October 3, 2023 • 33 mins
Kensie Aubry, a 32-year-old woman hungry for a new chapter in her life, tragically finds herself the victim of a man's nightmarish fantasy, leading to her horrific murder. As her last known whereabouts in Independence, Missouri become the center of a desperate search, Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack delve into this unsettling case. They unpack the haunting realities that blur the lines between dark fantasies and unspeakable actions, exploring how one individual's twisted imagination led to a gruesome reality. The episode navigates the complexities of the foster care system, highlights the courage it takes for survivors to speak up, and provides an intricate look at the role of body identification in solving missing persons cases. Whether discussing the gruesome details of chainsaw dismemberment or the intricacies of matching tool marks on bones, this episode is a sobering reminder of the urgent need to bring justice to the lost and give voice to the silent.
Time-coded Highlights:
00:00:00 — Joseph Scott Morgan introduces the episode by exploring the human fascination with dark fantasies. He unpacks the depraved fantasy behind Kensie Aubry’s murder.
00:03:00 — Dave Mack elaborates on Kensie's last known whereabouts.
00:04:00 — Missing persons' reports and their intricacies are discussed.
00:05:00 — The conversation continues on the importance of intricate physical details for identification.
00:07:21 — A brave abuse survivor’s role in solving the case is revealed by Dave Mack.
00:09:12 — Joe Scott emphasizes how crucial revelations were for the investigation.
00:10:56 — The twisted relationship between Maggie Ybarra and Michael Hendricks is dissected.
00:14:00 — Dave shares a chilling confession leading to Michael Hendricks’ arrest.
00:15:20 — Morgan explains how X-ray machines can aid in identifying dismembered remains.
00:16:00 — The process of revealing tattoos on decomposed skin is shared.
00:16:40 — An in-depth look into the permanence of tattoos.
00:19:00 — Joseph Scott Morgan ponders the changing significance of prison tattoos for identification.
00:22:45 — Joe Scott recalls a haunting tale of a murder involving a frozen body. He speculates on why murderers might opt to freeze their victims.
00:27:20 — Dave and Joe ponder the logistics of dismembering a frozen body versus a non-frozen one.
00:30:03 — The investigation challenges are highlighted by Joe Scott Morgan.
00:33:34 — The episode concludes as Dave Mack heralds the hero who provided crucial information for the case.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Every one of us,
and I mean every one of us, have some fantasy.
We have a fantasy to involve ourselves in something that
we think is going to bring us joy, peace, bring us,
(00:30):
maybe for a moment, some area of safety. But you
know that there are people out there where they have fantasies,
and these fantasies extend into very very deep, dark places.
I've borne witness to the outcomes many times of actions
that people have taken as a result of some kind
(00:53):
of fantasy that they might have. But I can't remember
a case that is any more horrific than the one
that we're going to talk about today. It involves a
young lady by the name of Kinsey Aubrey, and her
life became intertwined with a fantastical narrative that a monster
(01:13):
created and brought her into, and she wound up dead.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags, Dave mac.
I know that all of us entertained some type of fantasies.
As I've said, most of us. The fantasies that we have,
I think are are good ones. They were seeking out
(01:34):
to get away from whatever our mundane, humdrum lives are,
or maybe we're going through some tough times in our
life and we just want to escape, even just for
a moment. We fantasize about having a bank full of money,
or living on an island somewhere, or in a mountain
cabin with a rushing stream, someplace where we can find peace.
But isn't it amazing that some people, when they entertained fantasies,
(01:59):
they're not necess necessarily seeking peace. And the case that
we have today, I have to say to you, the
individual that is responsible for the homicide that we're going
to talk about, it's actually two people, but one primary
their fantasy actually involved arguably one of the most horrific
things that someone could conceive.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Kensey Aubrey Kensey thirty two years old. She is looking
for a fresh start. She was looking to live out
her fantasy of life at the age of thirty two.
A lot of us have made a number of mistakes
in our twenties. It's almost like you know your friends,
and when you're in your twenties, a friend college gen
and says, hey, Joe, let's go to the beach for
the night. Okay, in your thirties, are like, really, what
(02:39):
car are we taking in your forties? You're like, I
got to plan that.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Yeah, I got to make sure all my prescriptions are filled.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah. And in the case of Kensey Aubrey, she was
looking for a fresh start and that's what brought her
to impact with this other man's fantasy. Her fantasy is
to begin her life over again. Kensey last seen in
October in Independence, Missouri. She was from Kansas City and
her mom said she just wanted a fresh start in life.
That's all she wanted, and so she went with some friends.
(03:08):
She didn't go on her own. She had a plan,
and she leaves home to start a new life, and
she ends up running into somebody who also had a
dream a fantasy. Hers was to live a simpler life,
to get her ducks in a row and move forward
with life. His not so much. I always go back
to the very beginning of the missing person's report to
find out who we're looking for, what kind of person
(03:30):
are they. Oftentimes you can find out a lot about
where you're going to find them when you know the
end by their missing person that's not indicated here. Her
missing person report was very simple, Joe. Mom hasn't seen her.
Family usually has a lot of contact with her. Last
had contact October seventh. Last known to be with two
men and a woman, Kansas City, and we don't know
where she is.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
That's actually something you know. At the medical Examiner's office,
people think about the police. You go to see the police,
and you file a missing person's report. In a lot
of big city Atlanta being one where I used to work,
we actually had a missing person's file as well, and
that information did not come to us from the police.
(04:11):
We would have family members that would reach out to
us because many times family would assume the worst, and
sometimes it actually came to fruition, and we would have
a mom or a dad, or even a spouse that
would literally show up at the emmy's office. I've had
them come in Dave at two o'clock in the morning
and they'll say, I'm looking for my husband, or I'm
(04:33):
looking we're looking for our daughter. They just could not
take it any longer. And so you're sitting there at
a table with a family who has either been to
the police and they didn't receive satisfaction, or they completely
skipped the police, and they come directly to you to
the morgue, And we used to have a saying that
many times, particularly with spouses, people would we always felt
(04:56):
like there was that one group of people that would
come to the medical ex and say, have you seen
my wife? Have you seen my husband? Knowing full well
that the person was come back home, and then when
the person does show back home, they can actually say
to them, I even went to the medical Examiner's office
to look for you. That kind of thing. But when
(05:16):
we would sit down, you actually have a checklist that
you go down because the information is so very detailed
for us, and it is equally for the police. But
from a forensic standpoint, what we would have is we
would have this questionnaire that we would run through with
family members and it would cover everything from shoe size
(05:36):
to any other clothing articles, what did they tend to wear,
hair color, eye color. Have they had any surgeries or
do they have surgical scars, Do they have any kind
of surgical replacements like hips or do they have pins
in their joints? Have they ever had a heart surgery?
Have they had any kind of dental work whatsoever? Because
(05:58):
many times that's what everything hinges on. Unfortunately, many of
the cases that we get kind of a rise out
of a set of skeletal remains that we will find.
And one of the most resilient items there is going
to be the dentition because it survives even beyond bone
many times. And so if you have somebody that has
a restoration of some kind, or maybe there is a
(06:18):
tooth that is missing in an anti mortem state out
of a skull, that's going to be a specific indicator.
So we would have this long list that we would
go down and then we would list the person's name,
and then the family would leave us with that data.
And it's a great place to start from. So if
we ever got an unidentified body that came in from
the field in some way they found a skeleton or
(06:38):
maybe just a decomposing body, we would go back through
our files first off and say, well, has this person
been reported missing? The police are much broader because most
of the time they're looking for a living individual that
may of on their own free will and volition, just
decided to shake the dust off their sandals and go
somewhere else, and you have no idea where they are
(06:59):
where they wound up. And that's just the way it works.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
I'm glad you said it that way, because that's kind
of what it was here, you know, because mom was
like Kinsey left. I know, she had a rough life
growing up. She's trying to find her own way. Now
as an adult, she's thirty two, she can go wherever
she wants. Last scene with this two men and this
woman in Independence, Missouri with somebody please help me find
my daughter. And as you were talking about that, I
(07:21):
was thinking, you know, she did have some tattoos. Five
foot three, one hundred and thirty to one hundred and
fifty pounds. They had all that in the descriptor of
what to be looking for, but they didn't know it
at the time. But they weren't looking for her anymore.
It came to us from a teenager. A teenager in
the foster care system had been sexually molested by a
forty year old man. That's what broke the story. A
(07:44):
teenager who actually had the wherewithal to stand up and say,
this person abused me, and you're not going to believe
what else he told me. You're not going to believe
what else I've seen.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Look, foster care is great, and there have been some
fantastic success stories, but I can tell you this from
an investigative standpoint. I've heard a lot of horror stories too,
and you never know where one of these poor kids
is going to land, and then what is going to
suddenly appear before their sight, what's going to be injected
into their already troubled life. This is a child, Dave,
(08:18):
which we can't reveal their name, But this is a
child like many foster children, who want a home, who
want to be loved, who want to be taken care of,
that want to give love and return. But yet when
you enter into this environment, many times trust is betrayed
and then they're left broken. But you talk about courage,
(08:41):
I cannot imagine the courage that this young person had
to come forward and reveal one of the most evil
things that has ever been reported to that police department.
(09:11):
Don't know about you, Dave, But when I've lost something,
I have to have a place to start. I have
to have some kind of information, and most of the
time that information arises from my very faulty memory. But
other times I'll have other people in my life that
will say, last time I saw you, you had this
here or you had this there. When you're talking about
(09:32):
something as big as a missing person's case. Can't tell
you how many times investigators have scratched their heads over
cases where they don't ever find anything. And to have
a young person, a teenager, come forward with information that
is so incredibly troubling, disturbing, and mind blowing, I can
(09:52):
only imagine the response that these officers had when they
were told this tale.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
People in the past carry system young people. We know
that there's a lot of bad situations there. They're oftentimes
taken out of a bad situation and placed in foster
care where they become a victim again of another predator
of a different type. Here's the case of this unnamed teenager.
She actually knew this woman named Maggie Yebara, the team
that we're talking about. She had been removed from a
(10:20):
home that Maggie Yebara was in. I don't know what
their relationship is, but the teenager knew Maggie and she
was living in foster care. She went looking for Maggie.
They had a relationship to when she was a small child.
Now Maggie Yebara is thirty years old. We know this
girl's a teen, we don't know how old, but she
knew Maggie Yabara as a child and she went looking
(10:44):
for her. As a teen, she found Maggie Yabara, and
Maggie Yabara was involved romantically with a forty year old
man named Michael Hendrix. Michael Hendrix and Maggie Yavara had
had a really wild sex life, if you want to
call it that. It was violent, it was fantasy of stuff.
(11:08):
I don't know how people fantasize things. I know there's
different strokes for different folks. But this teenage girl who
looked up a woman from her childhood, and it opened
the door to Satan's hell itself because Maggie Yabara showed
this girl a picture of a woman who was being
sexually abused. She had photos on her phone of a naked,
(11:31):
bound and gagged woman and there were other images on
the phone depicting dismembered human remains. Now, I don't know
if Maggie Yebara showed these pictures to the teen as
a threat. This could be you. I don't know, because
we haven't had a chance to find out who she is.
I just know that she's braver than I would have
been in my teens.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, and I think that part of this. You might
be right. Those were being used as leverage perhaps, or
if it can get any sicker, maybe as an enticement.
I can't imagine how someone's mind would work if you're
trying to entie someone into a specific behavior. But isn't
it correct that Michael Hendrix actually wound up abusing I think,
(12:13):
sexually abusing this team as well, did he not?
Speaker 2 (12:18):
She tells police that while he was sexually abusing her,
while he was set well, my forty year old Michael
Hendricks is sexually abusing this teenage girl. He is telling
her what he has done. He likes killing, He has
a sexual fantasy. And she actually said to police that
(12:38):
he likes killing. He gets excited, it gets him off
to kill. That's what he told this girl while he
was sexually abusing her. That's what she was hearing. It
all leads to a missing person because the photos on
that phone were of the missing woman we told you
about at the very beginning. It was the woman whose
(12:59):
mother called police and said, I haven't heard from my
thirty two year old daughter. She left Kansas City. She
was headed to Independence to start a new life, and
I haven't heard from her. In a while can you
help me find my daughter and Joe, they couldn't find her.
And even when they found something and they got the
information from this unnamed teen girl, we know she's been
(13:19):
threatened with abuse. We know she's been abused. We know
she's seen horrible photos. She's seen a naked woman bounding gag,
sexually abused. We know the girl is sexually abused, and
we know that she's been showing pictures of a dismembered woman.
The teenage girl told the police that forty year old
Michael Hendrix molested her and told her he killed a woman.
He put her body in the freezer and then cut
(13:39):
her up and buried the remains a lot.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Of data there to try to understand and understand the
scope of it. From an investigative perspective, it's important to
understand how I was talking about the questionnaire that we
fill out for the medical examiner when we would interview
family members. For instance, one of the key things is
that we look for any kind of specific identification on
(14:03):
an individual. And we do know that Kensy's body, when
the body was finally recovered, had been dismembered, and it's
difficult to try to get a body identified anyway that's
in a state of decomposition. But when you have a
body that has in fact been piecemealed out like this,
(14:24):
and I'll get into that in just a moment how
this was achieved allegedly, then you have to look at
the individual elements of the body that are left behind
to try to understand who they might be. Well, what
are you going to look for a person as young
as Kensy. You're not necessarily going to see a lot
of surgical events that have taken place. You know, that's
one of the things that we commonly look for. You
(14:45):
might have evidence of bone breakage, and we can actually
pick up on that on X ray because we will
in the morgue, we have our own X ray machines.
We will x ray the individual dismembered remains. Say, if
you have an arm, a lower leg, and an upper leg,
maybe even head, you will X ray those items individually
to see if there's anything that you can see without
(15:07):
the aid of something you would not otherwise see. So,
if you've got an old fracture line that can be identified,
but even with decomposing remains, it's kind of fascinating if
you've got, for instance, still soft tissue on a human
leg or arm, or maybe even the back. Did you
know that, as decayed as the body might be, that
(15:30):
top layer of skin on the body, the epidermis. You
can take the edge of a scalpel and begin to
scrape away the epidermis, and all you see is this
kind of black greenish discoloration. But you might just buy
eyeball in it. You might be able to see something
just beneath it. And I cannot tell you how many
(15:51):
times I've actually done this with a scalpel blade, where
you just kind of scrape away. It almost looks like
you're shaving. But as you begin to scrape that away,
suddenly you find a tattoo. It's a pretty profound moment
for you from an identification standpoint, where you can remove
that top layer of decomposing tissue and still appreciate. That's
how resilient tattoos are.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
How deep did they go?
Speaker 1 (16:12):
They go pretty deep, I mean well down into the dermis,
and so that's why it's such an arduous task to
have them removed. It's not as bad as it used
to be, but it is still something that procedure in
and of itself is not something that's pleasant to have
to go through, but the skin is essentially inked and stained,
(16:33):
you know now forever, amen. And as you scrape away
that top layer, many times you can truly appreciate a tattoo.
And if you apply I think that it's hydrogen peroxide.
We would do that in the morgue and kind of
let it bubble to get out a lot of the
dirt that's in there. Sometimes you can kind of bring
them back to life and see them see some level
(16:54):
of vibrancy in the midst of all of this decay.
You can even go back as far as and I
urge anybody, because I've told you before I'm a history guy.
You go back and you look at the bog bodies
that were covered out of Denmark, and I think some
of the British isles they had rudimentary tattoos on the body.
And this was back in the copper Age. They had tattoos.
You can still see those on some of those bodies
(17:16):
now because the bodies are so well preserved out of
the bog, you can still pick up on a lot
of indicators that might tell you what the point of
origin is. Here's the problem with tattoos nowadays. Though, because
everybody has them. It used to be where when you
were using a tattoo specifically identify a body, many tattoo
artists came from particular schools of training, and you can
(17:38):
actually kind of trace a familial lineage to the training. Nowadays,
there are tattoo shops everywhere. You don't necessarily have to
sit at the feet of a master to learn, and
many times tattoos all look the same to us. I'm
no officionado, but it's not as distinctive, say, for instance,
that it once was. When we're trying to get a
(17:59):
body an there's any number of things that we're going
to look for. And when you're standing over a grave,
as in a clandestine grave, as these investigators were out
there in Missouri, they had when they cracked up in
the ground, they certainly had more questions than they did answers.
(18:38):
So many times during my career I stood over severely
decomposing human remains and I would think, and this is
back at the morgue. Even I would think to myself,
how in the world are we going to make sense
of this? And I don't want to screw anything up
relative to examination or collection of evidence, because everything just
appears so fragile and isn't it great? Though, just like
(19:02):
anything in life where you have a few answers prior
to setting out on this kind of intellectual voyage of
discovery if you're a scientist.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
The teenage victim here is where we get a lot
of our information. First of all, I want to go
back to the original relationship because as I was digging deeper,
where we find out that this teenage girl that we
found out all the info from that she actually looked
up Maggie Yabara. Maggie is the thirty year old girlfriend
of forty year old Michael Hendrix, who actually is charged
with they're both charged by the way. But I founded
(19:32):
this teen girl when she was a younger child, was
actually in the care of Maggie Yabara. So she had
that type of relationship, digging it back to her child.
So she tracks Maggie Yabara down. She's looking for that relation.
This is a foster care child who's looking for her home.
She's looking and that's why I think there's some relationship here.
The reason the girl was removed from Maggie's care as
(19:55):
a child is because one of Maggie's boyfriends at the
time sexually molested this girl, who is now a teenager.
The teenager now tracks Maggie down. Maggie shows her these
pictures of a dead body, and we know that Michael
Hendricks sexually molested the girl, the teen girl, and while
he was doing it, he told her that he got
(20:16):
off on killing people, that it got him excited sexually. Now,
the teen girl tells the police that she was told
that Michael Hendrix choked the woman out that he killed,
that he choked her out and then stuffed her body
in the freezer and cut her up with a chainsaw
(20:37):
before burying her. And Joe, I want to go right
back to the very beginning on this a Why put
a body in a freezer? Isn't that going to make
it even more difficult to cut up? And we're told
the girl that the girl was told that she was
choked out, that she was murdered by choking, but we don't.
Is there a way to prove that after the body's
(20:57):
been frozen and cut up?
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Yes? And yeah, let me kind of break this down
to you. And I'm going to start off by telling
you a very brief story. When I was still working
in New Orleans. I had a case that I'd never
had ever before encountered anything like this. I had a
guy who was a cook's first mate on an international
oil tanker. It was a Korean crew and he got
(21:20):
into a fight with the chef on the ship, and
the chef took a meat cleaver and hit this guy.
I think, if I remember correctly, the count was like
in excess of one hundred and sixty times, and they
were coming around the horn in South America. They took
the victim's body and put it into the deepris and
(21:42):
they've got like the super duper depries on the ships,
which I was not aware of. The first port that
they put into was actually in my jurisdiction on the
Mississippi River. And so we caught the case. And it
was something, I mean, we had to get like the
Korean consulate involved in it, and all sorts of the
ship had a Liberian registry. But we kind of got
(22:03):
things figured out. But when we got this guy's body,
they did There was a scene in Goodfellas where they
said when they got Carbone's body, it was frozen so stiff.
They had to wait for three days before they could
do the autopsy. That is the truth. This guy's body
was frozen so thoroughly that we had to allow him
to thaw out before we could do the autopsy. However,
(22:24):
it was an experience because everything, in a literal sense
was frozen in time. So all of those injuries that
this person had sustained as a result of that attack
remained in place. They didn't change. They didn't change as
a result of decomposition. So with our victim here, with
(22:45):
this young woman who has now been killed, and we
have information that she has been strangled, essentially she's placed
in a deep freeze, those insults that she sustained to
her body paused. Now, bodies never completely ceased decomposing, even
in cool temperatures. It just it kind of retards the
(23:07):
progression of it. So in this particular case, it's going
to slow it down. It's not going to go at
as quick as speed. Remember we talked about heat bringing
about decomposition in a very quick manner, But it will
slow this process down. And so those marks that you
might see around the neck if you're talking about a
manual strangulation, those contused areas are still going to be there.
(23:28):
But I had a real thought about this what would
be the utility and why would you freeze a body
after you have taken this poor girl's life. And here's
what I came to a conclusion. This is a conclusion.
I came to you from an investigative perspective. First off,
you're trying to think about what to do with the body,
(23:49):
you know, can you imagine? And I hope you can't,
but just imagine if you will. You've just killed a
human being in this fever that you're in because of
this fantasy world in which you're in dwell and now
you have this oh my god moment where it's like, Okay,
I finally fulfilled this fantasy. Now what am I going
to do with the remains? Now? This Hendrix guy, he
(24:12):
lives and this is just outside Kansas City, by the way,
where they finally recover her body. He's got a fantastic property.
I'm only get the pictures of this thing, and it's
absolutely it'll knock your socks off. I mean it's gorgeous,
very pretty, very big, beautiful house, an outdoor workshop, beautiful
green grass, rolling hills. He has got enough land it
(24:33):
would appear that he could get rid of a body.
He has access to this property at least, and you
look where the body is actually found, and it's immediately
adjacent to one of the buildings. So it's almost like
he didn't go to a great deal of effort to
try to find some isolated rural area to get rid
of her. In my assumption was it was convenient and
(24:57):
he had nothing but time on his hands. So to
say that he's killed her and he makes the decision,
I'm going to freeze the body. That way, I can
have a pause, so I can decide, I can get
all my tools together, I can make up my mind
as to how I want to handle this. What's a
rural setting. You're not going to really raise an eyebrow
if you hear a chainsaw going off, right.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
You think about a body that would be just the skin,
it would just be torn that the chainsaw would just
be gummed and I don't mean to make light of it,
but gummed up with the body part, the skin and
the tissue and the muscle. It's a big mess.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
It is a big mess, but not with a frozen body.
It's not a frozen body literally becomes frozen to the core.
It's almost dave like you're dealing with a piece of wood.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Wow, with the body. Once you freeze the body, it
would make it easier to cut up than if it
wasn't frozen.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Correct, Absolutely, If you have a tool like a chainsaw
or a skill saw perhaps or bandsaw some kind, Yeah,
it would make it very easy to do, all right.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
But we all know that decomposing bodies smell that they
have a very I promise you, if you've ever smelled this,
you will never forget it. It will always come back to
you and you know immediately. By the way, I think
people know what the smell of decomposing flesh is even
before they've ever smelled it before, because it is so
unique to human beings and what we smell like when
we are decomposing. Does freezing stop that process? And will
(26:19):
the body still as it thaws out? Once you've cut
the body up and you're going to bear it, would
it then as it thaws would it start to have
an odor? Or would it have an odor when it's frozen.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
No, it would in my estimation, if her body went
into that freezer as soon as she died or within
say an hour, all right, and she shut up in there,
the really pronounced decompositional odor that you get with advanced
decomposition that is not current at this point. That's why
I say that it retards the process. It literally backs
(26:51):
it up, and that's why it's so difficult many times
to try to pinpoint. There are a number of cases
out there where people have killed in visuals and place
them in a freezer and then they go to thaw
them out later, so that decompositional process as the body thaws,
it kicks in as if the person has just dyed.
(27:12):
I think one of the most entertaining movies I've ever
seen is this thing with Jack Black called Bernie, and
it's based on a true story about this funeral director
killed this woman in Texas. I recommend this movie to anybody.
It's absolutely fascinating. It's got Matthew McConaughey in it and
Shirley MacLean. It's a fascinating movie, it really is, and
it's really based on a true story and the victim
(27:32):
in this case was actually placed into a deep free
so it facilitates mainly not creating a mess. Because if
you think about this high speed blade of a chainsaw,
and it is a chain with tiny individual little blades
on it. That's literally grinding through tissue. If you do
this with something soft, you're going to have this tremendous
(27:53):
amount of cast off, high speed cast off that's going
all over the place. I've actually got a colleague of
mine who within the last couple of years has worked
a case where an individual was dismembered with chains on
the back of a pickup truck. And it was a
bloody mess, literally, and there was blood cast off that went,
(28:13):
and it was done in the bed of the truck.
It was cast off over the cab of the truck,
down the front of the truck, and even onto the
leading edge of the truck where the grill is. And
so it's kind it's a fascinating dynamic because it's a
high speed event. But if you now have frozen tissue,
it's like I was saying before, when you're going through
(28:35):
this tissue and it's frozen solid, it's like going through
a piece of wood. So you're really you're encountering something here.
As an investigator, if you're trying to pin down a timeline,
the data that you're working with is going to be
greatly skewed. If you're looking to get some kind of
indication from a biological marker here, because decomposition has been
(28:57):
thwarted at this point. Now, once these individual remains are
placed into the ground, all bets are off because you
will get decomposition going on and it will pick up
pretty quickly. And if the body is not in a
sealed state or a cocoon state, it's even going to
probably speed this along as well. And you have to
(29:20):
think about it. Another thing, was the body clothed or unclosed?
Because now after I find out as an investigator, this
young girl is relating to me the story that she's heard. Hey,
I was told that this body was dismembered with a chainsaw.
Let that sink in Well, I want to do everything
I can on my warrant. When I draw up this
(29:40):
warrant and I go search this guy's property, which they
wound up doing, I'm looking for that chainsaw because I'm
going to try to find a couple of things from
a perspective of fiber evidence. I want to know if
there are any bits of cloth that are caught up
in here. And you can clean an item to a
certain degree, but you're always going to miss something. And
then from there, I'm going to look for things like hair.
(30:01):
I want to know if there's any hair left behind.
I want to know if underneath and in the edges
of any of these little saw blades, if there are
any skin at all, period I want to know if
that's there. If I can find any skin cells, then
I'm going to look for muscle, and all of these
tissues microscopically are specifically identifiable. If you can find a
bit of that on there and you can look at
(30:22):
it under the scope, you can get an idea. It's
one of the things we learned in microscopic anatomy. You
can tell the difference between skin cells and muscle cells
and bone cells, and there will be bone cells as well,
because the bone is being pulpified at the same time,
because it kicks up and it creates almost like a
histamine mist. If you've ever seen an animal that's been
(30:44):
butchered and has been placed on a bandsaw, it almost
looks like sawdust dave, and so it leaves behind that
residue as well, so you've got all of these bits
of trace evidence that can be tied back to that chainsaw.
Not to mention the unique tool marks that are left
behind on these bones when you get the bone out
(31:06):
of the grave and that chainsaw is in your possession.
If you really want to try to prove this thing,
you send this to a tool mark examiner and what
they'll do is they'll take like a bovine, a cowbone
or pig bone, and they will try to duplicate these
marks on that bone with said chainsaw and find out
if they can duplicate those marks and if they marry
(31:28):
up to the marks and the bones they recover from
the grave, and you've got ownership of the chainsaw. But
can you put that chainsaw into his hand. Well, we've
got circumstantial information from this young girl that says that
he admitted or that this woman, this other party had
stated that the body was in fact dismembered with a chainsaw.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
One of the things we found out as this case
has gone on, this thirteen year old girl that we've
talked about, she's the hero in this case. You have
a mother looking for her daughter, women looking for a
new fresh start, and she ends up in the hands
of these evil people. That thirteen year old girl that
talked about seeing the pictures, she was sexually abused by
this forty year old man who told her that he
gets off on it. Found out a trial that believe
(32:08):
it or not, Yabarra's mother, whose name is Ruth Loans,
she knew about the body being cut up. She was
shown pictures and she testified that these people actually tried
to get rid of the body by putting it in
plastic totes, taking it up in a helicopter, and dumping
it over water. But the plastic totes floated, so they
had to get the toats of the body parts out
(32:29):
and that's when they said they were going to bury
it on the property. And that's why it took time.
They tried several different things to get rid of that
body before they buried it on that man's property. But
we have a thirteen year old girl who was sexually
abused by this man, and I'm assuming her mother at
this point. Think about it. She's thirty, the girl's thirteen.
She was the girl was taken away from Yebarra when
she was a small child because Ybarra's boyfriends were sexually
(32:52):
abusing her as a child. She tracks her mother down,
mom shows her pictures of this membered body. I mean,
all of it kind of comes together.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
Joe, Yeah, it does, and It's very sad that she
cycled back into this horror show that's such a very
young and tender age. What she has borne witness to
From just the perspective of horror, most people could live
three lifetimes and never be exposed to anything like this.
But at the end, both Yabarah and Hendrix have both
(33:23):
been convicted. They're going to be in jail for a
long long time. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks.
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Every one of us,
and I mean every one of us, have some fantasy.
We have a fantasy to involve ourselves in something that
we think is going to bring us joy, peace, bring us,
(00:30):
maybe for a moment, some area of safety. But you
know that there are people out there where they have fantasies,
and these fantasies extend into very very deep, dark places.
I've borne witness to the outcomes many times of actions
that people have taken as a result of some kind
(00:53):
of fantasy that they might have. But I can't remember
a case that is any more horrific than the one
that we're going to talk about today. It involves a
young lady by the name of Kinsey Aubrey, and her
life became intertwined with a fantastical narrative that a monster
(01:13):
created and brought her into, and she wound up dead.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags, Dave mac.
I know that all of us entertained some type of fantasies.
As I've said, most of us. The fantasies that we have,
I think are are good ones. They were seeking out
(01:34):
to get away from whatever our mundane, humdrum lives are,
or maybe we're going through some tough times in our
life and we just want to escape, even just for
a moment. We fantasize about having a bank full of money,
or living on an island somewhere, or in a mountain
cabin with a rushing stream, someplace where we can find peace.
But isn't it amazing that some people, when they entertained fantasies,
(01:59):
they're not necess necessarily seeking peace. And the case that
we have today, I have to say to you, the
individual that is responsible for the homicide that we're going
to talk about, it's actually two people, but one primary
their fantasy actually involved arguably one of the most horrific
things that someone could conceive.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Kensey Aubrey Kensey thirty two years old. She is looking
for a fresh start. She was looking to live out
her fantasy of life at the age of thirty two.
A lot of us have made a number of mistakes
in our twenties. It's almost like you know your friends,
and when you're in your twenties, a friend college gen
and says, hey, Joe, let's go to the beach for
the night. Okay, in your thirties, are like, really, what
(02:39):
car are we taking in your forties? You're like, I
got to plan that.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
Yeah, I got to make sure all my prescriptions are filled.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
Yeah. And in the case of Kensey Aubrey, she was
looking for a fresh start and that's what brought her
to impact with this other man's fantasy. Her fantasy is
to begin her life over again. Kensey last seen in
October in Independence, Missouri. She was from Kansas City and
her mom said she just wanted a fresh start in life.
That's all she wanted, and so she went with some friends.
(03:08):
She didn't go on her own. She had a plan,
and she leaves home to start a new life, and
she ends up running into somebody who also had a
dream a fantasy. Hers was to live a simpler life,
to get her ducks in a row and move forward
with life. His not so much. I always go back
to the very beginning of the missing person's report to
find out who we're looking for, what kind of person
(03:30):
are they. Oftentimes you can find out a lot about
where you're going to find them when you know the
end by their missing person that's not indicated here. Her
missing person report was very simple, Joe. Mom hasn't seen her.
Family usually has a lot of contact with her. Last
had contact October seventh. Last known to be with two
men and a woman, Kansas City, and we don't know
where she is.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
That's actually something you know. At the medical Examiner's office,
people think about the police. You go to see the police,
and you file a missing person's report. In a lot
of big city Atlanta being one where I used to work,
we actually had a missing person's file as well, and
that information did not come to us from the police.
(04:11):
We would have family members that would reach out to
us because many times family would assume the worst, and
sometimes it actually came to fruition, and we would have
a mom or a dad, or even a spouse that
would literally show up at the emmy's office. I've had
them come in Dave at two o'clock in the morning
and they'll say, I'm looking for my husband, or I'm
(04:33):
looking we're looking for our daughter. They just could not
take it any longer. And so you're sitting there at
a table with a family who has either been to
the police and they didn't receive satisfaction, or they completely
skipped the police, and they come directly to you to
the morgue, And we used to have a saying that
many times, particularly with spouses, people would we always felt
(04:56):
like there was that one group of people that would
come to the medical ex and say, have you seen
my wife? Have you seen my husband? Knowing full well
that the person was come back home, and then when
the person does show back home, they can actually say
to them, I even went to the medical Examiner's office
to look for you. That kind of thing. But when
(05:16):
we would sit down, you actually have a checklist that
you go down because the information is so very detailed
for us, and it is equally for the police. But
from a forensic standpoint, what we would have is we
would have this questionnaire that we would run through with
family members and it would cover everything from shoe size
(05:36):
to any other clothing articles, what did they tend to wear,
hair color, eye color. Have they had any surgeries or
do they have surgical scars, Do they have any kind
of surgical replacements like hips or do they have pins
in their joints? Have they ever had a heart surgery?
Have they had any kind of dental work whatsoever? Because
(05:58):
many times that's what everything hinges on. Unfortunately, many of
the cases that we get kind of a rise out
of a set of skeletal remains that we will find.
And one of the most resilient items there is going
to be the dentition because it survives even beyond bone
many times. And so if you have somebody that has
a restoration of some kind, or maybe there is a
(06:18):
tooth that is missing in an anti mortem state out
of a skull, that's going to be a specific indicator.
So we would have this long list that we would
go down and then we would list the person's name,
and then the family would leave us with that data.
And it's a great place to start from. So if
we ever got an unidentified body that came in from
the field in some way they found a skeleton or
(06:38):
maybe just a decomposing body, we would go back through
our files first off and say, well, has this person
been reported missing? The police are much broader because most
of the time they're looking for a living individual that
may of on their own free will and volition, just
decided to shake the dust off their sandals and go
somewhere else, and you have no idea where they are
(06:59):
where they wound up. And that's just the way it works.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
I'm glad you said it that way, because that's kind
of what it was here, you know, because mom was
like Kinsey left. I know, she had a rough life
growing up. She's trying to find her own way. Now
as an adult, she's thirty two, she can go wherever
she wants. Last scene with this two men and this
woman in Independence, Missouri with somebody please help me find
my daughter. And as you were talking about that, I
(07:21):
was thinking, you know, she did have some tattoos. Five
foot three, one hundred and thirty to one hundred and
fifty pounds. They had all that in the descriptor of
what to be looking for, but they didn't know it
at the time. But they weren't looking for her anymore.
It came to us from a teenager. A teenager in
the foster care system had been sexually molested by a
forty year old man. That's what broke the story. A
(07:44):
teenager who actually had the wherewithal to stand up and say,
this person abused me, and you're not going to believe
what else he told me. You're not going to believe
what else I've seen.
Speaker 1 (07:55):
Look, foster care is great, and there have been some
fantastic success stories, but I can tell you this from
an investigative standpoint. I've heard a lot of horror stories too,
and you never know where one of these poor kids
is going to land, and then what is going to
suddenly appear before their sight, what's going to be injected
into their already troubled life. This is a child, Dave,
(08:18):
which we can't reveal their name, But this is a
child like many foster children, who want a home, who
want to be loved, who want to be taken care of,
that want to give love and return. But yet when
you enter into this environment, many times trust is betrayed
and then they're left broken. But you talk about courage,
(08:41):
I cannot imagine the courage that this young person had
to come forward and reveal one of the most evil
things that has ever been reported to that police department.
(09:11):
Don't know about you, Dave, But when I've lost something,
I have to have a place to start. I have
to have some kind of information, and most of the
time that information arises from my very faulty memory. But
other times I'll have other people in my life that
will say, last time I saw you, you had this
here or you had this there. When you're talking about
(09:32):
something as big as a missing person's case. Can't tell
you how many times investigators have scratched their heads over
cases where they don't ever find anything. And to have
a young person, a teenager, come forward with information that
is so incredibly troubling, disturbing, and mind blowing, I can
(09:52):
only imagine the response that these officers had when they
were told this tale.
Speaker 2 (09:58):
People in the past carry system young people. We know
that there's a lot of bad situations there. They're oftentimes
taken out of a bad situation and placed in foster
care where they become a victim again of another predator
of a different type. Here's the case of this unnamed teenager.
She actually knew this woman named Maggie Yebara, the team
that we're talking about. She had been removed from a
(10:20):
home that Maggie Yebara was in. I don't know what
their relationship is, but the teenager knew Maggie and she
was living in foster care. She went looking for Maggie.
They had a relationship to when she was a small child.
Now Maggie Yebara is thirty years old. We know this
girl's a teen, we don't know how old, but she
knew Maggie Yabara as a child and she went looking
(10:44):
for her. As a teen, she found Maggie Yabara, and
Maggie Yabara was involved romantically with a forty year old
man named Michael Hendrix. Michael Hendrix and Maggie Yavara had
had a really wild sex life, if you want to
call it that. It was violent, it was fantasy of stuff.
(11:08):
I don't know how people fantasize things. I know there's
different strokes for different folks. But this teenage girl who
looked up a woman from her childhood, and it opened
the door to Satan's hell itself because Maggie Yabara showed
this girl a picture of a woman who was being
sexually abused. She had photos on her phone of a naked,
(11:31):
bound and gagged woman and there were other images on
the phone depicting dismembered human remains. Now, I don't know
if Maggie Yebara showed these pictures to the teen as
a threat. This could be you. I don't know, because
we haven't had a chance to find out who she is.
I just know that she's braver than I would have
been in my teens.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yeah, and I think that part of this. You might
be right. Those were being used as leverage perhaps, or
if it can get any sicker, maybe as an enticement.
I can't imagine how someone's mind would work if you're
trying to entie someone into a specific behavior. But isn't
it correct that Michael Hendrix actually wound up abusing I think,
(12:13):
sexually abusing this team as well, did he not?
Speaker 2 (12:18):
She tells police that while he was sexually abusing her,
while he was set well, my forty year old Michael
Hendricks is sexually abusing this teenage girl. He is telling
her what he has done. He likes killing, He has
a sexual fantasy. And she actually said to police that
(12:38):
he likes killing. He gets excited, it gets him off
to kill. That's what he told this girl while he
was sexually abusing her. That's what she was hearing. It
all leads to a missing person because the photos on
that phone were of the missing woman we told you
about at the very beginning. It was the woman whose
(12:59):
mother called police and said, I haven't heard from my
thirty two year old daughter. She left Kansas City. She
was headed to Independence to start a new life, and
I haven't heard from her. In a while can you
help me find my daughter and Joe, they couldn't find her.
And even when they found something and they got the
information from this unnamed teen girl, we know she's been
(13:19):
threatened with abuse. We know she's been abused. We know
she's seen horrible photos. She's seen a naked woman bounding gag,
sexually abused. We know the girl is sexually abused, and
we know that she's been showing pictures of a dismembered woman.
The teenage girl told the police that forty year old
Michael Hendrix molested her and told her he killed a woman.
He put her body in the freezer and then cut
(13:39):
her up and buried the remains a lot.
Speaker 1 (13:42):
Of data there to try to understand and understand the
scope of it. From an investigative perspective, it's important to
understand how I was talking about the questionnaire that we
fill out for the medical examiner when we would interview
family members. For instance, one of the key things is
that we look for any kind of specific identification on
(14:03):
an individual. And we do know that Kensy's body, when
the body was finally recovered, had been dismembered, and it's
difficult to try to get a body identified anyway that's
in a state of decomposition. But when you have a
body that has in fact been piecemealed out like this,
(14:24):
and I'll get into that in just a moment how
this was achieved allegedly, then you have to look at
the individual elements of the body that are left behind
to try to understand who they might be. Well, what
are you going to look for a person as young
as Kensy. You're not necessarily going to see a lot
of surgical events that have taken place. You know, that's
one of the things that we commonly look for. You
(14:45):
might have evidence of bone breakage, and we can actually
pick up on that on X ray because we will
in the morgue, we have our own X ray machines.
We will x ray the individual dismembered remains. Say, if
you have an arm, a lower leg, and an upper leg,
maybe even head, you will X ray those items individually
to see if there's anything that you can see without
(15:07):
the aid of something you would not otherwise see. So,
if you've got an old fracture line that can be identified,
but even with decomposing remains, it's kind of fascinating if
you've got, for instance, still soft tissue on a human
leg or arm, or maybe even the back. Did you
know that, as decayed as the body might be, that
(15:30):
top layer of skin on the body, the epidermis. You
can take the edge of a scalpel and begin to
scrape away the epidermis, and all you see is this
kind of black greenish discoloration. But you might just buy
eyeball in it. You might be able to see something
just beneath it. And I cannot tell you how many
(15:51):
times I've actually done this with a scalpel blade, where
you just kind of scrape away. It almost looks like
you're shaving. But as you begin to scrape that away,
suddenly you find a tattoo. It's a pretty profound moment
for you from an identification standpoint, where you can remove
that top layer of decomposing tissue and still appreciate. That's
how resilient tattoos are.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
How deep did they go?
Speaker 1 (16:12):
They go pretty deep, I mean well down into the dermis,
and so that's why it's such an arduous task to
have them removed. It's not as bad as it used
to be, but it is still something that procedure in
and of itself is not something that's pleasant to have
to go through, but the skin is essentially inked and stained,
(16:33):
you know now forever, amen. And as you scrape away
that top layer, many times you can truly appreciate a tattoo.
And if you apply I think that it's hydrogen peroxide.
We would do that in the morgue and kind of
let it bubble to get out a lot of the
dirt that's in there. Sometimes you can kind of bring
them back to life and see them see some level
(16:54):
of vibrancy in the midst of all of this decay.
You can even go back as far as and I
urge anybody, because I've told you before I'm a history guy.
You go back and you look at the bog bodies
that were covered out of Denmark, and I think some
of the British isles they had rudimentary tattoos on the body.
And this was back in the copper Age. They had tattoos.
You can still see those on some of those bodies
(17:16):
now because the bodies are so well preserved out of
the bog, you can still pick up on a lot
of indicators that might tell you what the point of
origin is. Here's the problem with tattoos nowadays. Though, because
everybody has them. It used to be where when you
were using a tattoo specifically identify a body, many tattoo
artists came from particular schools of training, and you can
(17:38):
actually kind of trace a familial lineage to the training. Nowadays,
there are tattoo shops everywhere. You don't necessarily have to
sit at the feet of a master to learn, and
many times tattoos all look the same to us. I'm
no officionado, but it's not as distinctive, say, for instance,
that it once was. When we're trying to get a
(17:59):
body an there's any number of things that we're going
to look for. And when you're standing over a grave,
as in a clandestine grave, as these investigators were out
there in Missouri, they had when they cracked up in
the ground, they certainly had more questions than they did answers.
(18:38):
So many times during my career I stood over severely
decomposing human remains and I would think, and this is
back at the morgue. Even I would think to myself,
how in the world are we going to make sense
of this? And I don't want to screw anything up
relative to examination or collection of evidence, because everything just
appears so fragile and isn't it great? Though, just like
(19:02):
anything in life where you have a few answers prior
to setting out on this kind of intellectual voyage of
discovery if you're a scientist.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
The teenage victim here is where we get a lot
of our information. First of all, I want to go
back to the original relationship because as I was digging deeper,
where we find out that this teenage girl that we
found out all the info from that she actually looked
up Maggie Yabara. Maggie is the thirty year old girlfriend
of forty year old Michael Hendrix, who actually is charged
with they're both charged by the way. But I founded
(19:32):
this teen girl when she was a younger child, was
actually in the care of Maggie Yabara. So she had
that type of relationship, digging it back to her child.
So she tracks Maggie Yabara down. She's looking for that relation.
This is a foster care child who's looking for her home.
She's looking and that's why I think there's some relationship here.
The reason the girl was removed from Maggie's care as
(19:55):
a child is because one of Maggie's boyfriends at the
time sexually molested this girl, who is now a teenager.
The teenager now tracks Maggie down. Maggie shows her these
pictures of a dead body, and we know that Michael
Hendricks sexually molested the girl, the teen girl, and while
he was doing it, he told her that he got
(20:16):
off on killing people, that it got him excited sexually. Now,
the teen girl tells the police that she was told
that Michael Hendrix choked the woman out that he killed,
that he choked her out and then stuffed her body
in the freezer and cut her up with a chainsaw
(20:37):
before burying her. And Joe, I want to go right
back to the very beginning on this a Why put
a body in a freezer? Isn't that going to make
it even more difficult to cut up? And we're told
the girl that the girl was told that she was
choked out, that she was murdered by choking, but we don't.
Is there a way to prove that after the body's
(20:57):
been frozen and cut up?
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Yes? And yeah, let me kind of break this down
to you. And I'm going to start off by telling
you a very brief story. When I was still working
in New Orleans. I had a case that I'd never
had ever before encountered anything like this. I had a
guy who was a cook's first mate on an international
oil tanker. It was a Korean crew and he got
(21:20):
into a fight with the chef on the ship, and
the chef took a meat cleaver and hit this guy.
I think, if I remember correctly, the count was like
in excess of one hundred and sixty times, and they
were coming around the horn in South America. They took
the victim's body and put it into the deepris and
(21:42):
they've got like the super duper depries on the ships,
which I was not aware of. The first port that
they put into was actually in my jurisdiction on the
Mississippi River. And so we caught the case. And it
was something, I mean, we had to get like the
Korean consulate involved in it, and all sorts of the
ship had a Liberian registry. But we kind of got
(22:03):
things figured out. But when we got this guy's body,
they did There was a scene in Goodfellas where they
said when they got Carbone's body, it was frozen so stiff.
They had to wait for three days before they could
do the autopsy. That is the truth. This guy's body
was frozen so thoroughly that we had to allow him
to thaw out before we could do the autopsy. However,
(22:24):
it was an experience because everything, in a literal sense
was frozen in time. So all of those injuries that
this person had sustained as a result of that attack
remained in place. They didn't change. They didn't change as
a result of decomposition. So with our victim here, with
(22:45):
this young woman who has now been killed, and we
have information that she has been strangled, essentially she's placed
in a deep freeze, those insults that she sustained to
her body paused. Now, bodies never completely ceased decomposing, even
in cool temperatures. It just it kind of retards the
(23:07):
progression of it. So in this particular case, it's going
to slow it down. It's not going to go at
as quick as speed. Remember we talked about heat bringing
about decomposition in a very quick manner, But it will
slow this process down. And so those marks that you
might see around the neck if you're talking about a
manual strangulation, those contused areas are still going to be there.
(23:28):
But I had a real thought about this what would
be the utility and why would you freeze a body
after you have taken this poor girl's life. And here's
what I came to a conclusion. This is a conclusion.
I came to you from an investigative perspective. First off,
you're trying to think about what to do with the body,
(23:49):
you know, can you imagine? And I hope you can't,
but just imagine if you will. You've just killed a
human being in this fever that you're in because of
this fantasy world in which you're in dwell and now
you have this oh my god moment where it's like, Okay,
I finally fulfilled this fantasy. Now what am I going
to do with the remains? Now? This Hendrix guy, he
(24:12):
lives and this is just outside Kansas City, by the way,
where they finally recover her body. He's got a fantastic property.
I'm only get the pictures of this thing, and it's
absolutely it'll knock your socks off. I mean it's gorgeous,
very pretty, very big, beautiful house, an outdoor workshop, beautiful
green grass, rolling hills. He has got enough land it
(24:33):
would appear that he could get rid of a body.
He has access to this property at least, and you
look where the body is actually found, and it's immediately
adjacent to one of the buildings. So it's almost like
he didn't go to a great deal of effort to
try to find some isolated rural area to get rid
of her. In my assumption was it was convenient and
(24:57):
he had nothing but time on his hands. So to
say that he's killed her and he makes the decision,
I'm going to freeze the body. That way, I can
have a pause, so I can decide, I can get
all my tools together, I can make up my mind
as to how I want to handle this. What's a
rural setting. You're not going to really raise an eyebrow
if you hear a chainsaw going off, right.
Speaker 2 (25:17):
You think about a body that would be just the skin,
it would just be torn that the chainsaw would just
be gummed and I don't mean to make light of it,
but gummed up with the body part, the skin and
the tissue and the muscle. It's a big mess.
Speaker 1 (25:31):
It is a big mess, but not with a frozen body.
It's not a frozen body literally becomes frozen to the core.
It's almost dave like you're dealing with a piece of wood.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
Wow, with the body. Once you freeze the body, it
would make it easier to cut up than if it
wasn't frozen.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
Correct, Absolutely, If you have a tool like a chainsaw
or a skill saw perhaps or bandsaw some kind, Yeah,
it would make it very easy to do, all right.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
But we all know that decomposing bodies smell that they
have a very I promise you, if you've ever smelled this,
you will never forget it. It will always come back to
you and you know immediately. By the way, I think
people know what the smell of decomposing flesh is even
before they've ever smelled it before, because it is so
unique to human beings and what we smell like when
we are decomposing. Does freezing stop that process? And will
(26:19):
the body still as it thaws out? Once you've cut
the body up and you're going to bear it, would
it then as it thaws would it start to have
an odor? Or would it have an odor when it's frozen.
Speaker 1 (26:29):
No, it would in my estimation, if her body went
into that freezer as soon as she died or within
say an hour, all right, and she shut up in there,
the really pronounced decompositional odor that you get with advanced
decomposition that is not current at this point. That's why
I say that it retards the process. It literally backs
(26:51):
it up, and that's why it's so difficult many times
to try to pinpoint. There are a number of cases
out there where people have killed in visuals and place
them in a freezer and then they go to thaw
them out later, so that decompositional process as the body thaws,
it kicks in as if the person has just dyed.
(27:12):
I think one of the most entertaining movies I've ever
seen is this thing with Jack Black called Bernie, and
it's based on a true story about this funeral director
killed this woman in Texas. I recommend this movie to anybody.
It's absolutely fascinating. It's got Matthew McConaughey in it and
Shirley MacLean. It's a fascinating movie, it really is, and
it's really based on a true story and the victim
(27:32):
in this case was actually placed into a deep free
so it facilitates mainly not creating a mess. Because if
you think about this high speed blade of a chainsaw,
and it is a chain with tiny individual little blades
on it. That's literally grinding through tissue. If you do
this with something soft, you're going to have this tremendous
(27:53):
amount of cast off, high speed cast off that's going
all over the place. I've actually got a colleague of
mine who within the last couple of years has worked
a case where an individual was dismembered with chains on
the back of a pickup truck. And it was a
bloody mess, literally, and there was blood cast off that went,
(28:13):
and it was done in the bed of the truck.
It was cast off over the cab of the truck,
down the front of the truck, and even onto the
leading edge of the truck where the grill is. And
so it's kind it's a fascinating dynamic because it's a
high speed event. But if you now have frozen tissue,
it's like I was saying before, when you're going through
(28:35):
this tissue and it's frozen solid, it's like going through
a piece of wood. So you're really you're encountering something here.
As an investigator, if you're trying to pin down a timeline,
the data that you're working with is going to be
greatly skewed. If you're looking to get some kind of
indication from a biological marker here, because decomposition has been
(28:57):
thwarted at this point. Now, once these individual remains are
placed into the ground, all bets are off because you
will get decomposition going on and it will pick up
pretty quickly. And if the body is not in a
sealed state or a cocoon state, it's even going to
probably speed this along as well. And you have to
(29:20):
think about it. Another thing, was the body clothed or unclosed?
Because now after I find out as an investigator, this
young girl is relating to me the story that she's heard. Hey,
I was told that this body was dismembered with a chainsaw.
Let that sink in Well, I want to do everything
I can on my warrant. When I draw up this
(29:40):
warrant and I go search this guy's property, which they
wound up doing, I'm looking for that chainsaw because I'm
going to try to find a couple of things from
a perspective of fiber evidence. I want to know if
there are any bits of cloth that are caught up
in here. And you can clean an item to a
certain degree, but you're always going to miss something. And
then from there, I'm going to look for things like hair.
(30:01):
I want to know if there's any hair left behind.
I want to know if underneath and in the edges
of any of these little saw blades, if there are
any skin at all, period I want to know if
that's there. If I can find any skin cells, then
I'm going to look for muscle, and all of these
tissues microscopically are specifically identifiable. If you can find a
bit of that on there and you can look at
(30:22):
it under the scope, you can get an idea. It's
one of the things we learned in microscopic anatomy. You
can tell the difference between skin cells and muscle cells
and bone cells, and there will be bone cells as well,
because the bone is being pulpified at the same time,
because it kicks up and it creates almost like a
histamine mist. If you've ever seen an animal that's been
(30:44):
butchered and has been placed on a bandsaw, it almost
looks like sawdust dave, and so it leaves behind that
residue as well, so you've got all of these bits
of trace evidence that can be tied back to that chainsaw.
Not to mention the unique tool marks that are left
behind on these bones when you get the bone out
(31:06):
of the grave and that chainsaw is in your possession.
If you really want to try to prove this thing,
you send this to a tool mark examiner and what
they'll do is they'll take like a bovine, a cowbone
or pig bone, and they will try to duplicate these
marks on that bone with said chainsaw and find out
if they can duplicate those marks and if they marry
(31:28):
up to the marks and the bones they recover from
the grave, and you've got ownership of the chainsaw. But
can you put that chainsaw into his hand. Well, we've
got circumstantial information from this young girl that says that
he admitted or that this woman, this other party had
stated that the body was in fact dismembered with a chainsaw.
Speaker 2 (31:45):
One of the things we found out as this case
has gone on, this thirteen year old girl that we've
talked about, she's the hero in this case. You have
a mother looking for her daughter, women looking for a
new fresh start, and she ends up in the hands
of these evil people. That thirteen year old girl that
talked about seeing the pictures, she was sexually abused by
this forty year old man who told her that he
gets off on it. Found out a trial that believe
(32:08):
it or not, Yabarra's mother, whose name is Ruth Loans,
she knew about the body being cut up. She was
shown pictures and she testified that these people actually tried
to get rid of the body by putting it in
plastic totes, taking it up in a helicopter, and dumping
it over water. But the plastic totes floated, so they
had to get the toats of the body parts out
(32:29):
and that's when they said they were going to bury
it on the property. And that's why it took time.
They tried several different things to get rid of that
body before they buried it on that man's property. But
we have a thirteen year old girl who was sexually
abused by this man, and I'm assuming her mother at
this point. Think about it. She's thirty, the girl's thirteen.
She was the girl was taken away from Yebarra when
she was a small child because Ybarra's boyfriends were sexually
(32:52):
abusing her as a child. She tracks her mother down,
mom shows her pictures of this membered body. I mean,
all of it kind of comes together.
Speaker 1 (32:59):
Joe, Yeah, it does, and It's very sad that she
cycled back into this horror show that's such a very
young and tender age. What she has borne witness to
From just the perspective of horror, most people could live
three lifetimes and never be exposed to anything like this.
But at the end, both Yabarah and Hendrix have both
(33:23):
been convicted. They're going to be in jail for a
long long time. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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