December 2, 2021 • 34 mins
After weeks of searching for Brian Laundrie, the main suspect in the death of his girlfriend Gabby Petito, a partial skull is found in the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park in Florida. The remains and skull are confirmed to belong to Laundrie. The medical examiner concluded laundrie died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Today on Body Bags, forensics expert and former death scene investigator Joseph Scott Morgan explain what we can learn from the recovered skull.
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Dark still waters, Spanish moss,
(00:35):
live oak trees. When I think of a swamp, I
don't see something ugly, I see something beautiful. But there's
one swamp in America that's hidden a secret, and finally
that secret has been revealed. We will talk about Brian
Laundry today. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body
(01:00):
Backs back with me again today is my friend Jackie Howard,
executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, what's
come to light now regarding the death of Brian Laundry, Joe.
We now know that Brian Laundry committed suicide in the
(01:20):
swamps there close to his home. Chris and ROBERTA. Laundry
were informed that the cause of death was a gunshot
wound to the head. Now, we never knew specifically that
Brian Laundry had taken a gun from the home. That
was not released until just a few days ago. Chris
and Roberto Laundry had surrendered five or six guns that
(01:40):
they stored in their home to the FBI when Brian
went missing. That was not released to the public, nor
was the fact that a gun was missing. According to
their attorney, they did not want to cause a panic
in the community. It was released to the public that
a skull was found, a partial skull, I should be specific.
But at that point we did not know how Brian died. Again,
(02:03):
we do now know that he died of a gunshot
wound to the head. Explain this all to me, Joe,
because I have so many questions. Is the reason we
found a partial skull because of the injury and the
gunshot itself, or was this due to animals? You know, Jackie,
A lot of folks might not be aware of this,
but you know, suicide it outpaces homicide in this country.
(02:24):
You think that there's homesides going on all over the place,
and there are a lot of homicides, but it it's
almost it gets beat almost three to one, all right,
So we work a lot of suicides and medical legal
death investigation, and the number one cause when we're talking
about this, it's going to be self inflicted gunshot ones.
It's not surprising to me that when they finally did
(02:48):
discover his body that they only had a partial skull
at that point in time. Um. And the reason is
is that you have this remarkable dynamic that takes place
with a firearm and somebody, you know, placing this tightly
to their head um. This is what's commonly referred to
(03:12):
as a press contact gunshot one. Sometimes you'll hear old
timers referred to it as a hard contact, and that
means that if you'll take your finger and kind of
place it into the palm of your hand, your index finger,
and press it as tightly as you can. Generally, this
is what is occurring on the side of the head
or in the forehead, you know, where we normally see
(03:33):
self inflicted gunshot ones take place. And when that seal
is created and that in that individual is pressing so
very tightly, there's a couple of things that come out
of the muzzle. At weapon. You've got to projectile a bullet,
if you will, and it's creating the whole, all right.
I know this is very simple, simplistic sounding, but it's
(03:54):
creating the actual hole. But people don't understand what happens
after that. It's not just the projectile that's disruptive. In
this case, you have a tremendous amount superheated gas that
comes out of the end of that muscle. As a
matter of fact, at nighttime when people fire weapons, it
(04:15):
looks like there's a ball of flame coming out of
the end of that weapon, and and there is, and
there's rapidly expanding gas. Remember even when we were taking
physical science classes back in the seventh grade, what do
they say about hot air? Hot air expands and guess what,
it's destructive. So when you interject this or inject this
(04:37):
into a skull, it blows the skull apart. And that's
what you have happening. That's that's why that when they
came upon these partial remains, Remember they were talking about
partial remains. Initially they only had a partial skull. And
the reason is is that his head, his skull actually
(04:58):
came apart at that time when he actuated that trigger
on that firearm. So when you say that the gas,
as you said, explodes or expands, you're not saying that
the gas actually goes into the skull and goes from
the inside out. You're just saying the pressure build up
from the outside. Well, it's it's an internal event relative
(05:20):
to when when that primer is struck by the firing
pen on that weapon. There's a little ignition that takes place.
And this is kind of a brief little firearms tutorial.
You've got a little primer cap in the base of
that bullet, and that initiates the actual firing sequence when
(05:40):
it's struck. There's that's the first explosion. The second explosion
takes place when that spark is transferred to what's called
the propellant. There's another group of powder that's in there.
And listen, when you've got a tight scale, when you
have a tight seal, in this particular case, you've got
(06:01):
this rapidly expanding hot air and it's got to go somewhere. Now,
the individual that is pressing the weapon to their skull
has has there's no way to ventilate it other than forward.
And so when the bullet the projectile actually bores into
the side of that skull through that that bony plate,
(06:21):
which is what it's referred to as, that gas is
going to seek that little hole that's being created by
the bullet. And that's why in a lot of these
cases you see this just mammoth trauma that takes place
where these press contact gunshot ones. And here's here's kind
of another little fact that people don't understand about skulls
(06:44):
when it comes to gunshot ones when when we're being
formed in the embryotic stage, you know, our our skulls
literally come together, all right, they kind of seal, and
you know, people have heard about things like with babies
offspot fought now, all right, and that that hardens over
over a period of time. It's called ossification. When the
(07:07):
skull seals, it seals what are along lines that are
referred to as suiture lines, and it's it's a miracle
of nature. When you see it, it looks like locking
teeth and you've got these multiple plates of bone that
kind of come together. Let's think about that's real simple.
You've got your frontal bone, which is where your forehead is.
You got your temporal bone. Everybody's heard their temple. It's
(07:27):
kind of down low and forward of the forward of
the ears. And then you've got the parietal or parieteal
they call, and that makes up kind of the the
area above your ears. And then you have the occiput
or the accipital area, which is that thick bony prominence
on the back of your and it's all sealed together.
It almost looks like if you've ever seen fault lines.
(07:48):
You know, when they talk about earthquakes, it's it's kind
of along these little lines like this, and they're kind
of wavy, but those are weak points at that point
in time, so the gas is gonna try to expand,
and lots of times you'll I have literally seen skulls
open up, almost like the petal of a flower, think
of a tulip, kind of coming apart, you know, fracture
many times along along the suiture lines, and it's it's
(08:10):
quite fascinating to see. But you know, you generally only
see this in self inflicted gunshot ones because let's think
about it in order to form and this is key
to this investigation, Jackie, because people are gonna say, they're
gonna say that, how do you know this in the homicide? Well,
one of the reasons that one of the things we
(08:32):
look for from a forensic standpoint is when you press
that muzzle against the skull, you have to be in
a position where you're willing to do that and you
maintain that specific tension on that area. If he had
a weapon that was being placed against his skull, you're
(08:52):
not by someone else. You're not gonna lean into it, Jackie,
You're gonna shot pull your head away, right, So the
tighter they do you press it, the more damage that's
going to happen, not necessarily from the projectile, but from
this gas. Because look, the gas just by just by
virtue of physical science, it has to be released, it
(09:14):
has to expand that's the nature of heated gas. And
when it's injected into that little port, that little hole
that is being created, that cavitation by the bullet, it's
massive destruction at that point in time. Which part actually
kills you, Joe, the bullet, the destruction of the brain.
(09:35):
I mean, is there a way at this point to
tell or is it just kind of encapsulated in one action.
There's two parts to it and the trauma. Listen, if
you were just standing out in space and someone and
when I say space, I don't mean like outer space.
I'm just talking about in free roaming space, and someone
(09:56):
aims a projectile or aims a weapon at an individual.
Let's don't say you all right, Let's let's say you Nancy.
Nancy kills me often, and let's say you all right. Uh.
An individual aims of firearm at another individual from a distance,
and they hit you. They hit an individual center mass
(10:22):
with that projectile inside the skull the projectile is going
to kill you, all right, And and I know people
at home right now are rolling their eyes, are saying, well,
of course it's gonna kill you. Got shot in the head. Well,
not everybody dies and gets shot in the head, but
a penetrative injury with a high velocity bullet going into
the brain, it's going to cavitate and destroy the brain
(10:43):
to the point where it's not going to be able
to function. So nine out of temp times, the individual
with a G S W the head is probably gonna
pass on. So as you're telling me, is as that
bullet penetrates the brain as well as all of that
gas and force, it basically turns the brain into mush. Yes,
you're absolutely right. It will turn the brain to mush.
(11:04):
And it's not you know, it's not mush in the
sense that I'm gonna be kind of graphic here, but
this is body packs, right, Um, it's not like a
mass of mashed potatos, all right, it doesn't. It doesn't
look like that in in the autopsy room when the
brain is actually removed from the vault of the skull.
(11:24):
All right, you can remove it in essentially one piece
most of the time, but it's gonna be greatly fragmented.
You're gonna have a tremendous amount of hemorrhage that's in
this area, and you'll see what actual forensic pathologists they
refer to these as gas injuries where you have this
kind of ripping apart and in what will happen, and
(11:46):
this is kind of fascinating, is that there will be
gas injuries that will not be associated with the actual
projectile injury. You know, like if an individual were to
shoot themselves in the right temple and this is a
press contact, you're going to see a tremendous amount of trauma.
It goes without saying to that specific area, but you
(12:09):
can actually see gas injuries because it kind of expands out.
You can see gas injuries on the back side of
the brain as well, where the bullet never even touches. Jackie.
That's that's the kind of force that you're talking about here.
It's a it's a ripping, it's more of a shredding
kind of thing that takes place. And it's not just
the what's called the gray matter and the white matter. Um.
(12:33):
What you're also going to see is all the little
tiny vessels that are rising up out of the floor
of the skull. The optic nerves, which are very there.
You can appreciate them when you when you take the
brain out there, they're glaring when you see them. Um,
all of that is going to be disrupted as well,
and so you'll see these little tiny areas of hemorrhage
(12:54):
all over the place and you say, well, what in
the world could that be. Well, that's gas injury that
you're seeing. So it does mass destruction. That's why when
people sustained self inflicted gunshot wounds, it's it's very, very
difficult for them to survive these things, even even if
they get them to the emergency room, even if they
can get them into surgery, and hey, even beyond surgery,
(13:18):
if they get them onto I c U and they
put them in a coma, it's it's very very difficult
for people to make it through after they sustained one
of these injuries. Do you see these same kind of
injuries on let's say somebody was going to shoot themselves
in the shoulder. Do you see these same kind of
gas injuries on other parts of the body as well? Yeah,
(13:38):
you can, but there's there's something about the skull. It's
not it's not the same. Let's say I love the
example that's talked about relative to the shoulder. Let's take
that for instance, if you have an individual that's going
to take the muzzle of a weapon and place it
tightly against the surface of their of their skin overlying
(13:59):
you know, the their chest there, and they pull the trigger.
The gas in that particular instance is being dispersed into
a lot of soft tissue you've got underlying, you know,
if you're talking about your shoulder, You've got the top
side of the pectoralis muscle, You've got all of these
muscle groups that are involving around the collar bone in
all these areas, and then you have this kind of
(14:21):
network of bones that are through here. You know, you've
got your your collar bone, Uh, that's there. You've got
the connection with with the scalcule on the backside, which
is of course your your shoulder blade, and uh, you're
the upper portion of the humorous all these all these places.
But what what they don't have that the skull does
(14:42):
have is this kind of sealed environment. You know, it's
it's almost as if the the cranial vault is a
separate it's kind of a separate entity in and of
itself as it applies the skelton. There's no other bone
like it. It's a network of bones that are tightly
(15:04):
fused together. Remember we talked about those suture suture lines.
It's tightly fused together and it creates this kind of um,
this kind of container for the brain, if you will.
And it's tight. I mean, it's very well sealed. And
so the gas as it expands into the shoulder. With
the example that you gave, it's going to disperse through
(15:25):
the soft tissue in the cranium. You don't have that.
You've got your scalp that you'll see. But with a
scalp it will literally come away from the skull and
and then kind of settle back down. But you don't
have anything else that's going to absorb that energy. Uh,
it's going to be dispersed into the sealed environment. And
(15:47):
that's the reason the head comes apart. And one of
the really interesting things that we look for that is
if we still have soft tissue, which in the case
of Brian Laundry, what it sounds like they might not
have had. But I don't know that for a fact.
You'll get these little injuries, uh to the scalp. Now
I'm talking about soft tissue. You get these little injuries
(16:07):
to the scalp and jack you know what they're referred
to as, they're called stell eate injuries. And the reason
they're called stell eate injuries, um is, think about every
image you've ever seen of like at Christmas time when
people do renderings of the Star of Bethlehem and it's
kind of got that the long tail on it, and
it's got the short little arms over to the left
(16:29):
and the right, and it's got another short little arm
that goes up. The injuries actually look like that their
star shape. So forensic pathologists have adopted this term stell
eate and you'll see that on the surface of the skull,
and the stell eate injuries only occur over over the
surface where you have tissue that's covering very closely over
(16:50):
a flat, bony surface. Only other place that you might
see it in the body is going to be over
the sternum, which is, you know, a flat bone that
we have in the center of the chest. You'll see
a stellate injury. But again this only comes about as
a result of pressing that muzzle. And the reason it
forms the star shape, if you will, is that the
skin with this injection of hot gas is also ripping
(17:14):
and tearing. It just so happens that it has a
distinctive pattern when you see it. A stellate injury body
(17:35):
bags With Joe Scott Morgan, we're talking about Brian Laundry,
and you know, one of one of the things that
really strikes me about this case is the body is
fascinating and what they found relative to his remains or
what did actually remain of his body, But it's this
hostile environment. You know, Jackie, he was found in a swamp.
(17:57):
Well you would know about swamps, Joe. You know, you
started your death investigation career out in New Orleans and
there's lots of those kind of conditions in Louisiana. So
everybody wants to know. They found some remains of Brian Laundry.
They have not found a full skeleton, and they found
his skull partial skull again, so we have partial remains,
(18:20):
so we believe there's alligators there. Joe, how were we
able to find anything? Shouldn't the skull have been gone
to's that's the question. Since the search for Brian Laundry started,
you know, everybody was looking for him and whatnot, and
they talked about all these hostile environments he was going to,
(18:41):
and just on the side I have to say, you know,
it turns out he was almost right in plain view.
I guess, you know, out there in the swamps. But
swamp can be a tricky thing. It changes day to day.
You think that it's a static environment. It's not water
levels change only, it's changes all those sorts of things.
(19:03):
With him being found out in this kind of semi aquatic,
uh mucky kind of environment, it adds an entire different
level to the dynamic. Remember what they were saying in
press conferences. The police were coming out and they were
talking about what they were encountering out there. You had
all all manner of snakes. You know, you've got cotton
(19:25):
mouths out there, You've got copper heads and rattlesnakes and
everything else. But yeah, the apex predator in this environment.
Keep in mind we are in Florida. It's going to
be an alligator. And you know, just like you know
you had mentioned, I started my career in South Louisiana. Well,
you have to contend with the Mississippi River and all
the swamps and the marshes and Gulf of Mexico, And yeah,
(19:46):
we had a lot of gators down in that area,
and I've worked cases involving gators. But what set this
case apart from me and the reason from Jump Street
I suspected that a gator wasn't involved in this um
was the fact that when gators feast on a body,
and it doesn't have to be a human body. When
(20:07):
they you know, they can go up on a bank
and you know, you've seen these these videos of them
where they just kind of lay still in the water
and the wait until like some little deer comes up
to the side of the water, a raccoon or something.
They'll just reach up and grab it and pull it under.
But they also do a thing called the spin, and
that actually kills kills the prey and people. You know,
(20:27):
I think that they're under this impression that an alligator
will just immediately eat whatever the victim is not the
way this operates. Um. The nature of an alligator when
they take a prey is they will spin it after
(20:47):
they snatch it off the bank. And they're an aquatic animal.
They loved, they loved being the water. They'll sun themselves,
but they loved being the water. And then you know
what they do before they ever catch the prey. Lots
of times they'll they'll back up to a mud bank
and they take that huge tail and they kind of
swish it back and forth. They swish it back and forth.
You know what they're doing. They're actually creating a meat locker,
(21:10):
and it's it's fascinating. We would find these in South
Louisiana many times. Had a friend that actually fell through
one one time and he landed on top of dead
deer carcasses, terrified. He had been fishing. And what they
do with their victims is that after they kill the victim,
they go back to these little lockers they have set up,
(21:31):
and they kind of pushed them under the bank into
this meat locker. And people say, well, what in the
world they do that. I'll tell you why alligators can't chew.
Might not know that they don't chew. They actually have
to wait for remains to decompose so that they can
(21:53):
actually rip them apart and swallow them. If you ever
see the action of an alligator's mouth, it's not something
that even like a dog. You know, dogs will chew
on things. They alligators generally don't do that. They chomp.
You know that that that's associated with alligators. We hear
that all the time. They chomp, they chomp, they grip,
they rip, and the swallow. Now you can take like
(22:14):
a chicken carcass that you get the grocery store, and
I've seen this, you know, an alligator shows and whatnot
in South Louisiana, and you can throw it to an
alligator and they'll it'll it'll go into their mouth and
they'll just swallow the thing. They don't sit there to
on the thing. But when you're talking about the body
of a large deer or even a small deer, are
(22:35):
certainly a human being, They're they're not going to eat
that individual immediately. And so when I began to hear
that they had found Brian Laundry's body in a visible area.
Now granted he was probably underwater, you know, they talked
about the water level of dropped and everything, and I
knew that they had remains. I knew that he wasn't
buried beneath the bank, which is something that you would
(22:57):
commonly see with a gator. He was out in a
visible area at that point in time. Now I have
no idea why it is that a gator didn't just
come up and grab his body and hauling him away,
you know, And let's you know, let's be real about this.
He had been out there for a while, so he
would he's gonna be in at least probably a moderate
(23:18):
to advance state of decomposition. But for some reason, his
body wasn't carted away by an alligator, and it wasn't
stowed somewhere so that they could come back and feast
on remains later. It was out there. It was out
there to the point where they could appreciate that they
had physical remains. They knew that they had a partial
skull at this point in time. And when I heard
(23:39):
partial skull, um, my immediate reaction to this was, okay, well,
one of two things has happened. Um. Either he was
struck in the head by something like a heavy object. Uh,
And they said skull, they didn't say head. So I
knew that there's probably no soft tissue or this gonna
(24:00):
be a gunshot one. Because I do know this. I've
I've worked a lot of cases out in the woods
where people have self inflicted gunshot ones. The bodies go
into a skeletal or advanced state of decomposition, and the
soft tissue is the first thing to go. It's gonna
be gone, and so you'll just have partial bits of that,
(24:21):
that bony plate or those bony plates that are left
behind uh through the process of decomposition. And when his
body finally made it to the forensic anthropologists, Let's keep
in mind, the m E turned his body over to
the forensic anthropologists, they had very limited uh bits of
(24:41):
human remain to work with. And I still, you know,
I'm still wondering if they were able to recover everything Jackie,
because if he's in the semi aquatic environment, he's down
into the muck. Okay, this kind of muddy, mushy bottom
and it's it's really nasty. If you've never been out
into a swamp, there's a lot of UH debris that
(25:02):
comes off of trees. There's always a process and it's
right in your face. The swamp has a particular odor
two and it's not a foul odor necessarily, but there's
always this this kind of interesting odor plant decay that's
out there. Because this is always happening. That's why everything
is so green. You know, when you go into a swamp.
It's it's green. There's a lot of vegetation, a lot
(25:24):
in there. That's why you get a lot of these
animals that will go into this environment. They'll they'll they'll
have homes there. You see raccoons on the side of
these water on sides of these waterways, and they're living
there in the swamp and they're taking fish and crawfish
and everything out of out of the water. Possums live
out there. So you've got this big ecosystem that's out there,
(25:45):
and eventually, eventually it's going to consume everything. Body backs
with Joe Scott Morgan, Jackie, I gotta tell you, you you know,
(26:07):
as well as anybody you've been at this for a
while now. Uh, there will always always be questions about
the death of Brian Laundry. Of course there will be
in The biggest one is, I think from most people,
is will we ever recover a weapon? Joe, Yeah, you know,
I can't sit here and actually say that they don't
(26:27):
have a weapon. Remember, it was never even confirmed until
just a few days ago that he had a weapon
or even had access to weapons, you know, Jackie. What
has been revealed is that the authorities recovered and I
say recovered. They were actually surrendered by the family five
to six weapons in this home. And you know, we
(26:50):
didn't know anything about that in the news reports initially.
But what we do know is that one weapon is
still on accounted for, so we can only assume that
that is, in fact the weapon that Laundry took into
the swamp with him to end his life with. And
we know that he you know, look, the authorities are saying,
now this is a suicide, this is a self inflicted
(27:10):
gunshot one. And I think the big question is is
somebody gonna walk up on this weapon one day? Had
they actually recovered it? Remember that that mucky silty bottom
that I was referring to, Uh, did it swallow up
this weapon? And is there any chance that they can
recover it? You know, as we you know, we're heading
(27:31):
into winter now, and the one thing about this time
of year, as opposed to the summertime, we're going into
kind of a dry season, so the waters in that
area will begin to receive a bit you're not gonna
be you know, there were there were certain instances. I
remember one of the local law enforcement officers on one
of the swamp buggies jack There were certain certain times
(27:54):
they were six seven feet deep in water out there,
you know, in the swamp buggies. You're not gonna have
that right now. So now, right now, as we're headed
into the dry season, is the time that the local authorities,
along with the FBI or whoever else has a vested
investigative injury has a vested investigative interest in this case,
(28:18):
are gonna need to go back out there with the
crime scene team. If they haven't recovered this weapon yet,
they're gonna have to get multiple and I mean multiple
um metal detectors on hand and sweep that area. And
kind of the way that they would do this is
if you imagine four or five personnel lined up side
(28:40):
by side with probably about three to four ft of
space between each person. They each have a metal detector,
and they walk forward, if you will, covering this specific
area where his body was found, and they begin to
sweep back and forth with those metal detectors, they might
get hit. You know. One of the things that's kind
(29:01):
of interesting is that they specifically mentioned Jackie that the
water had receded. Well, what do we know when water
recedes um If you've ever you know, if you've ever
been out outside of your home and there's been a
huge rainfall that's taken place. You know, in the South,
we call them gully washers, And if you uh, as
(29:21):
the water begins to to recede and it goes down
into the sewage lines along street, it will begin to
pull all kinds of debris with it. I wonder if
that weapon didn't kind of migrate down this area, you know,
maybe it moved away from where they actually found the body.
And that's something they're gonna have to take into account
here to try to determine if that weapon is anywhere
(29:43):
in that location. I can almost assure you they're gonna
be out there looking for it um over these coming months,
because now is the time to do it. And you know,
certainly we don't. We don't want some citizen, and trust me,
there will be citizens that go out there because of
the notorious nature of this location. Now, they're not gonna
want some private citizen walking out there and maybe they've
(30:06):
got a kid with them and they pick up this weapon.
For all we know, this is a weapon that still
contains a live ammunition. Somebody could really get hurt. So
if for no other reason they want to recover it
for that purpose. You read my mind, Joe, because I
was gonna ask you can't they just go out there
with the metal detector and and find it? Or if
you've watched any viral videos these days, you see people
(30:26):
who go out and do magnetic fishing. They take a
really strong magnet, put it on a really long rope
and throw it out in the water to see what
they can find. So I would have to imagine, like
you said, that the that the law enforcement is going
to be on top of this. Yeah, I know that
they are, Jackie. And can you imagine what what horror
(30:48):
would follow if someone got injured as a result of
them not recovering this weapon. There there are a lot
of people that have an interest in in finding this weapon.
And for me as a forensic scientist, yeah, I want
to know what type of weapon this is. I want
to know the specific caliber. Um. I want to know
if they recovered a projectile and that's something else that
they could be looking for, you know, with the metal detectives,
(31:11):
you know this, uh, whether it's a semi jacket or
a jacketed ground that passed through his head and wound
up you know lodged in a tree or on the
ground somewhere, that can happen. And also, if it's a
semi automatic weapon, the little shell casing that comes out.
Remember if this is a semi automatic handgun or rifle,
that spent casing, spent brass as we call it, will
(31:35):
be ejected out into the air. So that's another metallic
element that you're looking for at the scene, and that's
going to have and on the base of those, on
the base of the spent brass, it has a caliber
stamp on it. So let's just say, for instance, it's
a nine millimeter. If you look at the base of
that of that that spent casing, it will be stamped
(31:57):
with the number nine, and then it will have M
M and then below it it'll have a manufacturer's mark. Okay,
so that will be a tie back. And even if
they don't recover the projectile. One of the cool things
about this, again, if this is a semi automatic handgun,
if they recover casing, they can actually match up the
(32:18):
casing marks or the extraction what they're called extraction marks
on this weapon to the casing. You don't necessarily have
to have the projectile itself. You can do a match
real it's not as accurate, but you can do a
match to say, yeah, this weapon generated these tiny little
ejection marks on this projectile, therefore tying it back to
(32:39):
that and if they can show that that weapon was
owned by this family, then that should be case closed.
Even if a weapon is recovered Joe, unless there is
a visible serial number that can be tied back to
the family. Given the damage on the skull, are they
actually if they don't have a serial number, going to
be able to say definitively that this is the weapon
(33:03):
they killed Brian Laundry. I think that it is going
to be within the realm of possibility that they can
say that, because the term that they're gonna use, they're
not going to paint themselves into a corner, either legally
or forensically by saying with absolute certainty, okay, with absolute certainty.
(33:23):
The term that we use in forensic science, and Nancy
can address this is when we're in court, we say
reasonable certainty. Okay, we say within a reasonable reasonable amount
of certain scientific certainty here, and that's that's what we're
looking at, because you have to take the circumstances in total. Here,
(33:44):
it's you might not get a specific physical match, but
is the wound that you're seeing generated on what's left
of this skull consistent consistent with the weapon that they
might recover it the scene, This weapon generate this injury
that might be the best that it's ever going to get.
(34:07):
Tom Joseph Scott Morgan and this his body backs
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Dark still waters, Spanish moss,
(00:35):
live oak trees. When I think of a swamp, I
don't see something ugly, I see something beautiful. But there's
one swamp in America that's hidden a secret, and finally
that secret has been revealed. We will talk about Brian
Laundry today. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body
(01:00):
Backs back with me again today is my friend Jackie Howard,
executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, what's
come to light now regarding the death of Brian Laundry, Joe.
We now know that Brian Laundry committed suicide in the
(01:20):
swamps there close to his home. Chris and ROBERTA. Laundry
were informed that the cause of death was a gunshot
wound to the head. Now, we never knew specifically that
Brian Laundry had taken a gun from the home. That
was not released until just a few days ago. Chris
and Roberto Laundry had surrendered five or six guns that
(01:40):
they stored in their home to the FBI when Brian
went missing. That was not released to the public, nor
was the fact that a gun was missing. According to
their attorney, they did not want to cause a panic
in the community. It was released to the public that
a skull was found, a partial skull, I should be specific.
But at that point we did not know how Brian died. Again,
(02:03):
we do now know that he died of a gunshot
wound to the head. Explain this all to me, Joe,
because I have so many questions. Is the reason we
found a partial skull because of the injury and the
gunshot itself, or was this due to animals? You know, Jackie,
A lot of folks might not be aware of this,
but you know, suicide it outpaces homicide in this country.
(02:24):
You think that there's homesides going on all over the place,
and there are a lot of homicides, but it it's
almost it gets beat almost three to one, all right,
So we work a lot of suicides and medical legal
death investigation, and the number one cause when we're talking
about this, it's going to be self inflicted gunshot ones.
It's not surprising to me that when they finally did
(02:48):
discover his body that they only had a partial skull
at that point in time. Um. And the reason is
is that you have this remarkable dynamic that takes place
with a firearm and somebody, you know, placing this tightly
to their head um. This is what's commonly referred to
(03:12):
as a press contact gunshot one. Sometimes you'll hear old
timers referred to it as a hard contact, and that
means that if you'll take your finger and kind of
place it into the palm of your hand, your index finger,
and press it as tightly as you can. Generally, this
is what is occurring on the side of the head
or in the forehead, you know, where we normally see
(03:33):
self inflicted gunshot ones take place. And when that seal
is created and that in that individual is pressing so
very tightly, there's a couple of things that come out
of the muzzle. At weapon. You've got to projectile a bullet,
if you will, and it's creating the whole, all right.
I know this is very simple, simplistic sounding, but it's
(03:54):
creating the actual hole. But people don't understand what happens
after that. It's not just the projectile that's disruptive. In
this case, you have a tremendous amount superheated gas that
comes out of the end of that muscle. As a
matter of fact, at nighttime when people fire weapons, it
(04:15):
looks like there's a ball of flame coming out of
the end of that weapon, and and there is, and
there's rapidly expanding gas. Remember even when we were taking
physical science classes back in the seventh grade, what do
they say about hot air? Hot air expands and guess what,
it's destructive. So when you interject this or inject this
(04:37):
into a skull, it blows the skull apart. And that's
what you have happening. That's that's why that when they
came upon these partial remains, Remember they were talking about
partial remains. Initially they only had a partial skull. And
the reason is is that his head, his skull actually
(04:58):
came apart at that time when he actuated that trigger
on that firearm. So when you say that the gas,
as you said, explodes or expands, you're not saying that
the gas actually goes into the skull and goes from
the inside out. You're just saying the pressure build up
from the outside. Well, it's it's an internal event relative
(05:20):
to when when that primer is struck by the firing
pen on that weapon. There's a little ignition that takes place.
And this is kind of a brief little firearms tutorial.
You've got a little primer cap in the base of
that bullet, and that initiates the actual firing sequence when
(05:40):
it's struck. There's that's the first explosion. The second explosion
takes place when that spark is transferred to what's called
the propellant. There's another group of powder that's in there.
And listen, when you've got a tight scale, when you
have a tight seal, in this particular case, you've got
(06:01):
this rapidly expanding hot air and it's got to go somewhere. Now,
the individual that is pressing the weapon to their skull
has has there's no way to ventilate it other than forward.
And so when the bullet the projectile actually bores into
the side of that skull through that that bony plate,
(06:21):
which is what it's referred to as, that gas is
going to seek that little hole that's being created by
the bullet. And that's why in a lot of these
cases you see this just mammoth trauma that takes place
where these press contact gunshot ones. And here's here's kind
of another little fact that people don't understand about skulls
(06:44):
when it comes to gunshot ones when when we're being
formed in the embryotic stage, you know, our our skulls
literally come together, all right, they kind of seal, and
you know, people have heard about things like with babies
offspot fought now, all right, and that that hardens over
over a period of time. It's called ossification. When the
(07:07):
skull seals, it seals what are along lines that are
referred to as suiture lines, and it's it's a miracle
of nature. When you see it, it looks like locking
teeth and you've got these multiple plates of bone that
kind of come together. Let's think about that's real simple.
You've got your frontal bone, which is where your forehead is.
You got your temporal bone. Everybody's heard their temple. It's
(07:27):
kind of down low and forward of the forward of
the ears. And then you've got the parietal or parieteal
they call, and that makes up kind of the the
area above your ears. And then you have the occiput
or the accipital area, which is that thick bony prominence
on the back of your and it's all sealed together.
It almost looks like if you've ever seen fault lines.
(07:48):
You know, when they talk about earthquakes, it's it's kind
of along these little lines like this, and they're kind
of wavy, but those are weak points at that point
in time, so the gas is gonna try to expand,
and lots of times you'll I have literally seen skulls
open up, almost like the petal of a flower, think
of a tulip, kind of coming apart, you know, fracture
many times along along the suiture lines, and it's it's
(08:10):
quite fascinating to see. But you know, you generally only
see this in self inflicted gunshot ones because let's think
about it in order to form and this is key
to this investigation, Jackie, because people are gonna say, they're
gonna say that, how do you know this in the homicide? Well,
one of the reasons that one of the things we
(08:32):
look for from a forensic standpoint is when you press
that muzzle against the skull, you have to be in
a position where you're willing to do that and you
maintain that specific tension on that area. If he had
a weapon that was being placed against his skull, you're
(08:52):
not by someone else. You're not gonna lean into it, Jackie,
You're gonna shot pull your head away, right, So the
tighter they do you press it, the more damage that's
going to happen, not necessarily from the projectile, but from
this gas. Because look, the gas just by just by
virtue of physical science, it has to be released, it
(09:14):
has to expand that's the nature of heated gas. And
when it's injected into that little port, that little hole
that is being created, that cavitation by the bullet, it's
massive destruction at that point in time. Which part actually
kills you, Joe, the bullet, the destruction of the brain.
(09:35):
I mean, is there a way at this point to
tell or is it just kind of encapsulated in one action.
There's two parts to it and the trauma. Listen, if
you were just standing out in space and someone and
when I say space, I don't mean like outer space.
I'm just talking about in free roaming space, and someone
(09:56):
aims a projectile or aims a weapon at an individual.
Let's don't say you all right, Let's let's say you Nancy.
Nancy kills me often, and let's say you all right. Uh.
An individual aims of firearm at another individual from a distance,
and they hit you. They hit an individual center mass
(10:22):
with that projectile inside the skull the projectile is going
to kill you, all right, And and I know people
at home right now are rolling their eyes, are saying, well,
of course it's gonna kill you. Got shot in the head. Well,
not everybody dies and gets shot in the head, but
a penetrative injury with a high velocity bullet going into
the brain, it's going to cavitate and destroy the brain
(10:43):
to the point where it's not going to be able
to function. So nine out of temp times, the individual
with a G S W the head is probably gonna
pass on. So as you're telling me, is as that
bullet penetrates the brain as well as all of that
gas and force, it basically turns the brain into mush. Yes,
you're absolutely right. It will turn the brain to mush.
(11:04):
And it's not you know, it's not mush in the
sense that I'm gonna be kind of graphic here, but
this is body packs, right, Um, it's not like a
mass of mashed potatos, all right, it doesn't. It doesn't
look like that in in the autopsy room when the
brain is actually removed from the vault of the skull.
(11:24):
All right, you can remove it in essentially one piece
most of the time, but it's gonna be greatly fragmented.
You're gonna have a tremendous amount of hemorrhage that's in
this area, and you'll see what actual forensic pathologists they
refer to these as gas injuries where you have this
kind of ripping apart and in what will happen, and
(11:46):
this is kind of fascinating, is that there will be
gas injuries that will not be associated with the actual
projectile injury. You know, like if an individual were to
shoot themselves in the right temple and this is a
press contact, you're going to see a tremendous amount of trauma.
It goes without saying to that specific area, but you
(12:09):
can actually see gas injuries because it kind of expands out.
You can see gas injuries on the back side of
the brain as well, where the bullet never even touches. Jackie.
That's that's the kind of force that you're talking about here.
It's a it's a ripping, it's more of a shredding
kind of thing that takes place. And it's not just
the what's called the gray matter and the white matter. Um.
(12:33):
What you're also going to see is all the little
tiny vessels that are rising up out of the floor
of the skull. The optic nerves, which are very there.
You can appreciate them when you when you take the
brain out there, they're glaring when you see them. Um,
all of that is going to be disrupted as well,
and so you'll see these little tiny areas of hemorrhage
(12:54):
all over the place and you say, well, what in
the world could that be. Well, that's gas injury that
you're seeing. So it does mass destruction. That's why when
people sustained self inflicted gunshot wounds, it's it's very, very
difficult for them to survive these things, even even if
they get them to the emergency room, even if they
can get them into surgery, and hey, even beyond surgery,
(13:18):
if they get them onto I c U and they
put them in a coma, it's it's very very difficult
for people to make it through after they sustained one
of these injuries. Do you see these same kind of
injuries on let's say somebody was going to shoot themselves
in the shoulder. Do you see these same kind of
gas injuries on other parts of the body as well? Yeah,
(13:38):
you can, but there's there's something about the skull. It's
not it's not the same. Let's say I love the
example that's talked about relative to the shoulder. Let's take
that for instance, if you have an individual that's going
to take the muzzle of a weapon and place it
tightly against the surface of their of their skin overlying
(13:59):
you know, the their chest there, and they pull the trigger.
The gas in that particular instance is being dispersed into
a lot of soft tissue you've got underlying, you know,
if you're talking about your shoulder, You've got the top
side of the pectoralis muscle, You've got all of these
muscle groups that are involving around the collar bone in
all these areas, and then you have this kind of
(14:21):
network of bones that are through here. You know, you've
got your your collar bone, Uh, that's there. You've got
the connection with with the scalcule on the backside, which
is of course your your shoulder blade, and uh, you're
the upper portion of the humorous all these all these places.
But what what they don't have that the skull does
(14:42):
have is this kind of sealed environment. You know, it's
it's almost as if the the cranial vault is a
separate it's kind of a separate entity in and of
itself as it applies the skelton. There's no other bone
like it. It's a network of bones that are tightly
(15:04):
fused together. Remember we talked about those suture suture lines.
It's tightly fused together and it creates this kind of um,
this kind of container for the brain, if you will.
And it's tight. I mean, it's very well sealed. And
so the gas as it expands into the shoulder. With
the example that you gave, it's going to disperse through
(15:25):
the soft tissue in the cranium. You don't have that.
You've got your scalp that you'll see. But with a
scalp it will literally come away from the skull and
and then kind of settle back down. But you don't
have anything else that's going to absorb that energy. Uh,
it's going to be dispersed into the sealed environment. And
(15:47):
that's the reason the head comes apart. And one of
the really interesting things that we look for that is
if we still have soft tissue, which in the case
of Brian Laundry, what it sounds like they might not
have had. But I don't know that for a fact.
You'll get these little injuries, uh to the scalp. Now
I'm talking about soft tissue. You get these little injuries
(16:07):
to the scalp and jack you know what they're referred
to as, they're called stell eate injuries. And the reason
they're called stell eate injuries, um is, think about every
image you've ever seen of like at Christmas time when
people do renderings of the Star of Bethlehem and it's
kind of got that the long tail on it, and
it's got the short little arms over to the left
(16:29):
and the right, and it's got another short little arm
that goes up. The injuries actually look like that their
star shape. So forensic pathologists have adopted this term stell
eate and you'll see that on the surface of the skull,
and the stell eate injuries only occur over over the
surface where you have tissue that's covering very closely over
(16:50):
a flat, bony surface. Only other place that you might
see it in the body is going to be over
the sternum, which is, you know, a flat bone that
we have in the center of the chest. You'll see
a stellate injury. But again this only comes about as
a result of pressing that muzzle. And the reason it
forms the star shape, if you will, is that the
skin with this injection of hot gas is also ripping
(17:14):
and tearing. It just so happens that it has a
distinctive pattern when you see it. A stellate injury body
(17:35):
bags With Joe Scott Morgan, we're talking about Brian Laundry,
and you know, one of one of the things that
really strikes me about this case is the body is
fascinating and what they found relative to his remains or
what did actually remain of his body, But it's this
hostile environment. You know, Jackie, he was found in a swamp.
(17:57):
Well you would know about swamps, Joe. You know, you
started your death investigation career out in New Orleans and
there's lots of those kind of conditions in Louisiana. So
everybody wants to know. They found some remains of Brian Laundry.
They have not found a full skeleton, and they found
his skull partial skull again, so we have partial remains,
(18:20):
so we believe there's alligators there. Joe, how were we
able to find anything? Shouldn't the skull have been gone
to's that's the question. Since the search for Brian Laundry started,
you know, everybody was looking for him and whatnot, and
they talked about all these hostile environments he was going to,
(18:41):
and just on the side I have to say, you know,
it turns out he was almost right in plain view.
I guess, you know, out there in the swamps. But
swamp can be a tricky thing. It changes day to day.
You think that it's a static environment. It's not water
levels change only, it's changes all those sorts of things.
(19:03):
With him being found out in this kind of semi aquatic,
uh mucky kind of environment, it adds an entire different
level to the dynamic. Remember what they were saying in
press conferences. The police were coming out and they were
talking about what they were encountering out there. You had
all all manner of snakes. You know, you've got cotton
(19:25):
mouths out there, You've got copper heads and rattlesnakes and
everything else. But yeah, the apex predator in this environment.
Keep in mind we are in Florida. It's going to
be an alligator. And you know, just like you know
you had mentioned, I started my career in South Louisiana. Well,
you have to contend with the Mississippi River and all
the swamps and the marshes and Gulf of Mexico, And yeah,
(19:46):
we had a lot of gators down in that area,
and I've worked cases involving gators. But what set this
case apart from me and the reason from Jump Street
I suspected that a gator wasn't involved in this um
was the fact that when gators feast on a body,
and it doesn't have to be a human body. When
(20:07):
they you know, they can go up on a bank
and you know, you've seen these these videos of them
where they just kind of lay still in the water
and the wait until like some little deer comes up
to the side of the water, a raccoon or something.
They'll just reach up and grab it and pull it under.
But they also do a thing called the spin, and
that actually kills kills the prey and people. You know,
(20:27):
I think that they're under this impression that an alligator
will just immediately eat whatever the victim is not the
way this operates. Um. The nature of an alligator when
they take a prey is they will spin it after
(20:47):
they snatch it off the bank. And they're an aquatic animal.
They loved, they loved being the water. They'll sun themselves,
but they loved being the water. And then you know
what they do before they ever catch the prey. Lots
of times they'll they'll back up to a mud bank
and they take that huge tail and they kind of
swish it back and forth. They swish it back and forth.
You know what they're doing. They're actually creating a meat locker,
(21:10):
and it's it's fascinating. We would find these in South
Louisiana many times. Had a friend that actually fell through
one one time and he landed on top of dead
deer carcasses, terrified. He had been fishing. And what they
do with their victims is that after they kill the victim,
they go back to these little lockers they have set up,
(21:31):
and they kind of pushed them under the bank into
this meat locker. And people say, well, what in the
world they do that. I'll tell you why alligators can't chew.
Might not know that they don't chew. They actually have
to wait for remains to decompose so that they can
(21:53):
actually rip them apart and swallow them. If you ever
see the action of an alligator's mouth, it's not something
that even like a dog. You know, dogs will chew
on things. They alligators generally don't do that. They chomp.
You know that that that's associated with alligators. We hear
that all the time. They chomp, they chomp, they grip,
they rip, and the swallow. Now you can take like
(22:14):
a chicken carcass that you get the grocery store, and
I've seen this, you know, an alligator shows and whatnot
in South Louisiana, and you can throw it to an
alligator and they'll it'll it'll go into their mouth and
they'll just swallow the thing. They don't sit there to
on the thing. But when you're talking about the body
of a large deer or even a small deer, are
(22:35):
certainly a human being, They're they're not going to eat
that individual immediately. And so when I began to hear
that they had found Brian Laundry's body in a visible area.
Now granted he was probably underwater, you know, they talked
about the water level of dropped and everything, and I
knew that they had remains. I knew that he wasn't
buried beneath the bank, which is something that you would
(22:57):
commonly see with a gator. He was out in a
visible area at that point in time. Now I have
no idea why it is that a gator didn't just
come up and grab his body and hauling him away,
you know, And let's you know, let's be real about this.
He had been out there for a while, so he
would he's gonna be in at least probably a moderate
(23:18):
to advance state of decomposition. But for some reason, his
body wasn't carted away by an alligator, and it wasn't
stowed somewhere so that they could come back and feast
on remains later. It was out there. It was out
there to the point where they could appreciate that they
had physical remains. They knew that they had a partial
skull at this point in time. And when I heard
(23:39):
partial skull, um, my immediate reaction to this was, okay, well,
one of two things has happened. Um. Either he was
struck in the head by something like a heavy object. Uh,
And they said skull, they didn't say head. So I
knew that there's probably no soft tissue or this gonna
(24:00):
be a gunshot one. Because I do know this. I've
I've worked a lot of cases out in the woods
where people have self inflicted gunshot ones. The bodies go
into a skeletal or advanced state of decomposition, and the
soft tissue is the first thing to go. It's gonna
be gone, and so you'll just have partial bits of that,
(24:21):
that bony plate or those bony plates that are left
behind uh through the process of decomposition. And when his
body finally made it to the forensic anthropologists, Let's keep
in mind, the m E turned his body over to
the forensic anthropologists, they had very limited uh bits of
(24:41):
human remain to work with. And I still, you know,
I'm still wondering if they were able to recover everything Jackie,
because if he's in the semi aquatic environment, he's down
into the muck. Okay, this kind of muddy, mushy bottom
and it's it's really nasty. If you've never been out
into a swamp, there's a lot of UH debris that
(25:02):
comes off of trees. There's always a process and it's
right in your face. The swamp has a particular odor
two and it's not a foul odor necessarily, but there's
always this this kind of interesting odor plant decay that's
out there. Because this is always happening. That's why everything
is so green. You know, when you go into a swamp.
It's it's green. There's a lot of vegetation, a lot
(25:24):
in there. That's why you get a lot of these
animals that will go into this environment. They'll they'll they'll
have homes there. You see raccoons on the side of
these water on sides of these waterways, and they're living
there in the swamp and they're taking fish and crawfish
and everything out of out of the water. Possums live
out there. So you've got this big ecosystem that's out there,
(25:45):
and eventually, eventually it's going to consume everything. Body backs
with Joe Scott Morgan, Jackie, I gotta tell you, you you know,
(26:07):
as well as anybody you've been at this for a
while now. Uh, there will always always be questions about
the death of Brian Laundry. Of course there will be
in The biggest one is, I think from most people,
is will we ever recover a weapon? Joe, Yeah, you know,
I can't sit here and actually say that they don't
(26:27):
have a weapon. Remember, it was never even confirmed until
just a few days ago that he had a weapon
or even had access to weapons, you know, Jackie. What
has been revealed is that the authorities recovered and I
say recovered. They were actually surrendered by the family five
to six weapons in this home. And you know, we
(26:50):
didn't know anything about that in the news reports initially.
But what we do know is that one weapon is
still on accounted for, so we can only assume that
that is, in fact the weapon that Laundry took into
the swamp with him to end his life with. And
we know that he you know, look, the authorities are saying,
now this is a suicide, this is a self inflicted
(27:10):
gunshot one. And I think the big question is is
somebody gonna walk up on this weapon one day? Had
they actually recovered it? Remember that that mucky silty bottom
that I was referring to, Uh, did it swallow up
this weapon? And is there any chance that they can
recover it? You know, as we you know, we're heading
(27:31):
into winter now, and the one thing about this time
of year, as opposed to the summertime, we're going into
kind of a dry season, so the waters in that
area will begin to receive a bit you're not gonna
be you know, there were there were certain instances. I
remember one of the local law enforcement officers on one
of the swamp buggies jack There were certain certain times
(27:54):
they were six seven feet deep in water out there,
you know, in the swamp buggies. You're not gonna have
that right now. So now, right now, as we're headed
into the dry season, is the time that the local authorities,
along with the FBI or whoever else has a vested
investigative injury has a vested investigative interest in this case,
(28:18):
are gonna need to go back out there with the
crime scene team. If they haven't recovered this weapon yet,
they're gonna have to get multiple and I mean multiple
um metal detectors on hand and sweep that area. And
kind of the way that they would do this is
if you imagine four or five personnel lined up side
(28:40):
by side with probably about three to four ft of
space between each person. They each have a metal detector,
and they walk forward, if you will, covering this specific
area where his body was found, and they begin to
sweep back and forth with those metal detectors, they might
get hit. You know. One of the things that's kind
(29:01):
of interesting is that they specifically mentioned Jackie that the
water had receded. Well, what do we know when water
recedes um If you've ever you know, if you've ever
been out outside of your home and there's been a
huge rainfall that's taken place. You know, in the South,
we call them gully washers, And if you uh, as
(29:21):
the water begins to to recede and it goes down
into the sewage lines along street, it will begin to
pull all kinds of debris with it. I wonder if
that weapon didn't kind of migrate down this area, you know,
maybe it moved away from where they actually found the body.
And that's something they're gonna have to take into account
here to try to determine if that weapon is anywhere
(29:43):
in that location. I can almost assure you they're gonna
be out there looking for it um over these coming months,
because now is the time to do it. And you know,
certainly we don't. We don't want some citizen, and trust me,
there will be citizens that go out there because of
the notorious nature of this location. Now, they're not gonna
want some private citizen walking out there and maybe they've
(30:06):
got a kid with them and they pick up this weapon.
For all we know, this is a weapon that still
contains a live ammunition. Somebody could really get hurt. So
if for no other reason they want to recover it
for that purpose. You read my mind, Joe, because I
was gonna ask you can't they just go out there
with the metal detector and and find it? Or if
you've watched any viral videos these days, you see people
(30:26):
who go out and do magnetic fishing. They take a
really strong magnet, put it on a really long rope
and throw it out in the water to see what
they can find. So I would have to imagine, like
you said, that the that the law enforcement is going
to be on top of this. Yeah, I know that
they are, Jackie. And can you imagine what what horror
(30:48):
would follow if someone got injured as a result of
them not recovering this weapon. There there are a lot
of people that have an interest in in finding this weapon.
And for me as a forensic scientist, yeah, I want
to know what type of weapon this is. I want
to know the specific caliber. Um. I want to know
if they recovered a projectile and that's something else that
they could be looking for, you know, with the metal detectives,
(31:11):
you know this, uh, whether it's a semi jacket or
a jacketed ground that passed through his head and wound
up you know lodged in a tree or on the
ground somewhere, that can happen. And also, if it's a
semi automatic weapon, the little shell casing that comes out.
Remember if this is a semi automatic handgun or rifle,
that spent casing, spent brass as we call it, will
(31:35):
be ejected out into the air. So that's another metallic
element that you're looking for at the scene, and that's
going to have and on the base of those, on
the base of the spent brass, it has a caliber
stamp on it. So let's just say, for instance, it's
a nine millimeter. If you look at the base of
that of that that spent casing, it will be stamped
(31:57):
with the number nine, and then it will have M
M and then below it it'll have a manufacturer's mark. Okay,
so that will be a tie back. And even if
they don't recover the projectile. One of the cool things
about this, again, if this is a semi automatic handgun,
if they recover casing, they can actually match up the
(32:18):
casing marks or the extraction what they're called extraction marks
on this weapon to the casing. You don't necessarily have
to have the projectile itself. You can do a match
real it's not as accurate, but you can do a
match to say, yeah, this weapon generated these tiny little
ejection marks on this projectile, therefore tying it back to
(32:39):
that and if they can show that that weapon was
owned by this family, then that should be case closed.
Even if a weapon is recovered Joe, unless there is
a visible serial number that can be tied back to
the family. Given the damage on the skull, are they
actually if they don't have a serial number, going to
be able to say definitively that this is the weapon
(33:03):
they killed Brian Laundry. I think that it is going
to be within the realm of possibility that they can
say that, because the term that they're gonna use, they're
not going to paint themselves into a corner, either legally
or forensically by saying with absolute certainty, okay, with absolute certainty.
(33:23):
The term that we use in forensic science, and Nancy
can address this is when we're in court, we say
reasonable certainty. Okay, we say within a reasonable reasonable amount
of certain scientific certainty here, and that's that's what we're
looking at, because you have to take the circumstances in total. Here,
(33:44):
it's you might not get a specific physical match, but
is the wound that you're seeing generated on what's left
of this skull consistent consistent with the weapon that they
might recover it the scene, This weapon generate this injury
that might be the best that it's ever going to get.
(34:07):
Tom Joseph Scott Morgan and this his body backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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