November 20, 2024 • 46 mins
When a body is found in a trashcan by workers of the Canton Parks Department, it doesn't matter that the park is called City Field Park. For decades City Field Park was known as "Mother Goose Land" so when the workers call 911 to report a dead body in a trashcan, they tell 911 to send help to Mother Goose Land. Joseph Scott Morgan will turn the pages of his own storybook to find out how a simple "wellness check" turns so evil, so fast. How did a 24-year-old woman wind up dead and thrown away like garbage and who is responsible for such a horrible murder.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.00 Introduction
05:02.22 Joe relives childhood in New Orleans
10:00.21 Mother Goose Land and a body in the trashcan
15:09.92 Making a welfare check, door is open, nobody is home
20:21.00 After getting search warrant, deputies proceed into apartment, signs of bloody fight
25:09.76 Workers find body and call 911
30:10.14 Sean Goe cut holes in Raychel's car tires
34:56.46 Raychel's body wrapped in plastic
40:01.86 Raychel has 10 specific blunt force injuries, one from hammer
45:02.88 Raychel died from blunt force trauma
Conclusion - Sean Got convicted in her death
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quody Naris, But Joseph Scott more Mary Mary quite contrary,
how does your garden grow with silver bells and cocke
shells and pretty mates all in a row? I think
(00:22):
we probably all recognize that nursery rhyme because that's what
it is. I mean, kids for ages have used that
over and over again. I remember that it was many
many moons ago being in nursery school is what they
(00:43):
used to call it, and we used all of these.
I think that teachers and I know nothing about teaching
small children, but they use these repetitive rhymes in order
to form language and get into rhythm, if you will.
But you know, these nursing rhymes have dark origins. I
(01:08):
think that many of you have heard that with Mary
Mary like contrary, its origin is said to go back
to Bloody Mary, who was Queen Mary the First of England,
and it has to do with her execution of hundreds
of Protestants over a very dark period in British history.
(01:34):
And if you didn't know, some scholars believe that silver
bells and cockle shells are actually references to not things
that might adorn your garden, but actually they're tied back
to torture devices that were used in dungeons back during
(01:59):
those days. Today, we're going to talk about a case
that has linkage to Mother goose If you will, seemingly innocent,
a place where you can go and enjoy your children
(02:21):
and watch them play Mother goose Land. Actually, but like
these nursery rhymes, there's a very sinister underlying story here.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks Joe.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Before we dig into the fairy tale part of this.
I had no idea that there were little parks all
over America that had names like Storytime Park or Mother
goose Land until I saw the headline in this story.
It says Mother goose Land Murder, Canton, Ohio. There actually
was a place called Mother goose Land. It's now known
as Cityfield Park, but it's still identified by those from
(03:02):
the area as Mother Gooseland. And we've got City Field
Park workers that are dumping trash cans nine thirty in
the morning, and they get to a big receptacle and
it's heavier than it should be, and as they look inside,
it appears to be a human body wrapped in plastic
has been shoved into the trash can. They immediately call
(03:23):
nine to one one and the identifier is Mother Gooseland.
So that's where today's story comes from, the Mother Gooseland murder.
But you were telling me about places that you knew of, Joe,
and in particular in New Orleans where you grew up,
going to a place that was kind of like this.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Right in the heart of City Park in New Orleans
is a location called story Land and it's been there
since the fifties. And when you walk through the gate,
it's you know that scene in Willie wanng Go where
they the kid the real Willy Wonka. I'm not talking
(04:02):
about this thing with Johnny. I'm talking about the real
Willy Wonka with the great late Jeene Wilder. Thank you,
the late great Gene Wilder, where they opened that door
and you see all of that candy. I don't know
about you. That was magical to me. That's the way
Storyland was when I was little in New Orleans. And
(04:23):
it's got all of the Mother Goose characters. There. You've
got old Mother Hubbard, You've got actually Mother Goose in
the air flying on her goose with children on her
back on the back of the goose as well the
little old man that lived in the little old house,
you know, the crooked house, and it just goes on
(04:45):
and on, I mean, and you could walk and run
and play through all of these things. It's a glorified playground.
But they also had like a little roller coaster. And
it's not just me if you talk to any kid
that was the grew up and I split time growing
up in New Orleans when I was little. You know,
(05:05):
we you know, we lived in various locations, and but
those memories you know that you have when you're a kid.
I remember going to the streetcar line and New Orleans
is famous for the street car that runs down Saint
Charles and being there with my aunt and it was
the first place I ever put a penny on a
track and the street car would run over it, you know,
(05:26):
and crush it down. And of course that was adjacent
to one of another beautiful UH park and zoo called
Audubon UH the Autumn Zoo, which again, you know, is
a magical place for me and all of the kids
you know that inhabit these spaces. But Dave Brother, I
got to tell you, it's when something that is this
(05:47):
innocent winds up in the midst of what truly is
a real horror show. You know that that imagery from
your past. I think that there were probably a lot
of places around the country that were similar to this,
because the place we're going to talk about today is
(06:09):
it has a lot of similarity. It sounds like to
you know this place that I that's beloved to me
as you know, as a kid that grew up around it,
you know, down in New Orleans. Well, can you kind
of take us through this real quick, because you know,
I got to tell our friends kind of sit back,
and this is something that I think shocked both Dave
and I when we heard this story.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Now, whenever our stories begin, Joe with somebody calling for
police to do a welfare check. It's a pretty innocuous
thing when you think about it, but in reality, for us,
it's usually a loved one, a friend, an employer that
had an expectation for you to be someplace and you weren't, and.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
So they pick up, Hey, let me let me step
on you just for a second. I apologize. I want
everybody to understand this. Welfare checks by law enforcement are
done minute by minute all over the country. This is
not something there's not something sinister that pops up every time,
and so writes you our day because with this particular case,
(07:15):
there's a big reveal here I got to tell you.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, here's your big reveal. Rachel Sheridan doesn't show up
for work and her mother, knowing the relationship with Sean
Goh and how volatile he can be, her mom. Rachel's
mom calls the sheriff's department and asks them to do
a welfare check on her. Deputies show up. They already
know that Rachel drives a maroon jeep Liberty, so they're
looking over the parking lot to see if they see it.
They don't. They go to the apartment and the door
(07:38):
to the apartment is open, not just unlocked and can turn.
We're talking. The door is open. They can see inside,
but deputies don't see anything that anything that actually gives
them the right to walk into that apartment right away
without a search warrant. So it's suspicious, so they stayed there.
They called their boss, Hey, we need a search warrant.
Here's why. So they're waiting on search warrant to right
(07:59):
so they can go in the apart and when they
see maroon jeep Liberty being driven by Sean go right
in front of him, so hey, let's find out what's
going on. He's driving her car. He has to know
where she is, so boom, they go ahead and light
him up. Well, he goes to pull over and Sean
go takes off and runs. He flees the scene. He
flees through the woods and everything else, and he gets
(08:20):
away from him. They search for him for hours, can't
find him anywhere. Finally, the next morning they do find
Sean go At a homeless shelter and they take him
into custody on some other warrants that he has out standing.
Still they haven't found Rachel Sheridan. They don't know where
she is. Then that's when the nine to one one
call comes in from Mother Goose Land Park now known
(08:42):
as City Field Park, and the workers calling with we
got a body wrapped in plastic in the trash.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Can this Mother Goose location? This is up in you know,
adjacent to Canton, Ohio, Stark I think it's Stark County location.
And you know this park that is there, The Mother
Goose Park has roughly been in operation or was in operation.
(09:12):
And here's the odd thing. It opened in the fifties.
David Singh's been shuddered since the eighties, and you can
see the pictures of it online and there are all
these kind of magical looking, magical looking creatures that are
still existing. There's like a big whale in a lagoon
with its mouth open that kids could run into. How
(09:35):
can you resist not wanting to go into this place?
But when you take a look at it, it's got
kind of because it's not being used, it's kind of
got a real creepy vibe to it now because nobody
is maintaining these things. These things are always brightly painted.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
You know.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
It's the type of stuff that you want to see
when you're a little kid. It attracts you to it.
You want to come in, Hey Mama, can we go
in here and play? You know that sort of thing.
This is the kind of place that you would see though,
and it's it's in stark contrast, you know, to like
what I love about Storyland in New Orleans that's really
kept up, brightly colored, all those sorts of things. And
(10:13):
you know, you think about the the deposition of a body,
it would I think that most people would not think
that it's a place where a body would be found,
maybe because it's an abandoned location and it has been
shuttered since the eighties that it's it's nobody's going to
(10:37):
find it. And you know, sometimes it's just dumb luck where,
you know, because how many cases do we have where
people just like vanish off the planet and you don't
have any kind of idea where they went to the
fact that they were able to find her body, I
think relatively quickly is amazing and there's a bit of
(11:02):
I'm not gonna call it joy, but there's a bit
of relief for the family because how many cases have
we covered over the years where you know, and still
I get contacted all the time, particularly over social media,
can you help me? You know, we haven't seen our
and you know, helping people in that particular way is
not really my forte. But you know, there's so many
(11:24):
people out there that want to know where their loved
ones are. But I'm interested in something that you said
earlier about the welfare check. You know, when police typically
go and they must really have put the screws down
on the cops out here, because if they're not crossing
over that threshold to go into the location without a warrant,
(11:47):
and it's a welfare check most of the time if
you can if you know that somebody's in danger, as
long as you don't if the door is open and
you're calling out to them to check. I guess it's
probably departmentally dependent. When it's a it's it's health and
(12:07):
safety is actually kind of the the thread that runs
through this. From a legal standpoint, that's what they're trying
to do. You know, you can't go looking in hidden places,
and that's that's what the warrant would be for. But
it's again dumb luck that when they pivot and they
see her car moving down the road and then you
(12:30):
got a guy. They chase this guy down and he
bolts out of the car and runs off into the woods.
There's your sign. As they used to say. You know,
one of the questions I would ask when I would
show up at a scene, because you know, when by
the time the Emmy or corner investigator arrives at a scene,
you don't there's so many actors on the stage by
that time. Commonly, my practice, if there was some kind
(12:54):
of domestic beef that occurred, I would seek out the
actual beat unit, like the officer that was in the
patrol car. The unit that patrols this area their beat,
and I would go to that individual, not to their sergeant,
not to their lieutenant who was there, is like, hey,
(13:15):
can you tell me something. Have you ever rolled out
here on anything? Have you ever been by here, because
you'd be surprised. You know, when people see cops, you
know just kind of and I hate this term, but
they'll say cops are loitering around. Well, they're not loitering.
They're sitting there and they're watching. Now I'm not a
big fan of, you know, speed traps, but if you're
(13:37):
in a neighborhood and you see a cop, you know,
that's kind of sitting there. They're watching most of the time,
and they know they've got their finger on the pulse.
They know more than people suspect about each house on
the block because they will have been called out to
domestic beefs, they will be called out when children are missing,
they'll be called out for an elderly person that has
(13:58):
fallen in the house, and they know that that and
some you know, you go back to this idea of
you know, one of the things they teach is community
police and I don't know really how well that has worked,
but the idea of the cop getting out of the
car and just walking up to a fence and talking
to the elderly people that live on the street. Hey,
how you doing. I'm officer Mike, and this is my area.
(14:19):
I wanted to introduce myself. So cops have a lot
of knowledge of that area. But you know, Dave, I
don't know if they even begin to suspect what they
would eventually find inside of that house, let alone, or
what they would find.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
At the Mother Goose Park.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Here we go, bowilerplate statement incoming. I found no evidence
of forced entry or struggle. Wish I had a nickel
for every time I'd written that down. Wish I had
a bitcoin for every time i'd written that down. I'd
be a very very wealthy man. But because you know,
(15:18):
it's included in all of our reports, if we don't
see anything, but Dave, they they saw something at that
at that home. Not only was the door open, and
there's no indication that it was necessarily forced open, it
was just open, you know, It's not like it had
(15:38):
been kicked in necessarily.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
That's an important part. Yeah, Yeah, because as they arrive,
they're doing a I want to go back to the
welfare check. Yeah, they're already warned that this is a
vau of a situation. Mom is concerned because she didn't
show up for work she always does, and she lives
with a man who is not oftentimes doing things in
her best interest. They have had a vallatle relationship. He
(16:02):
has allegedly beaten her before enough that family and friends
have been worried. And when they get there and they're
looking inside the apartment, they don't see anything that jumps
right out at them that says there was a struggle
or a fight in here. And as they're waiting for
that search warrant to arrive so they can go in
(16:24):
because at this point they're not seeing the whole apartment.
They're just seeing a living area and probably a kitchen.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yeah, And it's only after they get the search warrant.
By the time they've already got they they know Sean
Goh has taken off. He's running, So what is he
He's driving her car and he's now running.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
So and she's nowhere to be found.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Right, I still can't find her, still have not been
able to verify, you know. So they go into the apartment.
Now this is after you know, they get the search warrant,
and I can't imagine Joe, that the search warrant was
very specific, because it would have been we're looking, we
don't know where she is, we're trying to find her.
So would the warrant say they can go in the
(17:05):
apartment and look under things and see if they can
find share it.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
You know, maybe it's it's going to be more specific.
And most of the time you have to have some
kind of probable cause that's going to be an ingredient
into this.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
But the welfare check in and of itself is not enough.
They can't know that it's well unless here's the thing.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
If you if you visualize, let's just say that that
you walk into a scene, I think that a magistrate
or judge would bite on the idea if you see
what appeared to be and remember in forensics, we cannot
say something is blood until we test it and determine
that it is blood. But if you see what appears
(17:51):
to be blood at a scene, and you couple that
with anything that you might find in another location like
broken or turned over furniture, certainly any of item that
might have specific evidence on it, I think that a
magistrate would probably be willing to issue that warrant and
(18:12):
you can go in and you know, and you can
go in and process the scene at that point in time,
but yeah, you have to hold back because anything that
you do absent a warrant, you're really running the risk
of that being thrown out from an evidentiary standpoint. And
if that pe and you never know, Dave, what is
actually going to be critical to proving the case or
(18:35):
disproving the case with any type of item. Let's say
that you have some kind of of instrument that might
create a particular pattern. Okay, if you discover that instrument
and you don't expecsily have permission to do that, or
(18:57):
the warrant is written inappropriately, or whatever the case might be,
then did you know that that item can't be included
as part of the evidence. And so you have to
That's why they're very very careful about these things because
for so many years, you know, people would just they
would go in to a scene and you know, with
(19:21):
their hair on fire and not not show up with
the appropri appropriate documentation relative to a warrant, and a
lot of stuff winds up being excluded, and if in
fact it is excluded, then that huge building block for
your case is blown at that moment in time, Dave,
all right.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
And in this case, when they when they get the
search warrant and they go in, they're able to get
past the open the living area where they didn't see anything.
They're able to get into the apartment, and it's when
they get to the bedroom that they realize, Okay, we
(20:00):
got a problem. We have a major problem. I remember
Sean go Rachel and Rachel Sheridan and Shaan Goh live
together in this apartment, and he has been arrested and
is at jail on other charges, not to do with
this particular case of Rachel at the time, Remember he
was in her car. And so it's the next morning
(20:24):
he's in jail, and they've gone into the apartment and
they find in the master in the bedroom that they share,
that something has occurred. They see signs of struggle, they
see signs that point to a bloody fight. Yeah, in
the bedroom. And it's from that point on and this
(20:44):
is my I was curious about this because how far
did they go? We people bleed, a bloody knows can
cause a lot of issues. I'm also clumsy. I tend
to trip and fall. So if something is knocked over,
if there's a little blood, you could explain that. But
we have a violent man in jail and we can't
(21:06):
find his living girlfriend, and so where do you go
from here?
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yeah, and the blood can be easily explained by any
defense attorney. We've heard this over and over relative to DNA,
because if you're domiciled there, it's not unreasonable to expect
to be able to find blood that has issued forth
from one of the occupants that's that's also you know,
(21:32):
domiciled there, so and that can be explained away. Yeah,
I felt, you know, like you said, I tripped, I
hit my head, all right, that explains the blood that's there.
Or yeah, you know, when you're thinking about Rachel, maybe
Rachel had a bloody nose. I don't know about you.
I'm prone to bloody noses. You know. I can be
sitting in church and all of a sudden, I feel
(21:52):
that warmth, you know, beginning to run down my lip
and it just spontaneously happened. Well, any attorney worth their
salt can make that argument, you know, if you find
but when you have this kind of dynamic event that
has occurred inside of the dwelling, particularly in the bedroom,
(22:12):
this very intimate space, and you've got there's a level
of reasonableness that comes into this. So if you've got
you don't expect, say, cast off blood from an instrument
to be on the walls. If you have a bloody nose, okay,
you don't expect to be to find a mattress that
(22:35):
is super saturated with blood, or sheets and towels and
all these sorts of things and you know, maybe soaked
into carpet or onto the hardwood floor. And the patterns
themselves showed that this was a dynamic event with movement
and deposition and all these sorts of things that have
a certain level of velocity. You know, back to the
(22:57):
example of a bloody nose, if someone is standing there passively,
and that's a passive stain where it's just kind of
free falling through the air and it drops onto the
ground and it's kind of a classic droplet that you
would think that drops straight down and there's not much
dynamicism to it. You can have actually maybe multiple of
(23:21):
those spots, but you're not going to have it in
this kind of an elliptical pattern that occurs with a
little tail on it, you know, where it's cast off
and those sorts of things, so you have a reasonable
expectation that you would find blood there. But in an
environment like this, if you've got multiple locations where blood
(23:41):
has been shed, this is gonna you know, this is
going to give rise to this idea that an attack
probably occurred in this environment. But you know, Daved, the
thing about it is is that still, even though you
have this evidence that's there, you don't have a body.
(24:02):
And that's a problem in that moment, you don't have
a body, and that's the rub you know, you think about,
you know, the absence of in what a chill because
if you're a police officer, you're still thinking that if
if there is blood and there's no body, maybe there's
(24:25):
a chance she's still alive. Maybe there's a chance we
can find her. And unfortunately, you know in this case
that's that's not necessarily true.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Dave, Wow, Well, you know they're looking for Rachel Sheridan,
her living boyfriend is sitting cooling his heels in jail.
They find blood, a mess in the bedroom and then
they get the sanitation workers. At nine point thirty that morning,
they call nine to one one found a body. Now,
(24:58):
they did not do a whole lot to look at
the body. They found a body and stopped, which is incredible.
I don't I wonder when I saw this, I wonder
how many times people have found a body and immediately
started poking around at it versus stopping everything and calling
nine on one.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah, you know, I've had, I've had. I've had multiple
scenarios that have occurred. I've actually had civilians that have
come over. I've actually had civilians to do this with
decomposed bodies where and don't ask me what compels them
to do this, because when you're around a decomposed body,
(25:37):
it's most of the time it's one of the most
important things you can you know that you can encounter
in life. I've had civilians that have encountered bodies like
that and they they roll the body over, whereas I've
had I remember, in particular, I had an autoerotic case
with a gentleman that had hung himself on a door
(25:57):
on a door hinge with a dog cop nude in
a microtel if you're familiar with those, and the little
lady that was that was the housekeeper. She came to
the door and she had just arrived here in the country.
I think she was from Guatemala, if I'm not mistaken.
(26:20):
She couldn't speak English. She's pushing her cart up and
down the hall day and opens the door, and this
nude guy hanging by dog collar with his hands tied
is literally staring her in the face. And Dave, when
I got there, she the way she had alerted that
she had found the body was her screaming and she
was sitting this poor this poor lady was sitting on
(26:42):
the floor clutching her rosary with her knees pulled into
her chest, doing Hail Mary's in Spanish. And she was terrified.
So you never know what anybody's reaction is going to be,
you know, when it runs the gamut, you know, just
like deaths run the gamut. You don't know what you
going to find. But if you're a sanitation worker, you
(27:03):
come across some pretty disgusting things, as you can imagine,
as there's probably stuff that you and I could never fathom.
You know that those people encounter out there in the
streets of things that we throw away that they go
out and collect. And it's interesting how that initial contact
(27:23):
might very well impact the case or affect the position
of the body so that we don't necessarily appreciate it
in its pristine condition. But I can tell you this,
when they finally alerted the police in regards to this
young woman's body, they didn't touch it. They called and
(27:47):
what they discovered when the m he got out there
was horrific. Sean Go, this person that I would assume,
(28:11):
at one point in time, professed, you know, professed his
love for Rachel Sharonan told her that he cared about her,
told her he would take care of her. And you know,
you know who knows, you know, with these domestic cases
(28:32):
that we catch like this, Dave, nobody knows anybody. You
never know the level of violence that anyone is particularly
capable of because you don't know what their you know,
psychological history is. You don't know what their criminal history is.
But Dave, I got to tell you. With Shawn Go,
he he had he had a reputation as a bad seed,
(28:58):
if you.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Will, bad seed. Now that's a dated comment. You know.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
I also luck to use the term good egg every
now and then too. Just go with me.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
She was a bad egg. Another reference to Jim Wilder.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yep, there you go.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
The egdicator. So in this particular case with Sean Goh,
as we mentioned earlier, as soon as police saw him,
as they're standing outside the apartment trying to find the
very beginning part doing their welfare check on Rachel, they
see Sean in her vehicle and they give chase. He
takes off in bolts. They get him locked up. And
(29:34):
this isn't the first contact that Sean Goh has had
with police. At the time he's arrested, he was wanted
on a number of different issues. He allegedly stole a
handgun from a residence in the North Canton area a
couple of months before Rachel goes missing. He had physically
(29:58):
threatened Rachel in the and friends and family knew about
these threats because he didn't just make a threat and
that was it. He made threats and he actually punctured.
The actual stories is cut holes in her tires. Now
that I'm always picturing a puncture, you know, like with
a knife or a screwdriver or something, but cutting holes
(30:20):
in her tires seems to take it to a different level.
It's a different phrase than I've ever heard.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
But yeah, it does. That means that you're jamming you're
probably jamming a sharp instrument in there. And I'm not
talking about like a piece of rebar. I'm talking about
like a knife, and you're going you're you're carving the tires,
is what it comes down to now.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Going into the sidewall. So the tire cannot be repaired.
It will have to be replaced, which is a lot
more expensive. Ten bucks to patch a tire hole versus
you know, one hundred dollars for a whole tire.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Oh yeah, yeah, and that's if you get a low
end tire. Right. And you know, this couple is unmarried,
they're living in an apartment together, she's driving a cheap liberty.
She doesn't strike me as somebody that's got a ton
of money. So when you strike out at her like this,
it's not just it's not just the violence that's implied,
it's also it puts a financial burden on her. He
(31:08):
would have known that because yeah, they yeah, absolutely, And
you never know what's going to set him off at
any particular time, what button is going to be pressed.
And you get somebody that has a history of violence,
I mean it violence extends for me when you go
to someone's home and you actually steal a weapon that's
(31:33):
that has that has a flavor of violence to it
in that environment, even if you don't have physical contact
or you're not threatening, you know, what's your purpose to
specifically go to a location and steal a gun and
then you have this action with the tires. I can understand, Dave,
I can understand why her mother would have been terrified.
(31:57):
Can you imagine? I bet there are so many times
she had probably spoken with her and this this again
is a thread I worry about you, darling. Please is
you know, can you break away from him? And you
never know what the dynamic is is somebody saying, you know,
oh I love him, He's going to change all this.
They never changed, Dave. They don't. It's it's it's the
(32:18):
same story over and over and over again, and you
wind up with something that winds up in this horror.
This horror showed that that's eventually discovered.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Just remember, any guy that will hit a woman once
is not going to stop at once.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
No.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
So here we have the sanitation workers called nine one one,
Rachel Sheridan's body. They find her at nine thirty or
that's when they call. So we know we have the
day the moment of discovery. But we don't know exactly
how long she has been dead because we don't know
(32:54):
other than the welfare check call. We know that police
recall specific time after she didn't show up for work,
but we don't know right now. Can they determined based
on the body they find at nine thirty in the morning,
can they go back in time and figure out approximate
time of death? Joe?
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Yeah, and I And just to give you a little insight,
you know, when they first rolled up on this case
at the home they the police had shown up I
think on July second, at about twelve thirty two pm,
so you're going into the afternoon hours at this point
(33:35):
in time. They were able to hook him up, you know,
because he bolted, you know, while they were there initially.
They actually found him on the third, and they got
on this pretty quick. I don't know if they were
able to track him somehow or you know where, if
they were pinging his phone or what exactly happened.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
They got it. I that was they got him at
a homeless shelter, right And I'm.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Talking about his movement relative to depositing Rachel's body, because
they actually found her on July the third, So it
was it was actually less than twenty four hours when
they finally found her body. Yeah, it would be. She's
going to be at the outer margins, Dave, as far
as postmortem changes go, you know where we're looking for
(34:21):
the rigidity to begin to release also, and this is
in this is in July, Dave. And so it's gonna
it'll be hotter. And as I've mentioned before, when it
comes to obviously body temp and certainly riger mortis, those
are going to be slightly accelerated. And when they find her,
(34:44):
she's actually cocooned and plastic. So he's taken time to
wrap her body up in plastic and has driven out
to the Mother goose Land area and found a plastic
track can not unlike you know what we have at
our homes that we roll out to the street if
(35:04):
you live in town, and you know, you put by
the road and the garbage guys come by and pick
it up, and you know, it was just the sanitation workers,
you know that looked into the can and saw and
can you imagine their horror, you know when they lift
that lid up and they look inside and there's her
(35:26):
body inside of this of a rubbish container, you know,
the things that you discard. And I think that says
a lot here, Dave. It speaks to potentially how he
viewed her as as refuse, something to be thrown away,
treated horribly, And there's it's fascinating to me, as horrific
(35:51):
as this is. As horrific as this is when bodies
are cocooned like this, for us in forensics, it's actually
there's an upside to this. The upside is is that
there's a containment of evidence that takes place. So anything
that's on the body, you have the opportunity to retain that,
(36:15):
and not just retain it. Here's the cool part. You
actually keep it in place on the specific surfaces of
the body if it's deepended upon how it's secured. So
let's just say you've got a you've got a bit
of evidence, say a hair or something that's on the shoulder.
(36:37):
If they're cocooned in this wrapping, you can still find
that hair in place on the shoulder and it might
give you an indication as to where his hands were
on her or where his head was in relation to
her body. Did he slough hair, did it fall off
of his head onto her bloody handprint that may transfer
(37:01):
to her clothes because you know, you're having to manipulate
dead weight here. If there's been a spillach of blood
that's so significant, he can get blood on his hands,
transfer those contact points to her shirt, maybe the cuffs
of her pants, maybe to her bare legs. Drag her
onto the sheeting, the plastic sheeting, wrap her up in it.
(37:23):
The other thing that it protects because plastic is a
non poor surface, it protects layton prints, Dave. We've recovered
latent prints off of plastic sheeting before. And then if
there's blood involved, that's a different type of print from say,
for instance, a latent print that's oil. That's the you know,
(37:43):
generated from the oil in our fingertips. If he touches
her body with the bare hands and he transfers his
fingerprint onto that surface and it's the medium is actually blood,
that's a different type of print that can be recovered.
So the fact that her body is cocooned, even though
(38:03):
it's in this filthy rubbish container, she's kind of protected
in that sense. But that's not really what turned this case, Dave.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Is it they're able to determine Police say that you know,
she was attacked in the bedroom and then her body
was drug and placed and the damage, the wounds were
inflicted about her head, yeah, for the most part. And
they said she was beaten with an object. And they're
(38:34):
only willing, they being police and the medical examiner. They're
only about to go as far as saying that she
was hit with a hammer at least once. And I
find that to be an odd comment. There was only
of all the battering that was going on, Yeah, one
was obviously a hammer. I mean, they weren't.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
All right, so if and they also believe, if I'm
not mistaken, that she was probably asleep when this occurred. Sorry, yeah,
and no, that's a significant point. So this coward waits
until this diminutive and she is diminutive, Dave, a young
(39:22):
woman is asleep, and he begins to essentially wail on her.
It's not surprising that they're identifying a single hammer strike here.
They found a hammer at the scene. But you know,
this is not something that is well thought out. This
(39:46):
is very frenzied. They were able to delineate that she
had been struck, that she had ten specific injuries that
apparently are all blunt force trauma, and this coward could
have potentially have shown up with a hammer, or he
(40:07):
could have beaten her in her sleep with his fist,
striking her all about her head, and then he goes
and gets a hammer, and she's so she's so wrung out.
I mean, just imagine if you're awakened from a dead sleep,
(40:29):
and I know you can imagine this, if you have kids,
you can imagine this. You're slumbering, you finally lay your
head on the pillow and suddenly there's a scream that
lets out in the middle of the night in your house.
You're completely diswarriented. How much more so with her if
she doesn't see this incoming and she's attacked in her
(40:50):
bedroom like this, And I guess the you know, the
coup de gras is going to be to take a
hammer and have this single hammer strike. The way they
were able to delineate this specific injury away from the others,
and I'm not saying that the others could not be
(41:10):
hammer strikes, because hammer can be held in any number
of ways. And this was, by the way, a claw hammer,
which means it's got a nail extractor on the back
of it. With the two prongs the very common hammer
that we see and that most of us own. This
is actually the blunt and end, the leading edge that
she's struck with, and hammer strikes are very specific when
(41:33):
you see them in the morgue. When we're doing these examinations,
what would happen is her head would be probably completely
shaved at autopsy because it's impossible to appreciate all of
the injuries. And so when a body is when you
have head strikes like this with women in particular, because
(41:57):
women commonly have more hair than guys, do, we actually
shaved their heads at autopsy.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
I got to ask you something, Joe, and maybe this
seems silly and no, but would you have to ask
the family about that?
Speaker 1 (42:14):
No? No, I've had that question asking me before. This
is a search. No, we'll tell the funeral director, okay,
and the funeral director generally will. Now we've had families
that will ask the question, you know, why did you
do this? And here's the sole reason where it's an
(42:36):
evidentiary search. You know, you're you're trying to assess the family.
I think you know as time goes by, because they
probably can't have an open casket. And there have been
times where we've had these really traumatic events where I've
seen them get wigs, and funeral homes are good about
doing that. Hats. People will put hats on individuals and
(43:01):
if they're going to have a viewing. But your sole
purpose here is I'll put it to you this way, knowing,
and I don't want to put words into this precious
woman's mother's mouth. But would you rather her head be
shaved and us appropriately assess these insults to her head?
(43:25):
Or do you want to run the risk of having
an incomplete assessment and this guy's back on the streets.
You know, I know which one I'm going to pick,
And because I want I want every I want every
ounce of retribution that I can get if I'm a
parent here. And so when we shave the head, and
(43:48):
sometimes we'll do it selectively, we were very very careful though,
and the more because and these are hard and this
is one of the problems to run into. You'll see
like when you get a hammer strike, you'll actually have
an abrasion, Okay that you have to pay real close
attention to to see because it's so ghastly, because you'll
(44:09):
have a laceration. Many times that occurs so you've got
two things happening. That top layer of skin is abraided
and you'll see the little margins of it because the
skin is rubbed because it's coming in contact with this
metal object. Then the skin will split. Okay, sometimes on
the skin you can see the pattern like a it'll
(44:32):
look like a quarter almost. If it's a flush strike,
then depend upon the level of force. And I've seen
this happen. When you get below that layer of the
scalp and you get onto what's referred to as the
external table of skull, you'll see a plug of bone
day that's also shaped like a quarter, and it's depressed,
(44:53):
which means the bone actually sinks in to a criminal
vault at that point in time, and you know, impacts
the brain directly and it'll you know, many times the
bone will fragment and the little shards of bone will
go into the brain. That's incompatible with life. Not to mention,
you know, just a concussive event of this that leads
to death. The question is was he striking her with
(45:16):
a fist beforehand he had the hammer at the ready
and then used it, or was he holding the hammer
in a way that you couldn't really tell if it
was a hammer strike or not, Like if it's on
the one of the edges, for instance, I don't see
that happening, because even if you strike somebody with the
edge of a hammer, you're gonna have these kind of
linear marks that occur on the soft tissue either way.
(45:40):
Either way, they were able to determine that she did
die as a result of blunt force trauma. And thankfully,
very very thankfully, Sean Go is no longer among the
land of the free. He's now been convicted and now
(46:05):
he's awaiting sentencing. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
Bodybacks
Quody Naris, But Joseph Scott more Mary Mary quite contrary,
how does your garden grow with silver bells and cocke
shells and pretty mates all in a row? I think
(00:22):
we probably all recognize that nursery rhyme because that's what
it is. I mean, kids for ages have used that
over and over again. I remember that it was many
many moons ago being in nursery school is what they
(00:43):
used to call it, and we used all of these.
I think that teachers and I know nothing about teaching
small children, but they use these repetitive rhymes in order
to form language and get into rhythm, if you will.
But you know, these nursing rhymes have dark origins. I
(01:08):
think that many of you have heard that with Mary
Mary like contrary, its origin is said to go back
to Bloody Mary, who was Queen Mary the First of England,
and it has to do with her execution of hundreds
of Protestants over a very dark period in British history.
(01:34):
And if you didn't know, some scholars believe that silver
bells and cockle shells are actually references to not things
that might adorn your garden, but actually they're tied back
to torture devices that were used in dungeons back during
(01:59):
those days. Today, we're going to talk about a case
that has linkage to Mother goose If you will, seemingly innocent,
a place where you can go and enjoy your children
(02:21):
and watch them play Mother goose Land. Actually, but like
these nursery rhymes, there's a very sinister underlying story here.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks Joe.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Before we dig into the fairy tale part of this.
I had no idea that there were little parks all
over America that had names like Storytime Park or Mother
goose Land until I saw the headline in this story.
It says Mother goose Land Murder, Canton, Ohio. There actually
was a place called Mother goose Land. It's now known
as Cityfield Park, but it's still identified by those from
(03:02):
the area as Mother Gooseland. And we've got City Field
Park workers that are dumping trash cans nine thirty in
the morning, and they get to a big receptacle and
it's heavier than it should be, and as they look inside,
it appears to be a human body wrapped in plastic
has been shoved into the trash can. They immediately call
(03:23):
nine to one one and the identifier is Mother Gooseland.
So that's where today's story comes from, the Mother Gooseland murder.
But you were telling me about places that you knew of, Joe,
and in particular in New Orleans where you grew up,
going to a place that was kind of like this.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Right in the heart of City Park in New Orleans
is a location called story Land and it's been there
since the fifties. And when you walk through the gate,
it's you know that scene in Willie wanng Go where
they the kid the real Willy Wonka. I'm not talking
(04:02):
about this thing with Johnny. I'm talking about the real
Willy Wonka with the great late Jeene Wilder. Thank you,
the late great Gene Wilder, where they opened that door
and you see all of that candy. I don't know
about you. That was magical to me. That's the way
Storyland was when I was little in New Orleans. And
(04:23):
it's got all of the Mother Goose characters. There. You've
got old Mother Hubbard, You've got actually Mother Goose in
the air flying on her goose with children on her
back on the back of the goose as well the
little old man that lived in the little old house,
you know, the crooked house, and it just goes on
(04:45):
and on, I mean, and you could walk and run
and play through all of these things. It's a glorified playground.
But they also had like a little roller coaster. And
it's not just me if you talk to any kid
that was the grew up and I split time growing
up in New Orleans when I was little. You know,
(05:05):
we you know, we lived in various locations, and but
those memories you know that you have when you're a kid.
I remember going to the streetcar line and New Orleans
is famous for the street car that runs down Saint
Charles and being there with my aunt and it was
the first place I ever put a penny on a
track and the street car would run over it, you know,
(05:26):
and crush it down. And of course that was adjacent
to one of another beautiful UH park and zoo called
Audubon UH the Autumn Zoo, which again, you know, is
a magical place for me and all of the kids
you know that inhabit these spaces. But Dave Brother, I
got to tell you, it's when something that is this
(05:47):
innocent winds up in the midst of what truly is
a real horror show. You know that that imagery from
your past. I think that there were probably a lot
of places around the country that were similar to this,
because the place we're going to talk about today is
(06:09):
it has a lot of similarity. It sounds like to
you know this place that I that's beloved to me
as you know, as a kid that grew up around it,
you know, down in New Orleans. Well, can you kind
of take us through this real quick, because you know,
I got to tell our friends kind of sit back,
and this is something that I think shocked both Dave
and I when we heard this story.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
Now, whenever our stories begin, Joe with somebody calling for
police to do a welfare check. It's a pretty innocuous
thing when you think about it, but in reality, for us,
it's usually a loved one, a friend, an employer that
had an expectation for you to be someplace and you weren't, and.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
So they pick up, Hey, let me let me step
on you just for a second. I apologize. I want
everybody to understand this. Welfare checks by law enforcement are
done minute by minute all over the country. This is
not something there's not something sinister that pops up every time,
and so writes you our day because with this particular case,
(07:15):
there's a big reveal here I got to tell you.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Yeah, here's your big reveal. Rachel Sheridan doesn't show up
for work and her mother, knowing the relationship with Sean
Goh and how volatile he can be, her mom. Rachel's
mom calls the sheriff's department and asks them to do
a welfare check on her. Deputies show up. They already
know that Rachel drives a maroon jeep Liberty, so they're
looking over the parking lot to see if they see it.
They don't. They go to the apartment and the door
(07:38):
to the apartment is open, not just unlocked and can turn.
We're talking. The door is open. They can see inside,
but deputies don't see anything that anything that actually gives
them the right to walk into that apartment right away
without a search warrant. So it's suspicious, so they stayed there.
They called their boss, Hey, we need a search warrant.
Here's why. So they're waiting on search warrant to right
(07:59):
so they can go in the apart and when they
see maroon jeep Liberty being driven by Sean go right
in front of him, so hey, let's find out what's
going on. He's driving her car. He has to know
where she is, so boom, they go ahead and light
him up. Well, he goes to pull over and Sean
go takes off and runs. He flees the scene. He
flees through the woods and everything else, and he gets
(08:20):
away from him. They search for him for hours, can't
find him anywhere. Finally, the next morning they do find
Sean go At a homeless shelter and they take him
into custody on some other warrants that he has out standing.
Still they haven't found Rachel Sheridan. They don't know where
she is. Then that's when the nine to one one
call comes in from Mother Goose Land Park now known
(08:42):
as City Field Park, and the workers calling with we
got a body wrapped in plastic in the trash.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
Can this Mother Goose location? This is up in you know,
adjacent to Canton, Ohio, Stark I think it's Stark County location.
And you know this park that is there, The Mother
Goose Park has roughly been in operation or was in operation.
(09:12):
And here's the odd thing. It opened in the fifties.
David Singh's been shuddered since the eighties, and you can
see the pictures of it online and there are all
these kind of magical looking, magical looking creatures that are
still existing. There's like a big whale in a lagoon
with its mouth open that kids could run into. How
(09:35):
can you resist not wanting to go into this place?
But when you take a look at it, it's got
kind of because it's not being used, it's kind of
got a real creepy vibe to it now because nobody
is maintaining these things. These things are always brightly painted.
Speaker 2 (09:51):
You know.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
It's the type of stuff that you want to see
when you're a little kid. It attracts you to it.
You want to come in, Hey Mama, can we go
in here and play? You know that sort of thing.
This is the kind of place that you would see though,
and it's it's in stark contrast, you know, to like
what I love about Storyland in New Orleans that's really
kept up, brightly colored, all those sorts of things. And
(10:13):
you know, you think about the the deposition of a body,
it would I think that most people would not think
that it's a place where a body would be found,
maybe because it's an abandoned location and it has been
shuttered since the eighties that it's it's nobody's going to
(10:37):
find it. And you know, sometimes it's just dumb luck where,
you know, because how many cases do we have where
people just like vanish off the planet and you don't
have any kind of idea where they went to the
fact that they were able to find her body, I
think relatively quickly is amazing and there's a bit of
(11:02):
I'm not gonna call it joy, but there's a bit
of relief for the family because how many cases have
we covered over the years where you know, and still
I get contacted all the time, particularly over social media,
can you help me? You know, we haven't seen our
and you know, helping people in that particular way is
not really my forte. But you know, there's so many
(11:24):
people out there that want to know where their loved
ones are. But I'm interested in something that you said
earlier about the welfare check. You know, when police typically
go and they must really have put the screws down
on the cops out here, because if they're not crossing
over that threshold to go into the location without a warrant,
(11:47):
and it's a welfare check most of the time if
you can if you know that somebody's in danger, as
long as you don't if the door is open and
you're calling out to them to check. I guess it's
probably departmentally dependent. When it's a it's it's health and
(12:07):
safety is actually kind of the the thread that runs
through this. From a legal standpoint, that's what they're trying
to do. You know, you can't go looking in hidden places,
and that's that's what the warrant would be for. But
it's again dumb luck that when they pivot and they
see her car moving down the road and then you
(12:30):
got a guy. They chase this guy down and he
bolts out of the car and runs off into the woods.
There's your sign. As they used to say. You know,
one of the questions I would ask when I would
show up at a scene, because you know, when by
the time the Emmy or corner investigator arrives at a scene,
you don't there's so many actors on the stage by
that time. Commonly, my practice, if there was some kind
(12:54):
of domestic beef that occurred, I would seek out the
actual beat unit, like the officer that was in the
patrol car. The unit that patrols this area their beat,
and I would go to that individual, not to their sergeant,
not to their lieutenant who was there, is like, hey,
(13:15):
can you tell me something. Have you ever rolled out
here on anything? Have you ever been by here, because
you'd be surprised. You know, when people see cops, you
know just kind of and I hate this term, but
they'll say cops are loitering around. Well, they're not loitering.
They're sitting there and they're watching. Now I'm not a
big fan of, you know, speed traps, but if you're
(13:37):
in a neighborhood and you see a cop, you know,
that's kind of sitting there. They're watching most of the time,
and they know they've got their finger on the pulse.
They know more than people suspect about each house on
the block because they will have been called out to
domestic beefs, they will be called out when children are missing,
they'll be called out for an elderly person that has
(13:58):
fallen in the house, and they know that that and
some you know, you go back to this idea of
you know, one of the things they teach is community
police and I don't know really how well that has worked,
but the idea of the cop getting out of the
car and just walking up to a fence and talking
to the elderly people that live on the street. Hey,
how you doing. I'm officer Mike, and this is my area.
(14:19):
I wanted to introduce myself. So cops have a lot
of knowledge of that area. But you know, Dave, I
don't know if they even begin to suspect what they
would eventually find inside of that house, let alone, or
what they would find.
Speaker 3 (14:40):
At the Mother Goose Park.
Speaker 1 (14:55):
Here we go, bowilerplate statement incoming. I found no evidence
of forced entry or struggle. Wish I had a nickel
for every time I'd written that down. Wish I had
a bitcoin for every time i'd written that down. I'd
be a very very wealthy man. But because you know,
(15:18):
it's included in all of our reports, if we don't
see anything, but Dave, they they saw something at that
at that home. Not only was the door open, and
there's no indication that it was necessarily forced open, it
was just open, you know, It's not like it had
(15:38):
been kicked in necessarily.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
That's an important part. Yeah, Yeah, because as they arrive,
they're doing a I want to go back to the
welfare check. Yeah, they're already warned that this is a
vau of a situation. Mom is concerned because she didn't
show up for work she always does, and she lives
with a man who is not oftentimes doing things in
her best interest. They have had a vallatle relationship. He
(16:02):
has allegedly beaten her before enough that family and friends
have been worried. And when they get there and they're
looking inside the apartment, they don't see anything that jumps
right out at them that says there was a struggle
or a fight in here. And as they're waiting for
that search warrant to arrive so they can go in
(16:24):
because at this point they're not seeing the whole apartment.
They're just seeing a living area and probably a kitchen.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Yeah, And it's only after they get the search warrant.
By the time they've already got they they know Sean
Goh has taken off. He's running, So what is he
He's driving her car and he's now running.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
So and she's nowhere to be found.
Speaker 2 (16:43):
Right, I still can't find her, still have not been
able to verify, you know. So they go into the apartment.
Now this is after you know, they get the search warrant,
and I can't imagine Joe, that the search warrant was
very specific, because it would have been we're looking, we
don't know where she is, we're trying to find her.
So would the warrant say they can go in the
(17:05):
apartment and look under things and see if they can
find share it.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
You know, maybe it's it's going to be more specific.
And most of the time you have to have some
kind of probable cause that's going to be an ingredient
into this.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
But the welfare check in and of itself is not enough.
They can't know that it's well unless here's the thing.
Speaker 1 (17:29):
If you if you visualize, let's just say that that
you walk into a scene, I think that a magistrate
or judge would bite on the idea if you see
what appeared to be and remember in forensics, we cannot
say something is blood until we test it and determine
that it is blood. But if you see what appears
(17:51):
to be blood at a scene, and you couple that
with anything that you might find in another location like
broken or turned over furniture, certainly any of item that
might have specific evidence on it, I think that a
magistrate would probably be willing to issue that warrant and
(18:12):
you can go in and you know, and you can
go in and process the scene at that point in time,
but yeah, you have to hold back because anything that
you do absent a warrant, you're really running the risk
of that being thrown out from an evidentiary standpoint. And
if that pe and you never know, Dave, what is
actually going to be critical to proving the case or
(18:35):
disproving the case with any type of item. Let's say
that you have some kind of of instrument that might
create a particular pattern. Okay, if you discover that instrument
and you don't expecsily have permission to do that, or
(18:57):
the warrant is written inappropriately, or whatever the case might be,
then did you know that that item can't be included
as part of the evidence. And so you have to
That's why they're very very careful about these things because
for so many years, you know, people would just they
would go in to a scene and you know, with
(19:21):
their hair on fire and not not show up with
the appropri appropriate documentation relative to a warrant, and a
lot of stuff winds up being excluded, and if in
fact it is excluded, then that huge building block for
your case is blown at that moment in time, Dave,
all right.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
And in this case, when they when they get the
search warrant and they go in, they're able to get
past the open the living area where they didn't see anything.
They're able to get into the apartment, and it's when
they get to the bedroom that they realize, Okay, we
(20:00):
got a problem. We have a major problem. I remember
Sean go Rachel and Rachel Sheridan and Shaan Goh live
together in this apartment, and he has been arrested and
is at jail on other charges, not to do with
this particular case of Rachel at the time, Remember he
was in her car. And so it's the next morning
(20:24):
he's in jail, and they've gone into the apartment and
they find in the master in the bedroom that they share,
that something has occurred. They see signs of struggle, they
see signs that point to a bloody fight. Yeah, in
the bedroom. And it's from that point on and this
(20:44):
is my I was curious about this because how far
did they go? We people bleed, a bloody knows can
cause a lot of issues. I'm also clumsy. I tend
to trip and fall. So if something is knocked over,
if there's a little blood, you could explain that. But
we have a violent man in jail and we can't
(21:06):
find his living girlfriend, and so where do you go
from here?
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Yeah, and the blood can be easily explained by any
defense attorney. We've heard this over and over relative to DNA,
because if you're domiciled there, it's not unreasonable to expect
to be able to find blood that has issued forth
from one of the occupants that's that's also you know,
(21:32):
domiciled there, so and that can be explained away. Yeah,
I felt, you know, like you said, I tripped, I
hit my head, all right, that explains the blood that's there.
Or yeah, you know, when you're thinking about Rachel, maybe
Rachel had a bloody nose. I don't know about you.
I'm prone to bloody noses. You know. I can be
sitting in church and all of a sudden, I feel
(21:52):
that warmth, you know, beginning to run down my lip
and it just spontaneously happened. Well, any attorney worth their
salt can make that argument, you know, if you find
but when you have this kind of dynamic event that
has occurred inside of the dwelling, particularly in the bedroom,
(22:12):
this very intimate space, and you've got there's a level
of reasonableness that comes into this. So if you've got
you don't expect, say, cast off blood from an instrument
to be on the walls. If you have a bloody nose, okay,
you don't expect to be to find a mattress that
(22:35):
is super saturated with blood, or sheets and towels and
all these sorts of things and you know, maybe soaked
into carpet or onto the hardwood floor. And the patterns
themselves showed that this was a dynamic event with movement
and deposition and all these sorts of things that have
a certain level of velocity. You know, back to the
(22:57):
example of a bloody nose, if someone is standing there passively,
and that's a passive stain where it's just kind of
free falling through the air and it drops onto the
ground and it's kind of a classic droplet that you
would think that drops straight down and there's not much
dynamicism to it. You can have actually maybe multiple of
(23:21):
those spots, but you're not going to have it in
this kind of an elliptical pattern that occurs with a
little tail on it, you know, where it's cast off
and those sorts of things, so you have a reasonable
expectation that you would find blood there. But in an
environment like this, if you've got multiple locations where blood
(23:41):
has been shed, this is gonna you know, this is
going to give rise to this idea that an attack
probably occurred in this environment. But you know, Daved, the
thing about it is is that still, even though you
have this evidence that's there, you don't have a body.
(24:02):
And that's a problem in that moment, you don't have
a body, and that's the rub you know, you think about,
you know, the absence of in what a chill because
if you're a police officer, you're still thinking that if
if there is blood and there's no body, maybe there's
(24:25):
a chance she's still alive. Maybe there's a chance we
can find her. And unfortunately, you know in this case
that's that's not necessarily true.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Dave, Wow, Well, you know they're looking for Rachel Sheridan,
her living boyfriend is sitting cooling his heels in jail.
They find blood, a mess in the bedroom and then
they get the sanitation workers. At nine point thirty that morning,
they call nine to one one found a body. Now,
(24:58):
they did not do a whole lot to look at
the body. They found a body and stopped, which is incredible.
I don't I wonder when I saw this, I wonder
how many times people have found a body and immediately
started poking around at it versus stopping everything and calling
nine on one.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah, you know, I've had, I've had. I've had multiple
scenarios that have occurred. I've actually had civilians that have
come over. I've actually had civilians to do this with
decomposed bodies where and don't ask me what compels them
to do this, because when you're around a decomposed body,
(25:37):
it's most of the time it's one of the most
important things you can you know that you can encounter
in life. I've had civilians that have encountered bodies like
that and they they roll the body over, whereas I've
had I remember, in particular, I had an autoerotic case
with a gentleman that had hung himself on a door
(25:57):
on a door hinge with a dog cop nude in
a microtel if you're familiar with those, and the little
lady that was that was the housekeeper. She came to
the door and she had just arrived here in the country.
I think she was from Guatemala, if I'm not mistaken.
(26:20):
She couldn't speak English. She's pushing her cart up and
down the hall day and opens the door, and this
nude guy hanging by dog collar with his hands tied
is literally staring her in the face. And Dave, when
I got there, she the way she had alerted that
she had found the body was her screaming and she
was sitting this poor this poor lady was sitting on
(26:42):
the floor clutching her rosary with her knees pulled into
her chest, doing Hail Mary's in Spanish. And she was terrified.
So you never know what anybody's reaction is going to be,
you know, when it runs the gamut, you know, just
like deaths run the gamut. You don't know what you
going to find. But if you're a sanitation worker, you
(27:03):
come across some pretty disgusting things, as you can imagine,
as there's probably stuff that you and I could never fathom.
You know that those people encounter out there in the
streets of things that we throw away that they go
out and collect. And it's interesting how that initial contact
(27:23):
might very well impact the case or affect the position
of the body so that we don't necessarily appreciate it
in its pristine condition. But I can tell you this,
when they finally alerted the police in regards to this
young woman's body, they didn't touch it. They called and
(27:47):
what they discovered when the m he got out there
was horrific. Sean Go, this person that I would assume,
(28:11):
at one point in time, professed, you know, professed his
love for Rachel Sharonan told her that he cared about her,
told her he would take care of her. And you know,
you know who knows, you know, with these domestic cases
(28:32):
that we catch like this, Dave, nobody knows anybody. You
never know the level of violence that anyone is particularly
capable of because you don't know what their you know,
psychological history is. You don't know what their criminal history is.
But Dave, I got to tell you. With Shawn Go,
he he had he had a reputation as a bad seed,
(28:58):
if you.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Will, bad seed. Now that's a dated comment. You know.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
I also luck to use the term good egg every
now and then too. Just go with me.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
She was a bad egg. Another reference to Jim Wilder.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
Yep, there you go.
Speaker 2 (29:13):
The egdicator. So in this particular case with Sean Goh,
as we mentioned earlier, as soon as police saw him,
as they're standing outside the apartment trying to find the
very beginning part doing their welfare check on Rachel, they
see Sean in her vehicle and they give chase. He
takes off in bolts. They get him locked up. And
(29:34):
this isn't the first contact that Sean Goh has had
with police. At the time he's arrested, he was wanted
on a number of different issues. He allegedly stole a
handgun from a residence in the North Canton area a
couple of months before Rachel goes missing. He had physically
(29:58):
threatened Rachel in the and friends and family knew about
these threats because he didn't just make a threat and
that was it. He made threats and he actually punctured.
The actual stories is cut holes in her tires. Now
that I'm always picturing a puncture, you know, like with
a knife or a screwdriver or something, but cutting holes
(30:20):
in her tires seems to take it to a different level.
It's a different phrase than I've ever heard.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
But yeah, it does. That means that you're jamming you're
probably jamming a sharp instrument in there. And I'm not
talking about like a piece of rebar. I'm talking about
like a knife, and you're going you're you're carving the tires,
is what it comes down to now.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Going into the sidewall. So the tire cannot be repaired.
It will have to be replaced, which is a lot
more expensive. Ten bucks to patch a tire hole versus
you know, one hundred dollars for a whole tire.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
Oh yeah, yeah, and that's if you get a low
end tire. Right. And you know, this couple is unmarried,
they're living in an apartment together, she's driving a cheap liberty.
She doesn't strike me as somebody that's got a ton
of money. So when you strike out at her like this,
it's not just it's not just the violence that's implied,
it's also it puts a financial burden on her. He
(31:08):
would have known that because yeah, they yeah, absolutely, And
you never know what's going to set him off at
any particular time, what button is going to be pressed.
And you get somebody that has a history of violence,
I mean it violence extends for me when you go
to someone's home and you actually steal a weapon that's
(31:33):
that has that has a flavor of violence to it
in that environment, even if you don't have physical contact
or you're not threatening, you know, what's your purpose to
specifically go to a location and steal a gun and
then you have this action with the tires. I can understand, Dave,
I can understand why her mother would have been terrified.
(31:57):
Can you imagine? I bet there are so many times
she had probably spoken with her and this this again
is a thread I worry about you, darling. Please is
you know, can you break away from him? And you
never know what the dynamic is is somebody saying, you know,
oh I love him, He's going to change all this.
They never changed, Dave. They don't. It's it's it's the
(32:18):
same story over and over and over again, and you
wind up with something that winds up in this horror.
This horror showed that that's eventually discovered.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Just remember, any guy that will hit a woman once
is not going to stop at once.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
No.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
So here we have the sanitation workers called nine one one,
Rachel Sheridan's body. They find her at nine thirty or
that's when they call. So we know we have the
day the moment of discovery. But we don't know exactly
how long she has been dead because we don't know
(32:54):
other than the welfare check call. We know that police
recall specific time after she didn't show up for work,
but we don't know right now. Can they determined based
on the body they find at nine thirty in the morning,
can they go back in time and figure out approximate
time of death? Joe?
Speaker 1 (33:14):
Yeah, and I And just to give you a little insight,
you know, when they first rolled up on this case
at the home they the police had shown up I
think on July second, at about twelve thirty two pm,
so you're going into the afternoon hours at this point
(33:35):
in time. They were able to hook him up, you know,
because he bolted, you know, while they were there initially.
They actually found him on the third, and they got
on this pretty quick. I don't know if they were
able to track him somehow or you know where, if
they were pinging his phone or what exactly happened.
Speaker 2 (33:54):
They got it. I that was they got him at
a homeless shelter, right And I'm.
Speaker 1 (33:58):
Talking about his movement relative to depositing Rachel's body, because
they actually found her on July the third, So it
was it was actually less than twenty four hours when
they finally found her body. Yeah, it would be. She's
going to be at the outer margins, Dave, as far
as postmortem changes go, you know where we're looking for
(34:21):
the rigidity to begin to release also, and this is
in this is in July, Dave. And so it's gonna
it'll be hotter. And as I've mentioned before, when it
comes to obviously body temp and certainly riger mortis, those
are going to be slightly accelerated. And when they find her,
(34:44):
she's actually cocooned and plastic. So he's taken time to
wrap her body up in plastic and has driven out
to the Mother goose Land area and found a plastic
track can not unlike you know what we have at
our homes that we roll out to the street if
(35:04):
you live in town, and you know, you put by
the road and the garbage guys come by and pick
it up, and you know, it was just the sanitation workers,
you know that looked into the can and saw and
can you imagine their horror, you know when they lift
that lid up and they look inside and there's her
(35:26):
body inside of this of a rubbish container, you know,
the things that you discard. And I think that says
a lot here, Dave. It speaks to potentially how he
viewed her as as refuse, something to be thrown away,
treated horribly, And there's it's fascinating to me, as horrific
(35:51):
as this is. As horrific as this is when bodies
are cocooned like this, for us in forensics, it's actually
there's an upside to this. The upside is is that
there's a containment of evidence that takes place. So anything
that's on the body, you have the opportunity to retain that,
(36:15):
and not just retain it. Here's the cool part. You
actually keep it in place on the specific surfaces of
the body if it's deepended upon how it's secured. So
let's just say you've got a you've got a bit
of evidence, say a hair or something that's on the shoulder.
(36:37):
If they're cocooned in this wrapping, you can still find
that hair in place on the shoulder and it might
give you an indication as to where his hands were
on her or where his head was in relation to
her body. Did he slough hair, did it fall off
of his head onto her bloody handprint that may transfer
(37:01):
to her clothes because you know, you're having to manipulate
dead weight here. If there's been a spillach of blood
that's so significant, he can get blood on his hands,
transfer those contact points to her shirt, maybe the cuffs
of her pants, maybe to her bare legs. Drag her
onto the sheeting, the plastic sheeting, wrap her up in it.
(37:23):
The other thing that it protects because plastic is a
non poor surface, it protects layton prints, Dave. We've recovered
latent prints off of plastic sheeting before. And then if
there's blood involved, that's a different type of print from say,
for instance, a latent print that's oil. That's the you know,
(37:43):
generated from the oil in our fingertips. If he touches
her body with the bare hands and he transfers his
fingerprint onto that surface and it's the medium is actually blood,
that's a different type of print that can be recovered.
So the fact that her body is cocooned, even though
(38:03):
it's in this filthy rubbish container, she's kind of protected
in that sense. But that's not really what turned this case, Dave.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
Is it they're able to determine Police say that you know,
she was attacked in the bedroom and then her body
was drug and placed and the damage, the wounds were
inflicted about her head, yeah, for the most part. And
they said she was beaten with an object. And they're
(38:34):
only willing, they being police and the medical examiner. They're
only about to go as far as saying that she
was hit with a hammer at least once. And I
find that to be an odd comment. There was only
of all the battering that was going on, Yeah, one
was obviously a hammer. I mean, they weren't.
Speaker 1 (38:56):
All right, so if and they also believe, if I'm
not mistaken, that she was probably asleep when this occurred. Sorry, yeah,
and no, that's a significant point. So this coward waits
until this diminutive and she is diminutive, Dave, a young
(39:22):
woman is asleep, and he begins to essentially wail on her.
It's not surprising that they're identifying a single hammer strike here.
They found a hammer at the scene. But you know,
this is not something that is well thought out. This
(39:46):
is very frenzied. They were able to delineate that she
had been struck, that she had ten specific injuries that
apparently are all blunt force trauma, and this coward could
have potentially have shown up with a hammer, or he
(40:07):
could have beaten her in her sleep with his fist,
striking her all about her head, and then he goes
and gets a hammer, and she's so she's so wrung out.
I mean, just imagine if you're awakened from a dead sleep,
(40:29):
and I know you can imagine this, if you have kids,
you can imagine this. You're slumbering, you finally lay your
head on the pillow and suddenly there's a scream that
lets out in the middle of the night in your house.
You're completely diswarriented. How much more so with her if
she doesn't see this incoming and she's attacked in her
(40:50):
bedroom like this, And I guess the you know, the
coup de gras is going to be to take a
hammer and have this single hammer strike. The way they
were able to delineate this specific injury away from the others,
and I'm not saying that the others could not be
(41:10):
hammer strikes, because hammer can be held in any number
of ways. And this was, by the way, a claw hammer,
which means it's got a nail extractor on the back
of it. With the two prongs the very common hammer
that we see and that most of us own. This
is actually the blunt and end, the leading edge that
she's struck with, and hammer strikes are very specific when
(41:33):
you see them in the morgue. When we're doing these examinations,
what would happen is her head would be probably completely
shaved at autopsy because it's impossible to appreciate all of
the injuries. And so when a body is when you
have head strikes like this with women in particular, because
(41:57):
women commonly have more hair than guys, do, we actually
shaved their heads at autopsy.
Speaker 2 (42:05):
I got to ask you something, Joe, and maybe this
seems silly and no, but would you have to ask
the family about that?
Speaker 1 (42:14):
No? No, I've had that question asking me before. This
is a search. No, we'll tell the funeral director, okay,
and the funeral director generally will. Now we've had families
that will ask the question, you know, why did you
do this? And here's the sole reason where it's an
(42:36):
evidentiary search. You know, you're you're trying to assess the family.
I think you know as time goes by, because they
probably can't have an open casket. And there have been
times where we've had these really traumatic events where I've
seen them get wigs, and funeral homes are good about
doing that. Hats. People will put hats on individuals and
(43:01):
if they're going to have a viewing. But your sole
purpose here is I'll put it to you this way, knowing,
and I don't want to put words into this precious
woman's mother's mouth. But would you rather her head be
shaved and us appropriately assess these insults to her head?
(43:25):
Or do you want to run the risk of having
an incomplete assessment and this guy's back on the streets.
You know, I know which one I'm going to pick,
And because I want I want every I want every
ounce of retribution that I can get if I'm a
parent here. And so when we shave the head, and
(43:48):
sometimes we'll do it selectively, we were very very careful though,
and the more because and these are hard and this
is one of the problems to run into. You'll see
like when you get a hammer strike, you'll actually have
an abrasion, Okay that you have to pay real close
attention to to see because it's so ghastly, because you'll
(44:09):
have a laceration. Many times that occurs so you've got
two things happening. That top layer of skin is abraided
and you'll see the little margins of it because the
skin is rubbed because it's coming in contact with this
metal object. Then the skin will split. Okay, sometimes on
the skin you can see the pattern like a it'll
(44:32):
look like a quarter almost. If it's a flush strike,
then depend upon the level of force. And I've seen
this happen. When you get below that layer of the
scalp and you get onto what's referred to as the
external table of skull, you'll see a plug of bone
day that's also shaped like a quarter, and it's depressed,
(44:53):
which means the bone actually sinks in to a criminal
vault at that point in time, and you know, impacts
the brain directly and it'll you know, many times the
bone will fragment and the little shards of bone will
go into the brain. That's incompatible with life. Not to mention,
you know, just a concussive event of this that leads
to death. The question is was he striking her with
(45:16):
a fist beforehand he had the hammer at the ready
and then used it, or was he holding the hammer
in a way that you couldn't really tell if it
was a hammer strike or not, Like if it's on
the one of the edges, for instance, I don't see
that happening, because even if you strike somebody with the
edge of a hammer, you're gonna have these kind of
linear marks that occur on the soft tissue either way.
(45:40):
Either way, they were able to determine that she did
die as a result of blunt force trauma. And thankfully,
very very thankfully, Sean Go is no longer among the
land of the free. He's now been convicted and now
(46:05):
he's awaiting sentencing. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
Bodybacks
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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