October 5, 2023 • 27 mins
Connie Cuesta's life is violently cut short; her body is discovered with numerous lacerations, inflicted by the unlikely weapon of a wine bottle. The room shows signs of struggle; every organ in her body bears a mark, and multiple wine bottles are scattered across the scene. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack guide listeners through this bewildering episode of Body Bags, meticulously dissecting the elements that make this case so extraordinary. From the anatomy of a wine bottle's lethal potential to the significance of the victim's state of undress, the episode is a masterclass in forensic investigation. Listen in to uncover the intricate web of forensic details that could play a crucial role in the ensuing legal process.
Time-coded Highlights:
00:00:20 — Joseph Scott Morgan introduces the episode, hinting at a murder case involving a wine bottle as a weapon.
00:01:36 — The oddity of a wine bottle as a murder weapon is discussed.
00:02:39 —Joe Scott Morgan and Dave Mack delve into the impact of a head strike with an object, providing insight into the potential deadly force of the wine bottle.
00:03:00 — Dave Mack shares information about the murder case.
00:08:20 — Drawing a parallel between the design of a bottle and a baseball bat, Joe Scott indicates how they can be similarly weaponized. He then reveals that a woman's life ended due to an impact from a wine bottle.
00:10:20 — Joseph Scott Morgan describes the signs of a struggle at the crime scene. He emphasizes the importance of understanding those signs when investigating.
00:13:48 — Discussion of the role of the medical examiner in the investigation and the importance of the body’s temperature at the crime scene.
00:16:49 — Joe Scott and Dave discuss the victim's state of undress, considering whether it indicates a sexual assault or is a result of being dragged.
00:20:58 — Discussing the severity of the victim's injuries, Morgan notes that every organ in her body sustained a laceration.
00:25:11 — Detailing how a knife was driven into the victim's temporal bone four times, Morgan indicates the force required for such an act.
00:27:54 - Joseph Scott Morgan makes a crucial point about Sean Cuesta's current legal status, reminding listeners that he is still considered innocent as he has not yet been taken to trial.
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 Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan in Vino Veritas. In
wine there's truth. I don't necessarily know if there's truth,
but I think that consumption of a nice bottle of
(00:29):
wine may loosen you up to speak of things that
otherwise might not be said in any other circumstance. And
as a vessel, there are not too many other things
out there that function that are quite as exquisite as
a nice wine bottle. And there's all kinds now that
are out there in different colors and shapes. Certainly they
(00:52):
all retain kind of a basic they're on basic anatomy.
But today I want to talk about a case that
you're not gonna believe, where a wine bottle actually is
used as a weapon to take the life of an
elderly woman. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body
(01:12):
Bags talk about the Grapes of Wrath, Dave. This case
that we've got today is I'm really not trying to
be funny, but it is quite striking. It's something that
I haven't come across. I've worked a number of bludgeonings
over the course of my career with heavy objects and
this sort of thing, but you generally don't think of
(01:34):
a wine bottle as being resilient enough to impact someone
to bring about a death. And it's not just a
single blow, and it is not just a single injury,
it is multiple injuries. In today's case.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
I wanted to add one more thing too, Joe. The
idea is that the wine bottles are empty. I don't
know if that means anything to you, but it makes
a difference to me because I thought if you were
hitting somebody with a bottle, if it had something in it,
it would be more deadly than it would be if
it was empty. It seems like it would be more
app to crack and be useless if it was empty,
(02:12):
just a shattered glass. But that's the TV and movie
person watching that the breakaway glass. In real life glass
doesn't break away and go on to people. It's kind
of if you've ever been hit in the head in
a fight, you don't get up and take three more.
If you get a good hit to the face, I'm
telling you the fight's pretty much over.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Particularly with a head strike and with an object in particular,
it'll take you to your knees. I mean, you might
get back up, but you're not going to be the
same person as when you went down, or at least
for that moment. Tom.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Now, in this particular case, we have a thirty six
year old man, Sean Questa, and we have his sixty
four year old mother, Connie Questa, And according to a neighbor,
there had been arguments and loud arguments in the past,
so much so that a couple of weeks prior to
the mom we're talking about, this same neighbor went next
(03:02):
door and actually stopped the two of them from arguing.
So it hadn't gotten violent yet, but it had gotten
loud enough and enough noises being made that the neighbor
was worried. But when it got really bad this time
Sean Questa, the thirty six year old son of Connie Questa.
According to police and according to the neighbor, there was
at first a verbal argument. That verbal argument became physical
(03:25):
and at first it was throwing objects. There are several
different objects that were apparently thrown. It was when they
got they Obviously it's a fight, it's not just one sided.
It's not just the son throwing things at the mother
who's dodging them. She actually was fighting back. She had to.
When the son got to the wine bottles. That's when
(03:46):
he decided this is the weapon. According to a neighbor,
it sounded like they were tearing the building down by
the time the neighbor got there. And you and I
were talking about this before, because there's been some mention
of Connie Questa's spouse naming him, and I don't know
why that is, but they've named the son who's been arrested,
but they haven't named the spouse. They call him the spouse. Anyway.
(04:07):
When he got he wasn't home when all this is
going on. A neighbor told him, hey, man, this is
it's bad. That's when they went in and found Connie
Questa on the floor in the master bedroom. When they
found her shirt was off and her panties were down
to her knees, and the police found blood in the
living room, substantial blood in the living room, and of
(04:28):
course in the master bedroom where they found her body
faced down.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
A lot of dynamics here. Let's go back to the
bottles real quick, because this is significant when you're talking
about kind of this impassioned and you see it a
lot with familial cases. People are always terrified of stranger
on stranger crime that's not what terrifies me. And it
is scary. You know, if you're walking down a darkened street,
you come across an alley, the hair on the back
(04:53):
of your neck stands up. You don't know what's down
the alley. Who's down the alley in more danger with
the people that are in your inn circle than you
ever will be out on the street in most cases.
And when you're talking about an intimate environment, When something
as odd as a wine bottle is retrieved and is
used as a weapon in investigations, that's something that we
(05:15):
call a weapon of opportunity.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
We know the arguing started early in the day, around
ten am, and continued all day long, enough so that
the neighbor was bothered by it. And when the victim's
spouse came home, the neighbor went out and got him
and said, there's something bad that's been going on all
day now. According to police, the investigation reveals that apparently
Sean Questa was throwing stuff at Connie, first his stepmother
(05:40):
or mother, and then started beating her in the head
with the wine bottles. I'm going to use plural because
I gotta assume a bottle is going to break Joe,
the head is not soft tissue, is it. Have you
ever dealt with this, Joe, a wine bottle?
Speaker 1 (05:52):
I have had No. I have not had a wine bottle.
I have had a whiskey bottle, several whiskey bottles, one
in particular, where it was in fact broken and the
remainder of the bottle was used to cut with and
that was a very brutal case. But where you're talking
about someone utilizing a wine bottle, which I have to say,
(06:13):
you were talking about kind of the robust nature of glass.
It seems to me, at least wine bottles tend to
be again, and I know that it's going to be
heavily depended upon manufacturer, they tend to be a bit
more robust than say a standard whiskey bottle. For me,
they do. Now you can have decorative whiskey bottles that
(06:34):
sort of thing. I'm sure they are more robust, but
on the whole they are. All of these bottles have
a very specific anatomy. You have the mouth or the opening,
and then the neck, which is generally used if you're
going to use it as something that weaponize it. It's
going to be used as a handle to grip it with.
But as the neck descends down into the bottle itself,
it turns into what's referred to as the shoulders, and
(06:57):
then you have this kind of cylindrical area that makes
up what's referred to as the label field on these things.
As it curves down the base of it is called
the heel, and around the heel, if you'll notice there
are these little many times these little ridges. And when
we talk about pattern injuries, we talk about pattern injuries,
you can actually with something like this, particularly if it's
(07:18):
used on the long end, you can see a pattern.
And here's a little unknown factoid. The indented part at
the base of the bottle is actually referred to as
the punt punt, and it's the glass appears to be thicker.
I think that that probably in the manufacture of the
thing is that's probably where they close it off. More
than likely. So the bottle itself has a very unique
(07:42):
form to it, and it's certainly in wine circles it
has a very unique function to it. They talk about
things about like the poor and all these sorts of things.
These people that are wine of fishionados, not casting dispersions.
It's just it's all part and parcel of what they
do in this world when it's weaponized. If we look
at the design of a bottle like this, it's not
(08:05):
too dissimilar, I think in certain forms, as the form
of a baseball bat, how the tapering kind of increases.
It expands out as you move away from the handle,
so you can probably leverage it in the same manner
and deliver the same amount of injury. But I do
know this, Dave. In this particular case, a woman's life
(08:25):
ended because of an impact from a wine bottle when
(08:46):
ms Quester's husband found her. It's often hard for me,
even though I've seen so many of these cases, to
try to put myself into what we refer to in
depth investigation as the finder's position. On a little aside,
I still remember the first time I ever found a body.
I was never the finder. I was always the person
that would come out to the scene because someone else
(09:08):
was the finder. And I actually discovered a body in
a house subsequent to an ongoing investigation into another death.
And I entered a bedroom and found a guy wrapped
in a carpet that had been beaten to death with
a crowbar. And what a way to start off with
the first one you ever find is a guy that,
interestingly enough, was bludgeoned death. So it's really hard for
(09:29):
me to put myself in the position of the finder
to think about what they're experiencing in their mind. When
you walk into the home in which you've occupied with
your wife and your family all these years, and you
look around and you know that there's a lot of
destruction in here. We're talking about a fight. And the
reason I know this is that police have said that
(09:49):
you've got blood that is essentially in the living room,
and we know her body was found in the master bedroom,
so you've got a fight that initiated somewhere and continued on.
That's one of the reasons when you hear us AWK
on television in particular, and reporters talk to people like
me or police officers, they'll say, well, was there any
sign of a struggle? Our standard format is, well, there
(10:09):
was no signs of forced entrance struggle, And it's almost
boiler plate. We say that all the time. It either
is or it isn't. In this particular case, there was
a sign of a struggle here.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Day right, and oddly enough, we have a backup just
a little bit to the neighbor, the neighbor who he's
feeling a lot of guilt. I saw an interview that
he did, and because he's the neighbor who actually broke
up an argument between the mother and the son weeks
before this happened, and was aware there was an ongoing
stressor here the sons that he had lived with the
mom on and off of the last several years. Now
(10:40):
in this particular case, the neighbor told police that they
heard arguing and noises all throughout the day, starting here
about ten o'clock that morning until early in the evening.
By the time police were there, it was nine o'clock
at night. So you've got a fight that began an
argument at ten am roughly and continued all the way
and kept escalating to the point where we know it
(11:02):
went from verbal to physical where the wine bottles came
into play, and we know that it was actually finished off.
The day was not finished off with a wine bottle.
It was finished off with something else. But before we
get to that, according to the neighbor, they hard arguments
from ten o'clock in the morning. They heard loud banging
and yelling coming from the apartment. When the victims spouse
arrived at the scene, the concerned neighbor informed him about
(11:26):
the commotion. The commotion had been going on for some
time and immediately called nine to one one. Then now
that spouse then goes into the apartment where he finds
his wife on the floor of the master bedroom, face
down and she's cold to the touch. Then called nine
one one, sends the fireman, paramedics, whoever else shows up,
(11:46):
and they declared her debt on the scene. Is that
a situation where the coroner somebody in your position would
then come out to the scene because you do have
a death scene here. They're not taking her to the
hospital to see if they can save her life. They've tried,
know she's gone, and that way you can get a
look at the whole scene to try to figure out
where these injuries came from.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah, it is in most jurisdictions. Here's a little unknown
fact that people might not be aware of the corner
where you still have corner systems in place. Florida is
not one of those states. They have district medical examiners
down there well, and even in city in Miami Day
they have their own medical examiner. But where you have
a corner do you know that if there is a
body on the scene, the corner is actually in charge
(12:27):
of the scene until that body leaves.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Yeah, the presence of a body trumps everything else that's
going on. Now, look, you can take that kind of
power and you can be a real jerk about it.
That's not good. You need to play nice with everybody.
And generally the corner will acquiesce and say, yeah, you guys,
do what you need to do, but let me know
what you're going to do, because I have to still
take this body back and have it examined, and I
(12:51):
need it. I need all of the context of the
body there.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Now that makes sense. That's the whole thing about to
whom much is given, much is required. And yeah, you've
got all this power, but you better darnwell know exactly
what happened.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
Yeah, precisely, And so you have to have kind of
an understanding of that. You have to sit back and
just kind of understand how the rattling hum of a
scene goes. But in this case, the corner or the
medical examiner down there, it would have been an emmy
investigator more than likely that had shown up at the scene.
Here's something else I know, and this is quite critical
(13:23):
when her body was observed at the scene. One of
the key things that stood out to me about this
case is the fact that they stated her body was
cold to the touch. And when somebody says the body
is cold to the touch, first off, that's not vernacular
that the public generally uses. Again, that goes back to
boiler plate. When we in the medical legal field make
(13:44):
an assessment of the body, we're not going to give
an actual body temperature. We'll say the body is cold
or cool to the touch, and it's just something that
it sounds like that. Whoever wrote that for the news
media got that information from the police more than likely
and that was the origin of that. And so you
would have to work the scene by bit. And because
there's so much what I would think, at least what
(14:06):
I would refer to as particulate evidence here, we've probably
understated this. This isn't just one wine bottle. There were
multiple wine bottles that were found at the scene and utilized.
And I'm with you, Dave. When I hear about an
empty wine bottle, I'm thinking, well, why would you have
empty wine bottles? Well, let's consider the probability here because
(14:26):
this plays into the investigation. Had there been a big party,
you had mentioned a critical piece of information. This fight
had been going on for some time well, where the
parties involved drinking with one another, because as you know,
and I know, liquor many times as devil's fuel, and
so the more you consume, the more dicey things can get.
(14:46):
And then it comes to this horrible crescendo at the
end of the day. Or did somebody like to collect
wine bottles? And some of these wine bottles look like art.
You see lights made out of them, all kinds of stuff,
and they have beautiful labels. And I've got friends that
collect wine bottles. Do they just have a collection of
wand bottles? Because to the eye aesthetically they're pleasing. So
you think about all of these things. And when the
(15:09):
sun is looking for something to utilize as a weapon,
this is the first thing he's seen after he's allegedly
being assaulted. In all of this, they're throwing something. That's
the whole point is it went from a verbal altercation.
The verbal was loud enough that neighbors heard it. The
neighbors heard the arguing at ten in the morning. Then
(15:29):
it escalated to the throwing of things, and that's where
I wonder if there were other things thrown first, and
if it was mom and son. Now, you and I
both have noted there have been a couple of reports
here saying that this was that Connie Questa is the stepmother.
It was reported that in the headline, Now, Joe, when
you have a victim who is found without a shirt
(15:52):
and with panties pulled down to her knees, does that
immediately tell you there was a sexual assault? Or do
you look at it as maybe she was down in
the living room and the suspect drug her into the
master bedroom and in the process of dragging her the
shirt pulled up and the panties pulled down. That is
(16:14):
a possibility. But from an investigative perspective, I'm treating this
like a sexual assault anytime I see a female while
male for that matter, with their pants down around their
knees and their genitalia is exposed, and with women in
particular where a shirt is pulled up and their breasts
are exposed. Look, if I don't treat this as a
sexual assault, I'm falling down the job as an investigator
(16:35):
because I'm going to lose fragile evidence. If I have
like seminal deposition on a body and I just go
ahead and just kind of treat the body carelessly when
I'm moving it and all those sorts of things, there's
a probability that I can lose evidence. Also, if it's
a sexual assault, there could be very intimate transfer to
that's going on here with touch DNA from the perpetrator
(16:56):
onto the victim's body. And conversely, in addition to that,
you can have hair transfer. And think about this, what
kind of surface was she found on? What she found
on a carpeted surface. Let's say that she's got carpet
fibers on the front the anterior aspect of her legs,
and then she's found in the bedroom and she's got
(17:16):
carpet fibers on the posterior surface of the legs. And
there's a different carpet in the living room than there
is in the Mastard bedroom. So you get an idea
maybe she's being assaulted all over the place. Maybe it's
an ongoing thing. We're talking about hours that ellapse here day,
so you've got a big gap in information here and
you're kind of trying to understand what the body is
(17:38):
going to reveal to you in this period of time.
When they did finally track him down, they found this knife.
That weapon in particular, will tell a tale. At the
end of the day, when you examine that knife in
the crime lab, you will find all that remains of
this poor victim. So, come to find out this knife
(18:17):
which is eventually found on the alleged perpetrator's person in
his backpack, nonetheless, and it's going to be covered in
blood and I think to a certain degree probably bone.
Once this thing's taken back to the state crime lab,
you're in the circumstance. You know that you've just beaten
and stabbed in the skull. Nonetheless, these injuries were in
(18:37):
her temple, the knife wounds. What do you do? Where
do you go? Where does your mind go at this
point where you're going to say, Okay, I'm going to leave.
I've got my backpack and I'm taking it on the road.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
And before he did that, he tried to clean up.
He actually did try to clean up the bloody scene.
They actually said that he used a towel and a
green rag to try to clean up the scene and
then gave up through the right down at her next
to his mother, and he left with his backpack. And
this is before they recovered the knife or anything else.
He took off. Sean Questa took off and went to
(19:09):
his aunt's house in Hialiah. It was there that he
allegedly admitted I killed my mom and was acting really weird.
He was acting weird enough that the family, even though
they couldn't confirm what he was saying, they called police.
They were worried, so they called police. The police show
up and they did what they call a Baker Act.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
What's the Baker Act?
Speaker 2 (19:29):
It is, bottom line, a seventy two hour mental health hold.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Okay cycled, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
It's a cycle. And when they say the Baker acted him,
that means that they can hold him from up to
seventy two hours about any charges. And that's what they did,
and then they were able to find the knife in
the backpack and go back to the crimesne and figure
everything out.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
I came across something in this case that I don't
know that I have ever heard the police or medical
examiner state before. Now, I gotta tell you that's saying
something you never hear everything. But when I heard this
first off, I knew that this victim had not been
in a car accident. I knew that this was a
(20:07):
person on person attack. I knew that there were wine
bottles that were being used to strike her multiple times
blunt force trauma. But Dave, according to the reports this victim,
they said not some they said every Now I wasn't there.
I can't verify it, but they said that every organ
(20:28):
in this woman's body sustained a laceration. Now, we've talked
about lacerations, I think recently on an episode. The difference
between in sized wounds and lacerations. Here is a perfect example,
because you know, with lacerations, that's something that only arises
from blunt force trauma. And let's consider very briefly. Let's
just consider the organs that we're talking about. When you
(20:50):
say organs, now, and you say every organ, all internal organs,
So we're talking, we're probably are they saying the bowel,
the small bowel, and the large bowel, I don't know
they're saying, and all organs were lacerated. We do know
that we have a liver is the largest organ in
the body. And if you'll feel just beneath the base
of your right ribcage, it's right there. You slide on
(21:10):
over on the other side, and you've got your pancreas
and your spleen right down there. Spleens sustain And there's
a lot of people who have splenectomies over the year,
in years, and many times those arise from motivehicle accidents.
They're very fragile, and they sit on the left aspect
of the abdomen, the upper abdomen. I can understand that.
But then you have the pancreas that stems off of
the spleen. I'm thinking, was the pancreas also last ray,
(21:33):
you're saying all organs now, and yeah, I've seen lacerated pancreases,
but again, most of the time it comes from a
fall from a great height or comes from a motivehicle accent.
Then we go superior to the diaphragm. We've got both lungs.
Are we talking about both lungs are lacerated. Then we
go to the heart. Has the heart been last? You're
(21:55):
talking about all organs all right, all internal organs, And
then it brings us to the brain. I think that
we can probably explain the brain pretty easily, and yet
blunt force trauma will in fact a lacrate of brain.
It has to be pretty significant. Most of the time,
you're going to get evidence of what's called coup or
concert coup injuries, where you'll get these big hemorrhagic areas
(22:15):
where the brain kind of slashes back and forth. I'm
taking it at face value when they're saying all, I'm
including the brain in this as well. To have this
level of trauma on a body where every organ is
in fact impacted, it would take first off time. Then
you would have to have an instrument that is so
very resilient. You'd have to be able to put it
(22:37):
into the hands of someone that could wield it with
the appropriate amount of force or the needed force in
order to direct that energy at that specific organ system,
and you would in the case of utilizing a bottle,
you're going to have to have more than one.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Dave Well, you mentioned the other day when we were
talking about this, and I didn't know the laceration term
and blunt force trauma. That was all new to me.
And this actually says I'm reading the report, it says
the victim died of internal bleeding resulting from all internal
organs being lacerated from blunt force trauma. Now, if the
victim had one lump force injury that caused an internal
(23:15):
organ to be lacerated, wouldn't that pretty much debilitate a
sixty four year old woman just one?
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Yeah, any one of those organs would be sufficient to
bring about death. And here's another thing. We go back
to what we had said in an earlier segment where
her body was cold to the touch. I really have
to think here that when they're doing the examination on her,
how many of these lacerations took place anti mortem and
how many took place post mortem. You've got two things
(23:43):
that are going on here if this was in fact
a sexual assault. Because when you have a body demonstrated
with no shirt on, pants pulled down, for any investigator
worth their salt out there, they're going to that's the
first thing they're going to think of, that this is
some kind of sexually motivated assault that has occurred, and
is that something that took place post mortem? And then
(24:05):
on top of that, you begin to think about a knife. Now,
this knife was not driven once, not twice, not three times,
but four times into her temporal bone, actually the left
temple bone. So if you take your left hand and
put it up just posterior to your left eye. That's
going to be your temporal bone, and it's one of
(24:25):
the thinner bones of the skull. It's not impossible to
have a knife driven through there. And as a matter
of fact, even though it is, and we've talked about
sharp force injury versus blunt force depended upon the knife
that was utilized in this case, and it's passing through bone.
You could make an argument that if he buries the
scene down to the hilt of the knife or the
(24:46):
hilt guard, or if it's like a flip knife, like
a buck style knife, to the body of the knife,
that the body of the knife or the hilt and
the hand protector can actually work as a blunt instrument,
so you can get underlining fracturing there. But either way,
you would be looking for hemorrhage in that area, and
if it's absent hemorrhage day, this means that this was
done post mortem. So they've got so many injuries to
(25:10):
kind of analyze and assess throughout this saying they're trying
to determine order and orders. You can't determine actual order
like ABCD like that. The order I'm talking about is
post mortem versus anti mortem and our perry mortem, which
means in the throes of death. It's kind of that
middle milky ground. So that's the order that you're looking
(25:30):
at here. And then they're going to have to and
I can tell you for a fact that they will
have done a rape kit on this lady as well.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
We haven't heard anything about that, but we are just
now hearing all of the details. But Joe to stab
somebody in the temple with a knife four times, what
are we talking about? In terms of force? You have
to be closed up. The other ones. You could be
a little bit far away. I mean, you can strike
somebody with the bottle at arm's length, but I'm thinking
to actually put a knife into the temple of somebody
(25:57):
you love.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Yeah, it's very personal. And again you're you know, you're
getting into that area where a person's identity is tied
up in their appearance and it goes to a tremendous
amount of anger. I'm fascinated by the fact that the
father was not present in the house when this had occurred.
And also in order to shore the head up to
(26:18):
the point where you could drive a knife through it,
you would literally have to be on top of this
person in order to do it with let me get
my orientation right here with the head or the face,
if you imagine the face turned to the right, so
that the underside or the right cheek is actually shored
what they call shoring against the surface, the harder surface
underlying that, so that you can you can position yourself
(26:41):
over the body, and you're driving this knife down into
the temple multiple tips, not just one time, but over
and over and over and over again until you're done. Now,
obviously that in and of itself would have been enough
to have killed somebody. It sounds like there's a lot
I have to at least propose the thought that there
(27:02):
was a lot of anger that was being taken out
on this woman's body, perhaps in a post mortem state.
But I also think that it's important that we remember
that to this date, Sean Questa is innocent. He has
not been taken to trial, but he has been charged
with second degree homicide. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this
(27:26):
is bodybags
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan in Vino Veritas. In
wine there's truth. I don't necessarily know if there's truth,
but I think that consumption of a nice bottle of
(00:29):
wine may loosen you up to speak of things that
otherwise might not be said in any other circumstance. And
as a vessel, there are not too many other things
out there that function that are quite as exquisite as
a nice wine bottle. And there's all kinds now that
are out there in different colors and shapes. Certainly they
(00:52):
all retain kind of a basic they're on basic anatomy.
But today I want to talk about a case that
you're not gonna believe, where a wine bottle actually is
used as a weapon to take the life of an
elderly woman. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body
(01:12):
Bags talk about the Grapes of Wrath, Dave. This case
that we've got today is I'm really not trying to
be funny, but it is quite striking. It's something that
I haven't come across. I've worked a number of bludgeonings
over the course of my career with heavy objects and
this sort of thing, but you generally don't think of
(01:34):
a wine bottle as being resilient enough to impact someone
to bring about a death. And it's not just a
single blow, and it is not just a single injury,
it is multiple injuries. In today's case.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
I wanted to add one more thing too, Joe. The
idea is that the wine bottles are empty. I don't
know if that means anything to you, but it makes
a difference to me because I thought if you were
hitting somebody with a bottle, if it had something in it,
it would be more deadly than it would be if
it was empty. It seems like it would be more
app to crack and be useless if it was empty,
(02:12):
just a shattered glass. But that's the TV and movie
person watching that the breakaway glass. In real life glass
doesn't break away and go on to people. It's kind
of if you've ever been hit in the head in
a fight, you don't get up and take three more.
If you get a good hit to the face, I'm
telling you the fight's pretty much over.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Particularly with a head strike and with an object in particular,
it'll take you to your knees. I mean, you might
get back up, but you're not going to be the
same person as when you went down, or at least
for that moment. Tom.
Speaker 2 (02:41):
Now, in this particular case, we have a thirty six
year old man, Sean Questa, and we have his sixty
four year old mother, Connie Questa, And according to a neighbor,
there had been arguments and loud arguments in the past,
so much so that a couple of weeks prior to
the mom we're talking about, this same neighbor went next
(03:02):
door and actually stopped the two of them from arguing.
So it hadn't gotten violent yet, but it had gotten
loud enough and enough noises being made that the neighbor
was worried. But when it got really bad this time
Sean Questa, the thirty six year old son of Connie Questa.
According to police and according to the neighbor, there was
at first a verbal argument. That verbal argument became physical
(03:25):
and at first it was throwing objects. There are several
different objects that were apparently thrown. It was when they
got they Obviously it's a fight, it's not just one sided.
It's not just the son throwing things at the mother
who's dodging them. She actually was fighting back. She had to.
When the son got to the wine bottles. That's when
(03:46):
he decided this is the weapon. According to a neighbor,
it sounded like they were tearing the building down by
the time the neighbor got there. And you and I
were talking about this before, because there's been some mention
of Connie Questa's spouse naming him, and I don't know
why that is, but they've named the son who's been arrested,
but they haven't named the spouse. They call him the spouse. Anyway.
(04:07):
When he got he wasn't home when all this is
going on. A neighbor told him, hey, man, this is
it's bad. That's when they went in and found Connie
Questa on the floor in the master bedroom. When they
found her shirt was off and her panties were down
to her knees, and the police found blood in the
living room, substantial blood in the living room, and of
(04:28):
course in the master bedroom where they found her body
faced down.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
A lot of dynamics here. Let's go back to the
bottles real quick, because this is significant when you're talking
about kind of this impassioned and you see it a
lot with familial cases. People are always terrified of stranger
on stranger crime that's not what terrifies me. And it
is scary. You know, if you're walking down a darkened street,
you come across an alley, the hair on the back
(04:53):
of your neck stands up. You don't know what's down
the alley. Who's down the alley in more danger with
the people that are in your inn circle than you
ever will be out on the street in most cases.
And when you're talking about an intimate environment, When something
as odd as a wine bottle is retrieved and is
used as a weapon in investigations, that's something that we
(05:15):
call a weapon of opportunity.
Speaker 2 (05:17):
We know the arguing started early in the day, around
ten am, and continued all day long, enough so that
the neighbor was bothered by it. And when the victim's
spouse came home, the neighbor went out and got him
and said, there's something bad that's been going on all
day now. According to police, the investigation reveals that apparently
Sean Questa was throwing stuff at Connie, first his stepmother
(05:40):
or mother, and then started beating her in the head
with the wine bottles. I'm going to use plural because
I gotta assume a bottle is going to break Joe,
the head is not soft tissue, is it. Have you
ever dealt with this, Joe, a wine bottle?
Speaker 1 (05:52):
I have had No. I have not had a wine bottle.
I have had a whiskey bottle, several whiskey bottles, one
in particular, where it was in fact broken and the
remainder of the bottle was used to cut with and
that was a very brutal case. But where you're talking
about someone utilizing a wine bottle, which I have to say,
(06:13):
you were talking about kind of the robust nature of glass.
It seems to me, at least wine bottles tend to
be again, and I know that it's going to be
heavily depended upon manufacturer, they tend to be a bit
more robust than say a standard whiskey bottle. For me,
they do. Now you can have decorative whiskey bottles that
(06:34):
sort of thing. I'm sure they are more robust, but
on the whole they are. All of these bottles have
a very specific anatomy. You have the mouth or the opening,
and then the neck, which is generally used if you're
going to use it as something that weaponize it. It's
going to be used as a handle to grip it with.
But as the neck descends down into the bottle itself,
it turns into what's referred to as the shoulders, and
(06:57):
then you have this kind of cylindrical area that makes
up what's referred to as the label field on these things.
As it curves down the base of it is called
the heel, and around the heel, if you'll notice there
are these little many times these little ridges. And when
we talk about pattern injuries, we talk about pattern injuries,
you can actually with something like this, particularly if it's
(07:18):
used on the long end, you can see a pattern.
And here's a little unknown factoid. The indented part at
the base of the bottle is actually referred to as
the punt punt, and it's the glass appears to be thicker.
I think that that probably in the manufacture of the
thing is that's probably where they close it off. More
than likely. So the bottle itself has a very unique
(07:42):
form to it, and it's certainly in wine circles it
has a very unique function to it. They talk about
things about like the poor and all these sorts of things.
These people that are wine of fishionados, not casting dispersions.
It's just it's all part and parcel of what they
do in this world when it's weaponized. If we look
at the design of a bottle like this, it's not
(08:05):
too dissimilar, I think in certain forms, as the form
of a baseball bat, how the tapering kind of increases.
It expands out as you move away from the handle,
so you can probably leverage it in the same manner
and deliver the same amount of injury. But I do
know this, Dave. In this particular case, a woman's life
(08:25):
ended because of an impact from a wine bottle when
(08:46):
ms Quester's husband found her. It's often hard for me,
even though I've seen so many of these cases, to
try to put myself into what we refer to in
depth investigation as the finder's position. On a little aside,
I still remember the first time I ever found a body.
I was never the finder. I was always the person
that would come out to the scene because someone else
(09:08):
was the finder. And I actually discovered a body in
a house subsequent to an ongoing investigation into another death.
And I entered a bedroom and found a guy wrapped
in a carpet that had been beaten to death with
a crowbar. And what a way to start off with
the first one you ever find is a guy that,
interestingly enough, was bludgeoned death. So it's really hard for
(09:29):
me to put myself in the position of the finder
to think about what they're experiencing in their mind. When
you walk into the home in which you've occupied with
your wife and your family all these years, and you
look around and you know that there's a lot of
destruction in here. We're talking about a fight. And the
reason I know this is that police have said that
(09:49):
you've got blood that is essentially in the living room,
and we know her body was found in the master bedroom,
so you've got a fight that initiated somewhere and continued on.
That's one of the reasons when you hear us AWK
on television in particular, and reporters talk to people like
me or police officers, they'll say, well, was there any
sign of a struggle? Our standard format is, well, there
(10:09):
was no signs of forced entrance struggle, And it's almost
boiler plate. We say that all the time. It either
is or it isn't. In this particular case, there was
a sign of a struggle here.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Day right, and oddly enough, we have a backup just
a little bit to the neighbor, the neighbor who he's
feeling a lot of guilt. I saw an interview that
he did, and because he's the neighbor who actually broke
up an argument between the mother and the son weeks
before this happened, and was aware there was an ongoing
stressor here the sons that he had lived with the
mom on and off of the last several years. Now
(10:40):
in this particular case, the neighbor told police that they
heard arguing and noises all throughout the day, starting here
about ten o'clock that morning until early in the evening.
By the time police were there, it was nine o'clock
at night. So you've got a fight that began an
argument at ten am roughly and continued all the way
and kept escalating to the point where we know it
(11:02):
went from verbal to physical where the wine bottles came
into play, and we know that it was actually finished off.
The day was not finished off with a wine bottle.
It was finished off with something else. But before we
get to that, according to the neighbor, they hard arguments
from ten o'clock in the morning. They heard loud banging
and yelling coming from the apartment. When the victims spouse
arrived at the scene, the concerned neighbor informed him about
(11:26):
the commotion. The commotion had been going on for some
time and immediately called nine to one one. Then now
that spouse then goes into the apartment where he finds
his wife on the floor of the master bedroom, face
down and she's cold to the touch. Then called nine
one one, sends the fireman, paramedics, whoever else shows up,
(11:46):
and they declared her debt on the scene. Is that
a situation where the coroner somebody in your position would
then come out to the scene because you do have
a death scene here. They're not taking her to the
hospital to see if they can save her life. They've tried,
know she's gone, and that way you can get a
look at the whole scene to try to figure out
where these injuries came from.
Speaker 1 (12:06):
Yeah, it is in most jurisdictions. Here's a little unknown
fact that people might not be aware of the corner
where you still have corner systems in place. Florida is
not one of those states. They have district medical examiners
down there well, and even in city in Miami Day
they have their own medical examiner. But where you have
a corner do you know that if there is a
body on the scene, the corner is actually in charge
(12:27):
of the scene until that body leaves.
Speaker 2 (12:29):
Didn't know that.
Speaker 1 (12:30):
Yeah, the presence of a body trumps everything else that's
going on. Now, look, you can take that kind of
power and you can be a real jerk about it.
That's not good. You need to play nice with everybody.
And generally the corner will acquiesce and say, yeah, you guys,
do what you need to do, but let me know
what you're going to do, because I have to still
take this body back and have it examined, and I
(12:51):
need it. I need all of the context of the
body there.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Now that makes sense. That's the whole thing about to
whom much is given, much is required. And yeah, you've
got all this power, but you better darnwell know exactly
what happened.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
Yeah, precisely, And so you have to have kind of
an understanding of that. You have to sit back and
just kind of understand how the rattling hum of a
scene goes. But in this case, the corner or the
medical examiner down there, it would have been an emmy
investigator more than likely that had shown up at the scene.
Here's something else I know, and this is quite critical
(13:23):
when her body was observed at the scene. One of
the key things that stood out to me about this
case is the fact that they stated her body was
cold to the touch. And when somebody says the body
is cold to the touch, first off, that's not vernacular
that the public generally uses. Again, that goes back to
boiler plate. When we in the medical legal field make
(13:44):
an assessment of the body, we're not going to give
an actual body temperature. We'll say the body is cold
or cool to the touch, and it's just something that
it sounds like that. Whoever wrote that for the news
media got that information from the police more than likely
and that was the origin of that. And so you
would have to work the scene by bit. And because
there's so much what I would think, at least what
(14:06):
I would refer to as particulate evidence here, we've probably
understated this. This isn't just one wine bottle. There were
multiple wine bottles that were found at the scene and utilized.
And I'm with you, Dave. When I hear about an
empty wine bottle, I'm thinking, well, why would you have
empty wine bottles? Well, let's consider the probability here because
(14:26):
this plays into the investigation. Had there been a big party,
you had mentioned a critical piece of information. This fight
had been going on for some time well, where the
parties involved drinking with one another, because as you know,
and I know, liquor many times as devil's fuel, and
so the more you consume, the more dicey things can get.
(14:46):
And then it comes to this horrible crescendo at the
end of the day. Or did somebody like to collect
wine bottles? And some of these wine bottles look like art.
You see lights made out of them, all kinds of stuff,
and they have beautiful labels. And I've got friends that
collect wine bottles. Do they just have a collection of
wand bottles? Because to the eye aesthetically they're pleasing. So
you think about all of these things. And when the
(15:09):
sun is looking for something to utilize as a weapon,
this is the first thing he's seen after he's allegedly
being assaulted. In all of this, they're throwing something. That's
the whole point is it went from a verbal altercation.
The verbal was loud enough that neighbors heard it. The
neighbors heard the arguing at ten in the morning. Then
(15:29):
it escalated to the throwing of things, and that's where
I wonder if there were other things thrown first, and
if it was mom and son. Now, you and I
both have noted there have been a couple of reports
here saying that this was that Connie Questa is the stepmother.
It was reported that in the headline, Now, Joe, when
you have a victim who is found without a shirt
(15:52):
and with panties pulled down to her knees, does that
immediately tell you there was a sexual assault? Or do
you look at it as maybe she was down in
the living room and the suspect drug her into the
master bedroom and in the process of dragging her the
shirt pulled up and the panties pulled down. That is
(16:14):
a possibility. But from an investigative perspective, I'm treating this
like a sexual assault anytime I see a female while
male for that matter, with their pants down around their
knees and their genitalia is exposed, and with women in
particular where a shirt is pulled up and their breasts
are exposed. Look, if I don't treat this as a
sexual assault, I'm falling down the job as an investigator
(16:35):
because I'm going to lose fragile evidence. If I have
like seminal deposition on a body and I just go
ahead and just kind of treat the body carelessly when
I'm moving it and all those sorts of things, there's
a probability that I can lose evidence. Also, if it's
a sexual assault, there could be very intimate transfer to
that's going on here with touch DNA from the perpetrator
(16:56):
onto the victim's body. And conversely, in addition to that,
you can have hair transfer. And think about this, what
kind of surface was she found on? What she found
on a carpeted surface. Let's say that she's got carpet
fibers on the front the anterior aspect of her legs,
and then she's found in the bedroom and she's got
(17:16):
carpet fibers on the posterior surface of the legs. And
there's a different carpet in the living room than there
is in the Mastard bedroom. So you get an idea
maybe she's being assaulted all over the place. Maybe it's
an ongoing thing. We're talking about hours that ellapse here day,
so you've got a big gap in information here and
you're kind of trying to understand what the body is
(17:38):
going to reveal to you in this period of time.
When they did finally track him down, they found this knife.
That weapon in particular, will tell a tale. At the
end of the day, when you examine that knife in
the crime lab, you will find all that remains of
this poor victim. So, come to find out this knife
(18:17):
which is eventually found on the alleged perpetrator's person in
his backpack, nonetheless, and it's going to be covered in
blood and I think to a certain degree probably bone.
Once this thing's taken back to the state crime lab,
you're in the circumstance. You know that you've just beaten
and stabbed in the skull. Nonetheless, these injuries were in
(18:37):
her temple, the knife wounds. What do you do? Where
do you go? Where does your mind go at this
point where you're going to say, Okay, I'm going to leave.
I've got my backpack and I'm taking it on the road.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
And before he did that, he tried to clean up.
He actually did try to clean up the bloody scene.
They actually said that he used a towel and a
green rag to try to clean up the scene and
then gave up through the right down at her next
to his mother, and he left with his backpack. And
this is before they recovered the knife or anything else.
He took off. Sean Questa took off and went to
(19:09):
his aunt's house in Hialiah. It was there that he
allegedly admitted I killed my mom and was acting really weird.
He was acting weird enough that the family, even though
they couldn't confirm what he was saying, they called police.
They were worried, so they called police. The police show
up and they did what they call a Baker Act.
Speaker 1 (19:28):
What's the Baker Act?
Speaker 2 (19:29):
It is, bottom line, a seventy two hour mental health hold.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
Okay cycled, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
It's a cycle. And when they say the Baker acted him,
that means that they can hold him from up to
seventy two hours about any charges. And that's what they did,
and then they were able to find the knife in
the backpack and go back to the crimesne and figure
everything out.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
I came across something in this case that I don't
know that I have ever heard the police or medical
examiner state before. Now, I gotta tell you that's saying
something you never hear everything. But when I heard this
first off, I knew that this victim had not been
in a car accident. I knew that this was a
(20:07):
person on person attack. I knew that there were wine
bottles that were being used to strike her multiple times
blunt force trauma. But Dave, according to the reports this victim,
they said not some they said every Now I wasn't there.
I can't verify it, but they said that every organ
(20:28):
in this woman's body sustained a laceration. Now, we've talked
about lacerations, I think recently on an episode. The difference
between in sized wounds and lacerations. Here is a perfect example,
because you know, with lacerations, that's something that only arises
from blunt force trauma. And let's consider very briefly. Let's
just consider the organs that we're talking about. When you
(20:50):
say organs, now, and you say every organ, all internal organs,
So we're talking, we're probably are they saying the bowel,
the small bowel, and the large bowel, I don't know
they're saying, and all organs were lacerated. We do know
that we have a liver is the largest organ in
the body. And if you'll feel just beneath the base
of your right ribcage, it's right there. You slide on
(21:10):
over on the other side, and you've got your pancreas
and your spleen right down there. Spleens sustain And there's
a lot of people who have splenectomies over the year,
in years, and many times those arise from motivehicle accidents.
They're very fragile, and they sit on the left aspect
of the abdomen, the upper abdomen. I can understand that.
But then you have the pancreas that stems off of
the spleen. I'm thinking, was the pancreas also last ray,
(21:33):
you're saying all organs now, and yeah, I've seen lacerated pancreases,
but again, most of the time it comes from a
fall from a great height or comes from a motivehicle accent.
Then we go superior to the diaphragm. We've got both lungs.
Are we talking about both lungs are lacerated. Then we
go to the heart. Has the heart been last? You're
(21:55):
talking about all organs all right, all internal organs, And
then it brings us to the brain. I think that
we can probably explain the brain pretty easily, and yet
blunt force trauma will in fact a lacrate of brain.
It has to be pretty significant. Most of the time,
you're going to get evidence of what's called coup or
concert coup injuries, where you'll get these big hemorrhagic areas
(22:15):
where the brain kind of slashes back and forth. I'm
taking it at face value when they're saying all, I'm
including the brain in this as well. To have this
level of trauma on a body where every organ is
in fact impacted, it would take first off time. Then
you would have to have an instrument that is so
very resilient. You'd have to be able to put it
(22:37):
into the hands of someone that could wield it with
the appropriate amount of force or the needed force in
order to direct that energy at that specific organ system,
and you would in the case of utilizing a bottle,
you're going to have to have more than one.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Dave Well, you mentioned the other day when we were
talking about this, and I didn't know the laceration term
and blunt force trauma. That was all new to me.
And this actually says I'm reading the report, it says
the victim died of internal bleeding resulting from all internal
organs being lacerated from blunt force trauma. Now, if the
victim had one lump force injury that caused an internal
(23:15):
organ to be lacerated, wouldn't that pretty much debilitate a
sixty four year old woman just one?
Speaker 1 (23:21):
Yeah, any one of those organs would be sufficient to
bring about death. And here's another thing. We go back
to what we had said in an earlier segment where
her body was cold to the touch. I really have
to think here that when they're doing the examination on her,
how many of these lacerations took place anti mortem and
how many took place post mortem. You've got two things
(23:43):
that are going on here if this was in fact
a sexual assault. Because when you have a body demonstrated
with no shirt on, pants pulled down, for any investigator
worth their salt out there, they're going to that's the
first thing they're going to think of, that this is
some kind of sexually motivated assault that has occurred, and
is that something that took place post mortem? And then
(24:05):
on top of that, you begin to think about a knife. Now,
this knife was not driven once, not twice, not three times,
but four times into her temporal bone, actually the left
temple bone. So if you take your left hand and
put it up just posterior to your left eye. That's
going to be your temporal bone, and it's one of
(24:25):
the thinner bones of the skull. It's not impossible to
have a knife driven through there. And as a matter
of fact, even though it is, and we've talked about
sharp force injury versus blunt force depended upon the knife
that was utilized in this case, and it's passing through bone.
You could make an argument that if he buries the
scene down to the hilt of the knife or the
(24:46):
hilt guard, or if it's like a flip knife, like
a buck style knife, to the body of the knife,
that the body of the knife or the hilt and
the hand protector can actually work as a blunt instrument,
so you can get underlining fracturing there. But either way,
you would be looking for hemorrhage in that area, and
if it's absent hemorrhage day, this means that this was
done post mortem. So they've got so many injuries to
(25:10):
kind of analyze and assess throughout this saying they're trying
to determine order and orders. You can't determine actual order
like ABCD like that. The order I'm talking about is
post mortem versus anti mortem and our perry mortem, which
means in the throes of death. It's kind of that
middle milky ground. So that's the order that you're looking
(25:30):
at here. And then they're going to have to and
I can tell you for a fact that they will
have done a rape kit on this lady as well.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
We haven't heard anything about that, but we are just
now hearing all of the details. But Joe to stab
somebody in the temple with a knife four times, what
are we talking about? In terms of force? You have
to be closed up. The other ones. You could be
a little bit far away. I mean, you can strike
somebody with the bottle at arm's length, but I'm thinking
to actually put a knife into the temple of somebody
(25:57):
you love.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
Yeah, it's very personal. And again you're you know, you're
getting into that area where a person's identity is tied
up in their appearance and it goes to a tremendous
amount of anger. I'm fascinated by the fact that the
father was not present in the house when this had occurred.
And also in order to shore the head up to
(26:18):
the point where you could drive a knife through it,
you would literally have to be on top of this
person in order to do it with let me get
my orientation right here with the head or the face,
if you imagine the face turned to the right, so
that the underside or the right cheek is actually shored
what they call shoring against the surface, the harder surface
underlying that, so that you can you can position yourself
(26:41):
over the body, and you're driving this knife down into
the temple multiple tips, not just one time, but over
and over and over and over again until you're done. Now,
obviously that in and of itself would have been enough
to have killed somebody. It sounds like there's a lot
I have to at least propose the thought that there
(27:02):
was a lot of anger that was being taken out
on this woman's body, perhaps in a post mortem state.
But I also think that it's important that we remember
that to this date, Sean Questa is innocent. He has
not been taken to trial, but he has been charged
with second degree homicide. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this
(27:26):
is bodybags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
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
New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce
Football’s funniest family duo — Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles and Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs — team up to provide next-level access to life in the league as it unfolds. The two brothers and Super Bowl champions drop weekly insights about the weekly slate of games and share their INSIDE perspectives on trending NFL news and sports headlines. They also endlessly rag on each other as brothers do, chat the latest in pop culture and welcome some very popular and well-known friends to chat with them. Check out new episodes every Wednesday. Follow New Heights on the Wondery App, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to new episodes early and ad-free, and get exclusive content on Wondery+. Join Wondery+ in the Wondery App, Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And join our new membership for a unique fan experience by going to the New Heights YouTube channel now!