying out there before you,
it's quite breathtaking. It's it almost looked as though it's
not real. It almost does, in fact, seem like in
that setting that the city is a movie set. The
(01:12):
views are fantastic. Today, we're going to talk about a
lady that lived there, that was part and parcel of
that community that people knew, people in very high echelns
out in Hollywood. We're going to talk about the death
of Amy Hardwick. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
(01:35):
body Backs. Some of the toughest scenes that I've had
to work have taken place as a result of falls
from great height because I don't know. You you look
at it and you try to make heads or tails
out of what actually happened, because sometimes that trauma is
(01:57):
just so extensive, it's very hard to kind of make
your way through everything that you have to analyze. Jackie Howard,
executive producer of Crown Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, I
gotta tell you this case is is one of those
cases for me. I can only imagine the trouble that
the corner had kind of deciphering what they were seeing
before them. I have so many questions for you, Joe
(02:20):
about this case related to that fall. But let's look
a little bit at the life of Amy Harwick. She
was a well known sex therapist in Hollywood. She was
the ex fiance of Drew Carey, actor and host of
The Price Is Right. And the night Amy Harwick died,
she had gone with friends to see a burlesque show
(02:41):
and she had got home around one o'clock in the morning,
and at that time she texted a friend that said,
send me pictures on the green couch and the location
where they had gone there is a green couch and
I guess she wanted to see that her friend got
there and she was having a good time. Amy had
decided to go home, so as Amy went to her
(03:04):
third floor apartment, she was attacked. Police theorized that the
assailant had been waiting on her for hours. We'll talk
a little more in depth in a minute about the
scene and what was found. But Joe Amy Hardwick was
thrown off of the balcony of her third floor apartment.
(03:25):
That's about a twenty fall. But we also know that
she was assaulted and attacked in her apartment. How can,
how does how will this type of investigation be conducted?
Because an emmy has to distinguish between the injuries caused
(03:46):
by the assault and the injuries caused by the fall.
Where do you start? The first place you started is
at the scene. You want to see if there's any
kind of evidence, you know, at the scene that would
give you an indication of, you know, any kind of
struggle that had happened there, and that certainly you know
was the case. There was disruption at the scene, There
(04:07):
was evidence that a door had been breached and broken through.
There was even blood on the door. They haven't released
a lot of information in regards to that blood as
to actually who the blood belonged to, but that is significant.
It's a significant bit of information. That's something that is
totally atypical. You don't expect to walk into a well
maintained living area, and from the accounts that are friends
(04:31):
have put forward alight, this apartment is absolutely gorgeous. I mean,
it's it's beautiful. If you could see this building, it's
it's kind of got a tutor appearance to it, you know,
a high pitched roof. It's very well maintained and I'm
sure very high end. We talked about the Hollywood Hills
people have talked about. Even her bedroom was very striking.
You know, she's a sex therapist. I'm sure that it's,
(04:54):
you know, very luxurious in all those things. She's putting
forth an image in this environment, and you look for
things there that are going to give you clues as
to what happened. Obviously, we know where she wound up.
You know, she struck a hard surface, you know, after
a twenty ft fall, But how did she come to
(05:14):
wind up there? And it's interesting you use the term
thrown off of the balcony that's not something that we
just you know, conjured up out of the air. That's
something that apparently the corner had actually reported to the
local media. Thrown, you know, that's that's an active word.
That's that's different than fell. You know, he begin to
(05:36):
think about thrown. That means that someone in fact has
to enter into the equation and propel that individual through
the air and over the balcony. And that's not something
that's easily accomplished. That's something that takes strength. It's something
that takes force of will in order to do, and
it's something that you have to be purposed at. I
would think, you know, there's any number of other places
(05:57):
that she could have been thrown, thrown through the floor,
thrown through a window, thrown onto the bed, thrown into
the bathtub, I don't know, but thrown over a balcony railing.
And when you see the balcony, for folks that haven't
seen it, I'll kind of paint a picture for you.
It gives you the distinct impression of kind of a
larger form of what's referred to as a Juliette balcony,
(06:20):
that classic image that we think of Romeo and Juliette
highly romanticized. It's not a place you would go out
and take coffee and toast in the morning, and there's
not a lot of space to it, but it does
open into her bedroom and so it's a feature of
this home. And so you've got to make it through
several levels here, you know, because it's on the third floor,
(06:42):
her her bedrooms up there on the third floor. You're
not going to access it, you know, from the top floor.
You have to access it down below. So whoever did
this would have had specific knowledge about that area and
where she lived. I think that that's that's quite fascinating
(07:02):
in a very interesting piece of evidence and evidence of
a life that has been lived, that an individual would
have to have familiarity with it where to find her
in this particular location, and not a lot of people
would have been out and about. This happened in the
wee we hours. It's it's after midnight, two am. Yeah,
(07:24):
it's at two am. And I think one little aside
here that's very very important that we can certainly address,
has happened on the fifteenth of February. Jackie. She had
been out celebrating with these friends at the burlesque show
on Valentine's Night. Well, you were talking about how the
emmy announced to the press that she was thrown off
(07:45):
of the balcony, before we get back to the body
and talk about the injuries, how would he have known that?
I know it has to do with the angle of
where the body is found, the distance from the building.
It's good old geometry, trigonometry, all those elm trees that
I am really no good at. Yeah, you would think that, Well,
(08:07):
first off, did you have witness to it? You know,
if that is the font or the well spring from
where that data is coming from. From an investigative standpoint,
did somebody physically witness her be projected off of the balcony,
then you have to think about, well, at what point
did she pitch off of the balcony? Did she make
(08:29):
contact with the rail? Is there any evidence that there
was any kind of blood transfer on the rail? Is
there any evidence that maybe someone had put their hands
on the rail, put their hands on her maybe if
she's wearing clothing, was the back of her collar clutched
with a bloody handprint, or maybe her backside or maybe
her ankles. Where you get this idea that maybe she
(08:51):
was pitched out. A person that is just falling will
not generally have the ability to project themselves. And another
thing that you have to factor in here, and you
had mentioned this earlier, is that the corner actually stated
that she had sustained two types of trauma. She not
(09:11):
only sustained blunt force trauma, which is generally associated with
the fall and impact injury. Okay, and we can dig
dig into that, but also there was evidence in the
soft tissue of her neck that she had been a
strangled or manually throttled in some way. That there was
deep tissue hemorrhage there and a significant enough so that
(09:32):
the corner made note of it and thought that it
was genuine finding something that's not associated with a fall.
When we look at these types of injuries like this,
and people that have listened to bodybags now they know
that we talked about things like anti mortem injuries before death.
We talked about perimortem injuries, and then we talked about
(09:55):
post mortalm injuries. And you know, just to kind of
break that down, if you have an anti mortem injury
that gives you some kind of indication that when the
person sustained the injury which is obviously prior to death,
that there's been time for that to begin, at least
even at a cellular level, for healing to start. Okay,
(10:15):
where the traumatized area gives evidence that you know, there's
some type of work being done at a cellular level.
With perimortem injury, what you'll have and this distinguishes it
from post mortem perimortem. You have focal areas of hemorrhage, okay,
but there's no evidence of healing. So you know that
the moment time, that time when the person lost their life,
(10:39):
you think about you know, there's probably a lot of
fracturing that's associated with this, and then you've got the
soft tissue hemorrhage. You began to look at this thing
as logically as you possibly can't think, well, would somebody
hurt their neck, particularly like their anterior neck, and when
I say anterior, I mean front okay, blow the chin.
Would they have injured that area in a well, there's
(11:01):
not a likelihood of that. Okay, you can strike something
and leave a linear mark. But I think what the
emmy saw relative to her neck is possibly and I
have no way to prove this at this moment time,
but that Emmy may have seen a contused area, are
(11:21):
bruised area that may very well may have matched up
with shape that appear consistent with the human hand. I
need to back up on you for just a second
job because we are going to talk very in depth
about the injuries to the body, but I got to
talk about this idea of her being thrown again. The
Emmy is going to measure where the body fell, the
(11:43):
distance from the building, because usually if it's an accidental fall,
if I'm understanding things as I've learned from you and
Nancy through the years and and her panel of experts,
usually if you fall, then you are going to tell
yourself is pretty much straight down. It's not gonna be
(12:05):
ten or fifteen feet or and I'm I'm sorry, I'm
distance challenge, it's not, you know, but it's not going
to be at an angle from the building and at
a distance, right, yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right when an
individual free falls, essentially particularly from the short of a height.
And don't get me wrong, I'm not diminishing the trauma
(12:27):
that that was inflicted upon Amy's body, but when you
think about you know, twenty ft is a lot different
than two feet Okay, so it's easier to kind of
size this up if you will. When you begin to fall,
you were doing the greatest battle in the world from
a physics standpoint, with one of the most overwhelming forces
(12:49):
in nature, and that's gravity. Remember gravity, It's not like,
you know, when we talk about other elements that factor
into death investigation, we're not talking about things like heat
and environmental changes. We're talking about a constant and that's
in your universal Gravity is going to impact us all
no pun intended. We know what it's like to fall down. Generally,
when we fall, our people pass out. For instance, say
if you're deprived of of oxygen and you just kind
(13:13):
of fall over, you're gonna fall essentially straight down. But
when you get this kind of projected event, you have
to begin to think about, well, how far away from
that leading edge of the balcony would you have had
to have kind of been propelled out from in order
to wind up this particular distance away or forward of
(13:38):
of the edge the leading edge of that balcony. And
I think that that's probably what they're looking at. It's
going to be variable. None of these numbers are static
because there's too many variables to factor into But I
think that you can kind of classify by looking at
it and think, well, if if she was pitched and
we don't know what position her body was in, that's
you know, one of the reasons I was saying earlier,
(13:59):
you know, is their evidence that she was grabbed by
a collar by her backside and just kind of thrown
up in the air like a you know, like a
bail of hay, where she pitched outward maybe three to
five ft. And how much strength would it take to
propel a woman who probably weighed roughly about a pounds.
How far can you toss someone like that? And apparently
(14:22):
it was significant enough to get the idea that she
was out away from the balcony, that she didn't just
simply tip over the edge and fall straight now, and
you know, with gravity having the totality of the effect
relative to her death, this is something where she would
have had to have been propelled out from the edge
(14:42):
and she fell through the air perhaps I don't know,
three to four feet away from the balcony, And that's
one of the things that the emmy struggles with. The
key here though, and I find this quite interesting, is
again back to this idea that they released this information, Jackie,
How are they able to draw these conclusions because guess what,
(15:02):
when folks first arrived at the scene relative to Amy
and they did the initial assessment, she's still alive. They
extricated her from that scene, They extricated her from the
ground beneath that balcony, and removed her from her home
to Cedar Sin. I speculatively, how do you make that?
(15:27):
Because it is numbers. You know, you've mentioned trigonometry. It
is numbers. When you begin to think about this, how
exactly do you come up with a formula when you're
absent a body, just as kind of an outside observer.
It makes you think that, well, maybe maybe the police
had more information, or maybe the m E has more
information than we're fully aware of. Is there a difference
(15:48):
in the injuries from whether you are thrown at this
height or fall from this height? Does the force that
propelled you had in difference in the impact and the
damage it makes to the body. I think that perhaps
you have what's referred to as kind of a inertial
(16:08):
energy that you know, given the mass of your body,
when you tip over and fall, you generate a certain
a certain velocity. Okay, and maybe that could be sped
up to a certain degree if you're cast and when
I say cast, pitched, thrown, propelled, but it's gonna be negligible.
(16:28):
What's really going to dictate most injuries, and I talked
about this with people that I teach my classes, What
really dictates the type of injury that you're gonna have
is the surface that you strike. You think about anybody
that falls and they strike, say a pile of leaves,
all right, a lot of that energy is going to
(16:49):
be absorbed by that soft surface. But if you strike
say a poor concrete area and assphalt area, that energy
is not going to dissipate as read. It's not going
to kind of range out away from the body, is
going to be self contained and kind of focal to
wherever you make these points of impact. That's one of
the ways that we tell many times when people will
(17:11):
come up with these stories about, yeah, well my kid
he fell and he broke his leg. Okay, You've got
some person that comes into emergency room and they make
that comment about you know, broken leg on a on
a child or a shoulder or something like that, and well, okay,
it's pretty nasty injury. They've got a compound common uty fracture,
you've got the bone protruding. Okay, I see that maybe
(17:36):
they fell and they struck that one location, but how
do you get all these other non associated bruises, these
points of impact. That means that something else has been
going on. So if it's a one off event where
let's say she falls, Amy falls and strikes, say the
point of contact, and I don't know this for a fact,
(17:56):
but the point of contact is, say the top of
her head, all right, Well, then you will have a
focal area of hemorrhage. It'll be probably an underlying fracture
that's going to center on the top of her head
and it will kind of extend out. That fracture will
extend out. You might even have what's referred to as
a depressed skull fracture at that point in time, and
(18:19):
it's it's extending out almost like a cracked eggshell. You
wouldn't expect to see multiple fractures that are from multiple strikes.
It's a single strike, all right, And according to what
the corner is saying, at least at this point in time,
she had trauma to both her head and her of
her body. So maybe just maybe we're not talking about
(18:41):
a single strike to the top of the head. Maybe
when she impacted, not only did she impact the side
of her head, perhaps, but she also impacted her shoulder,
and so these things are gonna be kind of married
up as the single event, those two single points of contact,
and she fell with such ferocity that she sustained fractures,
and certainly it was enough to bring about her death.
(19:21):
I don't think that the public at large understands that
one of the leading causes of death in our country
is blunt force trauma when it comes down to traumatic events,
because you know, there are more people that are involved
in fatal car accidents than just about any other kind
of trauma related event that's out there, and so we
deal a lot in the medical legal world with blunt
(19:44):
force trauma in car accidents in particular, blunt force trauma
is in fact the leading cause of death, but it
can be very confusing because the injuries that are sustained
with blunt forced trauma are so extensive, and you know,
you'll your people described them as being massive. I don't
know at this point in time, Jackie, if I can
(20:06):
say that her injuries are massive because what we do
understand is that when the authorities arrived at the scene,
she at least had what's referred to as an agonal respiration.
She had some sign of life enough that they tried
to resuscitate her and took her to the hospital, and
of course she eventually died there at Cedar Suna. Let's
(20:26):
look closer at Harwick's injuries. She had injuries to her brain,
to her liver, and to her pelvis from her fall
in the apartment balcony to the ground was about twenty
She also had severe injuries and deep marks on her neck, indicating,
as you mentioned earlier, that she had been strangled before
(20:49):
she fell. Then you have, as you were talking about,
before the break, all of these injuries from the fall itself.
How does an emmy go about laying those out? I
think that one of the things that you have to consider,
because one of the questions that will come up is,
(21:10):
you know, we're we're talking about these locations of injuries.
We talked about the head, when we talked about the liver.
You mentioned the liver, and certainly talked about the pelvis.
So that gives you an indication as to perhaps how
she impacted. If it's a single one off. All. Let's
say that they were able to rule out that she
(21:31):
had been You mentioned the liver for instance. Liver is
a particular area that you can see when somebody has
been beaten in the abdomen. If our listeners will essentially
find the bottom of your rib cage on the right
side of your body kind of snugged up in that
area is your liver, all right, and it's not completely
(21:52):
protected by the rib cage. It's there, it's exposed, so
it's really easy to get to and I've I've had
cases where people have been kicked to death in the liver.
Liver can be very fragile. People find this kind of odd.
One of the things that we talked about in UM
in forensic pathology medical legal death investigation is that you'll
hear pathologists or reed pathologists do an examination of the
(22:15):
organs of the body and the liver in particular. They'll
refer to as these injuries of the of the liver
as a laceration, but they'll also call it a hepatic
fracture hepatic having to do with the liver. And when
you see the liver and the surface of it after
it's sustained an impact injury, it actually has the appearance
Jackie of a fracture. It kind of radiates out, it
(22:37):
will be very jagged, and the gut itself will begin
to fill up with blood. And people will die very
very quickly as a result of this, because you know,
the liver has a tremendous amount of blood supply, so
you begin to clip those little vessels in there. If
you don't get treated, you'll essentially lose blood and you'll
die of internal bleeding. But let's think about if this
(23:00):
is a one off fall where she's got head injury,
she's got a liver injury, and she's got a pelvic injury. Well,
how would you sustain that in a single fall. Well,
the only thing I can really think about is that
if you are falling through the air, you're not tipped
toward the top of your head or to the soles
(23:23):
of your feet. You're essentially pancaking in at this moment time.
So one of two things, you will either essentially imagine
somebody doing a belly flop off of a diving board
and we know what kind of impact that creates. And
certainly the surface that Amy fell onto was not forgiving
that energy as a result of that impact would transfer
(23:43):
to these points of contact, you know, where she struck
the ground with her head and the hepatic region of
her abdomen and certainly her pelvic region, So it would
have to come about simultaneously. Some people say, well, could
she have landed on her back flat and had this happened? Yeah,
I supposed that she could have. But you know, the
way we're kind of designed with our spine is that
(24:06):
often equated to you know, when we curl up, you know,
we kind of almost take on a tortoise like appearance.
You know, our our spine creates this kind of shell
like position for us. It would be very difficult, I think,
to generate that kind of injury to the liver. My
money would either be she would strike facedown or perhaps
on her right side, so that you've got involvement with
(24:29):
the pelvis, the hepatic region, and of course the head
injury and all of these these specific areas. You know,
I talked about how vascular the liver is, and you've
got tons of tiny vessels in there that cause you
to bleed out into the gut. What do you have
in the pelvis? Oh, my gosh. Well, there's all kinds
of vessels in there, and the pelvis is an odd bone.
(24:50):
When you you break it, it's oddly shaved, it's an
irregular bone, and so it fractures in these odd kind
of ways. And there's a lot of vest in there,
and most obvious you have the femoral artery is rooted
up in there. It kind of passes through what you
call a frayman. A frameman is a ten dollar word
(25:11):
that physicians and anatomus to use for a hole in
the bone, and it passes through these areas through there,
and so the from for moral artery can be clipped,
and if that happens, that's deadly. And then not to
mention what's going on in the skull with a closed
head injury again very vascular region. You begin to bleed
(25:32):
out essentially see page is taking place, and blood will
kind of leach out into those soft tissues around the
brain within the brain, and the brain begins to swell
and the person eventually dies. So you take all of
those injuries that we have just enumerated the possibility of,
(25:53):
and then when you finally receive Amy's remains, to take
a look at them, they've got a devil a job
on their hands because they begin to look at this
extensive trauma that she sustained to her torso, but yet
you still have the neck hang on Joe. I got
another question about the liver. Is it likely or possible
(26:13):
that she was beaten and that is part of what
gave her these injuries to her liver, or is it
likely those injuries were just caused from the fall. That's
an excellent question in that you know, I talked about
blunt force trauma and car accidents a little while ago,
and I'd say, I know that there will be debate
(26:35):
about this if people hear this, but one of the
organs that's really impacted by blunt force trauma in cars
many times is the liver. It's so close to the
surface and again, if you find the bottom of your
rib cage on the right hand side, it's just tucked
right there. And it's essentially the largest organ in the body.
It's massive, and it's got a lot of surface area
(26:58):
and again a lot of vessels running passing through it.
When you have a traumatized liver, the surgeons that can
get to the liver that begin to repair it have
got a devil of the time, because there are all
these little microfractures that you get in there, and you've
got these little beaty vessels that have been ruptured. Many
times the surgeons will go back and say, well, we're
(27:18):
still looking blood into the gut. We've got to figure
out what the origin of this is. I could do it,
it's about my pay grade. I'm not bright enough to
do that. So my hats off to trauma surgeons that
are able to do that to assess it. To your point, though,
I have seen people that have been kicked to death
in the abdomen, and that point of impact many times
has been the liver. It's an interesting proposition when you
(27:43):
begin to think about this that you've already got a
young lady that, according to the corner, has got trauma
to her neck. You begin to think, well, gee, you
know what, what other kind of trauma did she sustain?
Because there is an ear witness to this event that
actually heard what they described as bodies not singular but
(28:07):
bodise falling to the ground. There's a struggle going on,
and it's within earshot of a roommate, and they've heard this,
and you begin to think, okay, well, you're saying there's
a struggle. Uh, there's apparently an associated scream that apparently
emanated from amy. Well what else going on here? You
(28:29):
know how many? How many layers are we gonna have
to peel back here to try to understand. Many times, though,
when you see abdominal trauma, the abdomen is not necessarily
gonna be opened up. It's not like a gunshot one
where you've got an open wound, but overlying the hepatic region,
you know that area that I talked about, this arrival
(28:51):
of the right rib cage at the base. Many times
you'll see an overlying contusion. Okay, you'll see an area
that is read and irritated, are possibly even bruised. And
you can track this when we open at autopsy and
reflect back that tissue that's overlying the liver, you'll see
(29:12):
on the back side of the wall of the abdomen
there will be a big area of hemorrhage right there
overlying that area. And then of course it will be
lying right on top of the liver that's been traumatized.
And there's a term that we use for this when
the liver is like are even the spling to you
hear this a lot. Is a term called maceration, and
(29:33):
it just it's a fancy term for saying that the
organ has been beaten to bits. It's been almost pulpified.
You know. I don't know that that's necessarily the case
in Amy's case, but she apparently sustained significant abdominal trauma.
We know that. The trick here, though, I think for
the pathologist is going to be able to delineate the
order at which this occurred and when it occurred, because
(29:55):
that this person is going to be asked these questions
if this case goes to trial, they will be asked,
what order, doctor, did these injuries take place in? You know,
you're saying you've got trauma to the neck. It looks
like there's a strangulation that's going on. Are you sure
that this happened before she went over the balcony? Or
did going over the balcony cause this injury? Or was
(30:17):
this something that happened before she went over the balcony?
Keep going, Joe, how are they going to It's like
reading a mystery novel. Don't leave me in And how
are they going to know this? It's gonna be very
difficult to know it because you've got to traumatic events
that by their own admission the corner saying that happened
(30:38):
in a perimortem state, Okay, that it happened during the
throes of death. And that's what's gonna make this case
so difficult. I think for the Emmy to try to
describe the forensic pathologists that has to sit on the stand,
are they going to be able to say definitively? You know.
One of the things that we talked about with Nancy
he began to have forensic experts that come up on
(31:00):
the stand. You never talk in absolutes when you're understand
you say absolutely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, you
know this is what happened, because that's how you get
into big trouble. You have to make comments like within
a degree of scientific certainty. And so I don't know
that they will be able to say definitively that they
(31:22):
can give you the order in which these occurred unless
they're seeing something microscopically. You know. Again, I go back
to anti mortem injuries and the perimortem injuries. Remember, we've
got an ear witness to this. It's gonna be real key.
I think at least that when they have this ear
witness to this event, can they measure out the time?
(31:47):
What was the amount of time that we're talking about
in linear time? You know, from you know, this moment
time to the last sound that you heard? How long
did that take to happen? And then it based upon
that because you've got to bay slide. At that point, scientifically,
you go back to the pathologist and say, okay, doc,
are these injuries consistent with what you're seeing here, you know,
(32:08):
demonstrated on the autopsy table. And it's going to be
I think at least it's going to be a point
of contention if this thing comes to trial. Amy Harwick's
cause of death was listed as blunt force trauma. If
you have a fall like this, and I'm not talking
about being thrown, I'm just talking about a fall, would
(32:29):
it still be listed as blunt force trauma. There's the
old joke that people make about the fall is not
that's not what kills you. It's a sudden stop. And
this this is actually true. There's truth in in that
bit of morbid humor, and many times, particularly with motor
vehicle accidents, there's a kind of a way that in
medical legal death investigation. We frame these things are called
(32:51):
rapid deceleration injuries, and sometimes that's associated with things like
striking a fixed object as you're moving through space, you know,
like in a car. If you're not belted in a
car and you slam into a bridge abutment. Okay, well
the car stopped moving. Your body essentially stopped moving when
(33:12):
you struck the steering wheel or the windshield. But guess what,
your organs are still moving. People don't think about that.
For a middlesecond, your organs still moving in your body
and they get ripped to shreds as this weird event
that takes place. And I think that you can have
this kind of event occur with a fall as well.
The trick is being able to explain this in terms
(33:35):
that a layman will be able to understand it, particularly
in a chord, because that's where this really matters. How
do you frame this so that people understand that it
was in fact the fall that killed her as opposed
to this um manual stringulation event, because they're gonna be
questions that are going to arise relative to that. And
it seems like you've got all of the information here,
But sometimes in cases you get so it's such a
(33:58):
glut of information that it can be confused, and particularly
for the layman that occupied the jury box, you know,
they're going to have to be able to make a
decision based on this information that's coming to them from
the medical examiner. And investigators in cases involving someone like
(34:33):
Amy Harwick, she led a very interesting life and came
in contact with a lot of people that brought her
into the lens of the public. She was strikingly beautiful
and it was a sex therapist. And so when you
see her life coming to an end in such a
violent way, you begin to think about things, well, who
(34:56):
would be on your short list as far as suspects,
you know who when she come in contact with Is
there a history of somebody that's out there that's this
lurking about in her life, that's harassing her, that's making
her life pure health, that has left her in fear
or the restraining orders, And as investigators, that's one of
the first places you're going to go to because where
(35:17):
she died is not a place prone to this kind
of violence. It almost appears like she was targeted in
some way. Jackie Well, that is exactly what investigators suspect happen.
In fact, Joe Amy Harwick told family and friends at
one point, if anything ever happens to me, it's him,
(35:39):
and that him is an ex boyfriend. His name is
Gareth purse House. He has now been charged with murder
and residential burglary with special circumstances allegations of lying in wait,
and that comes from the fact that police believe that
he was waiting for Harwick for hours now. When police
(36:03):
were called, they were called by her downstairs roommate. He
tells police that he woke up and heard something. I'm
not really sure what he heard. He just assumed that
it was Hardwick coming home from her evening out. Then,
he says, he goes back to sleep and then is
woken up by a woman's screams and he was able
(36:27):
to tell that the screams were coming from above him
and that it was Amy. He tried to find his
phone but couldn't so he couldn't call the police. He
tried to get upstairs and couldn't, and he ended up
having to climb a fence to get to a neighbor
to be able to get her some help. And when
the police came, that's when they found her Amy Hardwick,
(36:47):
on the ground after being tossed from her balcony. Now
in the apartment, there were several things that were found.
She had a rosary and it was broke, and the
beads were scattered in multiple rooms of her apartment, which
tells us that this assault happened basically all over the apartment.
(37:10):
And then there was another very potent piece of evidence
that was found, and that was a syringe full of nicotine.
How do you get a syringeful of nicotine when we
know that harrowit did not do drugs, did not smoke.
(37:31):
This obviously was not hers, but brought allegedly, police say,
by purse house. Yeah, you know a few years ago
we would have been scratching our head a lot more
over this. You know, the presence of this nicotine filled
syringe is what the police have kind of identified this as.
But nowadays, where you have people that are vaping, they're
(37:51):
vaping liquids, and you know nicotine is a component, it's
not that difficult to get. The question is how is
it acquired from where was it acquired and how was
it drawn up? Because they specifically say syringe, which means
that more than likely that there is a needle that's
associated with this. And one of the things it's quite
(38:12):
fascinating with this is that the syringe was actually located
out on the balcony. You know the balcony that we've
mentioned now several times that she went over the side on.
Why would it be there was the perpetrator attempting to
administer this to her, and Jackie you've mentioned the broken
(38:34):
rosary beads. The beads lead from what are being called
her TV room, through her bedroom and again out onto
the balcony. So you've almost got this trail of bread crumbs,
if you will, evidentially bread crumbs that are giving you
an indication of what may have happened. But let's get
back to that nicotine syringe. Of your purpose to use
(38:54):
nicotine in order to do harm to an individual, I
think that rule you're gonna need an injection of about
sixty milligrams for an adult that you know might wagh
about twenty pounds. And you know what kind of effect, Well,
first off, it's with a concentration of nicotine. It's gonna
blow your your blood pressure up through through the roof
(39:17):
and it will cause you to have a cardiac potentially
a cardiac event. You know, it's kind of certainly into
my way of thinking, is certainly kind of an interesting
way of going about taking somebody's life. Nicotine is something
that we do, in fact screen for. It's in a
standard panel. You hear a lot, you know how many
times if we talked about on Nancy Show, where they'll say, well,
(39:37):
it's pending toxicology. Well, nicotine is one of the things
that some office is actually screened for in their standard panel.
And you say, why do you need to know nicotine, Well,
it gets to the lifestyle of the individual. What are
they engaged in, you know, what are they taking into
their body? And Amy had no history of cigarette use,
didn't have any history of vaping. She was not druggie
(40:00):
news drugs. And she's also teetotaler as well. I don't
know if that's been mentioned, but she didn't imbobe with alcohol,
so apparently she led a pretty clean lifestyle was relative
to what she was going to be putting into her body.
To that point, the corner has not indicated at all
that there was any nicotine found in her post examination,
(40:21):
certainly in her toxicology, but it does go to a
bigger issue here. That means for me at least that
whoever this perpetrator is, they should have prepared. They showed
up to do harm. And if you're aiming to do
harm and you want to use nicotine, which I'm not
(40:42):
going to say it's something it's an exotic toxin. You know,
some exotic fish that you've drawn you know, some kind
of toxic uh substance from to inject somebody where it's
not exotic like that, but it's a typical. That indicates
to me that you've done some study, you thought about this,
that you've kind of planned this out. Well, hang on,
(41:04):
you wouldn't if you brought a syringe with you filled
with nicotine. You're not intending to use that to get
high or experience some kind of euphoria. That's not what
that would do to your body, right lord? No, No,
with lethal concentration of nicotine is deadly. I mean it's
(41:25):
it's deadly. I don't know for whatever purpose you would
use liquified nicotine for drawn up in a syringe. Now, obviously,
you know we've talked about vaping where people want that
boost of nicotine. Because of nicotine, one of the addictive
factors in is it kind of gives you that euphoric
feeling when you take it on in your system, but
that's in smaller dosages. When you're talking to a bump
(41:47):
of something like sixty milligrams, And again they haven't really
released how how much was found. But when you start
to talk about, you know, an injection of that amount
of bollus that size, I think it would give a
reasonable person pause to think, why in the world would
the syringe be in Amy's home. She doesn't have a
(42:07):
nicotine habit. It's not like I don't think she's juicing
up her her non existent vapes that she doesn't possess.
So how did it miraculously appear there? And that's a
huge question. Well, when you begin to think about pure nicotine,
the only thing I can think of is that you're
either trying to incapacitate them some way to the point
(42:28):
where they can't fend you off, which would be an
odd selection, I would think, or you're trying to kill them.
We know that Amy Harwick and Gareth purse House dated
for quite some time. We also know that when they
broke up, he began to stalk her. He began to
(42:50):
harass her. Reviews of her business and her practice began
showing up online very detrimental, and she was worried about that.
And again I mentioned earlier she had told people, She
had told friends and family that if something happened to her,
(43:11):
it was him. And in fact, investigators saw that Mr
Pearce House had similar scratches and bruises on him, and
his DNA was found at Amy Hardwick's home. Now, of
course they had been dating for quite some time. Still,
how long it had been since he had been at
(43:34):
the home, So how is that going to play in? Joe?
I think that it would like to say down south,
that dog won't hunt, I think is what that comes
down to, because you know there's been separation. My god,
she she had restraining war on this guy. I'm not
saying that there could not be residual DNA in her dwelling,
But if you've got kind of a robust deposits of
(43:55):
his DNA in that environment, and he's got a restraining
order and she is stating unequivocally that she's afraid of him,
you know, how did it wind up in the apartment
You talked about how they had charged him with this
idea of laying in weight. If he's laying in weight
at that moment in time, has he been visiting her
(44:16):
at other times? You know, to are there depositions there
within that apartment of his DNA that would give an
investigator pause to think, well, maybe he's been in this
dwelling when she's not here, kind of wandering around if
you will. But yeah, I think that that would be
(44:36):
very difficult because that relationship has been ended for some
time and there was a lot of violent acting out
with this. I think that there's even a couple of
accounts where he may have pushed drive a vehicle and
all these other things and menacing and threatening and you know,
all that sort of stalking behavior that goes on many
(44:56):
times with these kinds of cases. So from me, I
think that that would be very very difficult to try
to say, well, yeah, his his DNA. I mean, you
can say it, you know, but that doesn't mean that,
you know, you're going to get a jury to buy
into that line of logic. Gareth purce House has been
charged with murder and first degree residential burglary. Additionally, he
(45:19):
has been charged with special circumstances allegation of lying in Wait.
A judge has ruled that this case can go forward again.
This case has not been adjudicated. Purse House is innocent
until proven guilty by court of law. If he has
found guilty, however, of these charges, he could be sentenced
to life in prison without the possibility of parole. I'm
(45:46):
Joseph Scott Morgen and this is body Backs.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
Popular Podcasts
Boysober
Have you ever wondered what life might be like if you stopped worrying about being wanted, and focused on understanding what you actually want? That was the question Hope Woodard asked herself after a string of situationships inspired her to take a break from sex and dating. She went "boysober," a personal concept that sparked a global movement among women looking to prioritize themselves over men. Now, Hope is looking to expand the ways we explore our relationship to relationships. Taking a bold, unfiltered look into modern love, romance, and self-discovery, Boysober will dive into messy stories about dating, sex, love, friendship, and breaking generational patterns—all with humor, vulnerability, and a fresh perspective.
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com