December 9, 2021 • 30 mins
Chad Daybell's trial for multiple counts of first-degree murder is set to begin just after the new year. The Idaho man is accused of killing his wife, Tammy Daybell and the children of the woman he marries just two weeks after Tammy died. JJ and Tylee Vallow are missing for months before their bodies are found on Daybell's property. At first, Tammy Daybell's death is ruled natural cases. The seemingly healthy 49-year-old is training to run a 4K race, but Chad Daybell reports that his wife is dead in the bed beside him one morning. The coroner does not attend the scene, only officers who say the death appears to be natural. What's more, an autopsy is refused by the family. As bodies seem to pile up around the newlywed family, questions are raised. Other deaths connected to this investigation include Lori Vallow Daybell's ex-husbands, and her brother. Today on Body Bags, forensic expert and former death scene investigator Joseph Scott Morgan looks into the unexplained death of Tammy Daybell.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. Just spent your entire
life educating children. You know, I don't mean in a
normal classroom. I'm talking about in the library, servicing children
(00:32):
for maybe a couple of decades, where you're teaching them
how to read, one of the most basic things in
the world. You're beloved in school, and not just in
the school, but in the community at large. And suddenly
one morning your husband wakes up and find you dead
in the bed next to him, and you're only forty
nine years old. Today we're gonna talk about the Tammy
(00:56):
Day Bell case. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this his
body backs back with me again. Today is my good
friend Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie,
what can you tell us about the Tammy Day Bell case? Joe?
(01:17):
The death of Tammy Day Bell came seemingly out of nowhere.
In fact, in everyday life, Tammy Day Bell was a
healthy individual. In fact, she was training for a five
k race. Yet her husband, Chad Dave Bell, woke up
called saying that his wife was dead in the bed
next to him. No autopsy was done, no talk screen
(01:39):
was done. Nothing was done by the investigative team other
than to say that Tammy Day Bell was dead. You know,
one of one of the basic guiding principles in any
medical legal death investigation, Jackie, is that when someone is
actually found to cease, that is someone that doesn't just
(02:00):
you know how people turn it sometimes keel over dead,
you need to have a representative of the corner the
medical legal community, the corner of the medical examiner to
show up on the scene. And the reason is is
that you get one shot at this. When I teach
my classes, I talked about you can only enter a
room for the very first time. That is, you can
(02:22):
only cross that threshold one time. After that that moment's gone,
and those things that you decided to do at that
moment time are critical. And in Tammy Day Bell's case,
there's a thread that runs through the entire thing, the family,
even the corner, the police that were in the scene
that kept using the term appears to be consistent with
(02:43):
the natural death. And when that, when that's put forward,
you have to ask this question, Jackie, had the corner
come to that conclusion? How did how did this corner
come to the conclusion that Tammy Day Bell's death was
a natural death, because once you say that, once you
say that this is a natural death, that convinces the
(03:03):
family that you know, there's no need to go any further.
But you have to have an answer for that. You
have to be able to fill out a death certificate.
What are you gonna put down, suddenly died, God called
the end of life. Now you have to have substance
for reasons. And the reason this is so important is
that Tammy David was only forty nine years of age, Jackie,
(03:24):
Like you said, she was training to run in a race.
And if if you can do that, then that means
that more than likely you're not having some kind of
cardiac event that's ongoing. Because you know, the number one
killer in America is actually a cause of death, is
actually related to cardiac disease. There's no indication of that whatsoever.
(03:44):
And from what we're hearing what we're hearing, the only
official that actually showed up at the scene of her
death were members of the local sheriff's office, and and
they said, These deputies said, well, it appears to be
consistent with the natural death. Well, you know, my question
to that is, how can a deputy shaff in this
(04:05):
tiny little community look at a body, not knowing anything
about the medical history of this individual, and say, well,
everything appears to be consistent with the natural death. Did
this individual have some kind of special insight? No, they didn't.
They worked upon an assumption and then the base law
the basics of this the corner violet. They didn't even
(04:28):
show up to the scene from what we're hearing, And
it's just important. And this is why. First off, you've
got this woman that has died in her sleep. You
have no good reason, at least scientific reason to hang
your hat on at this moment time, and you're just
gonna release her directly from the scene. And one of
the most important things about conducting a death investigation from
(04:52):
the perspective of the corners, you have to see that
body in context. So what does that mean? I want
to see the body on the bed where there were found.
I want to see the body on the floor if
that's where they're found, adjacent to the bed. Is there
something that happened during the night when no one else
was witnessing this event that could give me clues as
a trained medical legal death investigator, as to what brought
(05:15):
about the end of her life and you know, was
there some kind of trauma that was sustained. Was their
blood on the pillow? Will never know that. But besides that,
we've got another issue. We don't know what the post
mortem interval is. And that's one of the things that
we do that's critical. Okay, you just threw one out
at me, post mortem interval. What the hey? Well with
(05:37):
post mortem interval, Jackie. What that means is when we're
talking about we've got three areas that we deal in
in medical legal death death investigation. We talked about anti mortem,
which think of a like an anti chamber in a
in a pyramid. That means the precursor. That's gonna mean
anti mortem before death. And then we have an event
(05:58):
that's called perimortem, which kind of means in the throws up.
That's like in the in the midst of the fatal event.
You're not quite dead yet, but you're in that kind
of lingering mode. There, say, an individual that is bleeding out,
that has sustained a gunshot wound um and then you
have post mortem. Well, post mortem means that period of
time from when your heart ceased beating until the moment
(06:21):
time when you're finally discovered by the authorities, and so
we have to be able to measure that. And the
way that we measure that is examining the body by
determining postmorum temperature, that is, how cool or warm the
body is to the touch. And also we can use
thermometers to facilitate that because what we know is the
(06:42):
body once once your heart stops beating, you begin to
bleed energy out until like the twelve hour after death,
and after that all of the energy and the heat
that your body is generated is gone. And at that
point you are just like any other um element of
a room room, say, for instance, a piece of furniture,
the bed, You're impacted directly by the environmental temperature. That
(07:06):
means your temperature or your body is gonna rise and
fall just like it would on a chair or end
table or something like that. And then after that we
have to do an assessment on the rider mortis that
is the stiffness in the body, how stiff is a body,
And that's done at a measured interval, you know, and
it starts in the small muscles of the face and
(07:27):
and then it extends out to the to the peripheral
areas like the legs and the elbows and all these
sorts of things. It kind of starts at the same
time and all the muscle groups. But you first appreciated
in the smaller muscles. And then we talked about stuff
like uh, postmortem ravidity or the settling of blood. You
and I have talked about that a lot, Jackie, and
and that again happens at a measured interval. None of
(07:49):
this stuff was done so at the end of the
day when you're doing a scene assessment on the body.
And in this particular case and Tammy day Bell's case,
guess what, we got a big fat doughnut here. There's
no data. There's no data whatsoever, no scientific data to
back this up so that we can make a determination
as to how long this individual has been dead the
(08:10):
context in which their body was found. Now, one very
interesting piece of this is that Tammy's kids, they were
in attendance. What we're hearing is that the children actually
came to the home after they had been notified that
their mom had passed on. And one little comment really
(08:31):
caught my ear in the midst of all of this.
One of the children at that point time is reported
to have said that Tammy had something coming out of
her nose potentially out of her mouth, and it sounded
to me, Jackie like what we referred to as a
frothy odemitus cone. Well, you're throwing those big ones out.
(08:53):
What does that mean? Well, anytime we see this kind
of and if people just a age and almost like
the head of a beer, if you will, you know
how when you pour beer too fast and that foam
kind of creeps up to the top. Um, it's froth
You've heard that term before. UH. Horses get frothy when
(09:13):
they run real fast. But this can happen in the
midst of a fatal event in which there is some
type of respiratory distress that's going on, where, for instance,
individuals having trouble breathing. UH. It can happen in the
event of some kind of UH direct asphyxial event, like
(09:34):
a suffocation or like a strangulation UH smothering, that sort
of thing. It can happen in certain cases relative to
UH utilizing drugs. We see it a lot in heroin
overdose victims because what we do know is that heroin,
for instance, depresses the respiratory UH system and so the
(09:55):
lung has become very very heavy. At that point in time,
you're really struggling to breathing. You know what, l what
other area that you see this in, Jackie, We actually
see it in drowning victims when we take a body
out of a body of water and pull them up
on the bank of say a lake or or river.
It's really kind of odd to see this. But suddenly
this frothiodemitist cone begins to emerge from the nose in
(10:18):
the mouth, and it's almost kind of kind of a
pink color to it, and that's again an indication that
something has compromised the respiratory system. And in Tammy's case,
I would want to go back and take a look
at this and say, well, oh my gosh, what in
the world would have impacted this forty nine year old, healthy, beautiful,
(10:38):
vibrant woman who's loved by all of these folks, that
doesn't have any kind of physical uh complaints and no
kind of medical history anything like that. What would have
brought her to this end suddenly in her death? You
know what, those answers could very well have been buried
with her. Jackie, Jackie, I gotta say that with Tammy's death,
(11:17):
we've and I know it's cliche to say this, but
you know, at the end of the day, we've we've
got far more questions than we do answers um and
all because one simple action was not taken, and that
is somebody picking up their car key's, getting in their
car and driving out to the scene of her death.
As as the content area expert for that particular county,
(11:40):
and I'm talking about the corner you were reading my
mind joke as a cut a couple of specific questions here.
We know, Joe, as we've been talking about that the
corner did not go to the scene. First off, there
is a difference between a corner and a medical examiner,
and in this county, Fremont County, it is a corner
that attends death. Not only does that raise questions that
(12:02):
she did not attend to the seeing Idaho does not
require autopsies. The family said no to an autopsy and
that was it. There's just so many questions there, Joe,
about how Tammy day Bell tied. Yeah, there are, and
it's it's really amazing, Jackie, when you begin to think
about how the decision by one individual can impact multiple
(12:26):
cases and as we well know, the day bell saga
that goes on and on and on. There seems like
their bodies all over the place. And in my estimation
this is one of certainly the most curious out of
all of them. And you're right, you are in that
Idaho is a corner state. That means that the official
(12:48):
death investigator, that is the medical legal death investigator also
referred to as the certifier of death for that county,
is an elected official And there are many, many, wonder
all corners all across this this this country. It is
up to the corner at that moment in time to
make a decision about what is going to be the
(13:12):
disposition of the body. And what I mean by that
is is the body going to be released from the
scene nothing else is going to be pursued, or is
the body going to be sent And in this case,
the body Tammy Davel's body would have been sent to
the Ada County Corner's office, which is rather large county,
(13:32):
which is where Boise is and that's where the autopsies
are done. Uh. They kind of the best way to
say is a subcontract to do all of the autopsies
for this little county Fremont County, that choice wasn't made.
The former was made. They decided the corner deside to
release that body from the scene and sent directly to
(13:55):
the funeral home. And what they're saying their default position
is saying, well, the family didn't want an autopsy. Well,
let me break this down for you. Yeah, the family
may not have wanted an autopsy, but at the end
of the day, when you have a death investigation involving
a forty nine year old woman who you know, let's
face it, there are other mysterious events that are going
(14:17):
on around this body. It relies. It comes down to
this corner making that decision, and they are hard decisions.
That's why you get elected to this office. To go
ahead and even if it doesn't abide by the wishes
of the family, you go ahead and you do this autopsy,
because if you don't, as we're seeing played out right
before us, you wind up with a gigantic mess on
(14:38):
your hand. That means that after this period of time
which everybody knows, Tammy day Bell was sent from Idaho,
eventually wound up in a graveyard down in Utah and
she's buried. So now you've got all kinds of other
complications that come in if you want to examine her body.
Now you've got to have her exhumed. And there is
the big problem, Joe, because with burial comes the preparation
(15:02):
of the body to be buried. At that point, if
she had been poisoned, if she had overdosed, if she
had any chemical in her body, that evidence is destroyed now.
And Jackie, in this particular case, this is another example
of if only, if only another decision had been made,
(15:25):
so we know that that there was a bad decision
made at the scene of Tammy Davil's death. All Right,
the body is released, it has to go to the
funeral home because you're you're not gonna be able to
transport her body across state lines without that body being embolved.
All right, there was another opportunity here. The corner could
(15:46):
have gone to the funeral home. And some reports say
that she did at that point in time what she saw.
I have no idea. Obviously she felt comfortable enough at
that moment time to release the body. But I'll tell
you what she didn't do, Jackie. We have these big
needles that we use, these big syringes, if you will,
the needle itself is actually called a ten gage needle,
(16:08):
and people at home may or may not know what
it is, but it's a brother large needle. It's not
something you would give an injection with, say, if you're
going to see your your family practitioners. Rather large. It's
what we're use in the morgue. We can go to
a funeral home and I've done this any number of
times and take a ten gage needle with a large
syringe and you go right through the breastplate and you
(16:28):
go into the order and you directly draw heart blood.
If you can't get heart blood out of the a
order you can go into you can do a slight
incision and draw out femeral blood. Now that's better than nothing.
What else you can do with the more you can
actually and this this means that you're not doing an autopsy,
you're not having to open the body. We do all
of this externally. We can take a similar needle and
(16:51):
go directly externally into the roof of the bladder if
you will, and draw out urine that wasn't done. If
you can't get that, we can always go of the eyes.
And what are the eyes do? Well? They're filled with
what's referred to as vitreous fluid, and a lot of
people aren't familiar with that. It's got a real kind
of cyclical rate. It doesn't it doesn't metabolize things, say,
(17:13):
for instance, like the blood does. It just kind of
it kind of sits there and kind of slowly kind
of churns in this area. And it it's what gives
our I form. But what's really interesting about it is
it holds on uh to certain chemicals that we can
actually go in and conduct toxicological studies on. That wasn't done, Jackie.
(17:33):
They missed the boat on that point too. So now
as you mentioned, as you mentioned, you've got all these
other people that are now touching the body, You've got
these funeral directors that are handling the body, the embalmer
that's going to be setting things up to start this
embalming process. And you know, I've had a lot of
people that have asked me, but we'll look, Morgan. You know,
(17:53):
why couldn't they just go back and draw talks on her?
You know, after she's been exhumed. You can't. It's an
empirical impossibility, Dina. Why because of all the blood is gone,
every single drop of it. Because the way embalming works,
it's a gravity driven process. They have a little pump
that pumps this embalming fluid into the body. It starts
(18:17):
up high, it comes down low, and so as they're
pumping the body, they're infusing it with this embalming fluid.
It's pushing all the blood out of the body. And
they have this return where they use these large metal trocars.
They're called to start this, to start this event, and
they're pulling the blood out of the body. And when
that when that fluid turns clear, you know that all
(18:40):
the blood is gone and the body is embalmed. So
you can't go back after the fact. And if you've
never if you've never actually placed your hands onto an
embalmed body, it's impacted by these chemicals, and rightly so,
because embalming the process itself turns the body very, very firm.
(19:01):
It preserves the body. The folks at home will just
imagine many times what an overinflated basketball feels like. That's
kind of the same texture that an embalmed body has.
It's got it's it's kind of it's very firm, but
yet it still has kind of a supple nature to it,
but you're not going to get anything out of that
body that is really worth having relative to fluids for toxicology.
(19:27):
There might be a saving grace if they can go
in and capture some of the tissue and look at
it microscopically, but again it's a long shot. When a
body is embalmed and the chemicals are flushed throughout the body,
it is going in through the veins. Is it going
into the organs and to the tissue as well? Yes,
(19:50):
it is. And I've been involved in many what are
referred to as exhimations where you take the body, um
you removed, the body is exhumed, and the body comes
back to the morgue. And many times this happens as
a result of the bodies uh not previously being an autopsy,
just like in this case. And when you get that
body out of the ground and you bring the body
(20:13):
back to the morgue where you're going to do the
autopsy again, when you not only is the external body
kind of firm to the touch, and it's got this
uh it's a smell that never leaves you. It's not
like a decomposition. It's got this real sickly sweet odor
to it, and that's the embalming fluid. And when you
open the body, uh, it just kind of slaps you
(20:33):
right in the face and you have to kind of
get past it, because when I say it's sickly sweet,
I'll put it to you this way. In my experience,
I would much rather be around a decomposed body than
I would an embalmed body. That's how sickening smells. I
listened to you and Nancy talk a lot about how
(20:53):
bad a decomposed body smells and how that is such
a distinctive odor that you ever forget and never want
to smell again. But you're telling me that an exhumed
body is worse. To me, it is and this is
why when when I go in as a scientist and
I am examining a decomposed body and yet they are foul,
(21:15):
I mean, it is really difficult to work in that environment.
But you understand that this is a natural biological process
that you're dealing with, okay, uh, But when you start
dealing with a uh, with a previously embalmed body, there's
something that's very unnatural about it, and it has again
like this sickly sweet smell. And one other factor to
(21:38):
it for me has always been in the back of
my mind when I first started the chemicals that were
being used. There was some evidence at that point in
time that these many of these these chemicals that were
being used, particularly a long long time ago UH two
inbalm bodies were carcinogenic. So you know, you're sitting there
and you're trying to keep your mind focused on the side.
(22:00):
It's this this examination that you're doing, but you're all
the while you're thinking, well, what in the heck am
I inhalating here with this sickly sweet kind of odor
of death? If you will. That's that's a man made
event that is uh on on every level for me,
at least very important Jackie. One of the biggest hurdles
(22:35):
that that these forensic scientists are going to have to
kind of negotiate as as this investigation into Tammy Davel's
death um UH continues on, is this idea that her
body has been embolved, and not only has the body
been embalmed, but the body has been buried. The body
(22:57):
has been buried in another state, and the big question
is what have they found? Why don't we have more
information at this point in time, that absolutely is the
million dollar question, Joe. And what I am curious about
after authorities exhumed the body, how are they going to
(23:17):
or how did they determine what caused Tammy's death and
what did she die from? Yeah, that that brings us
back to the original proposition. The kids all got together
with CBS on forty eight hours and actually one of
the sons, I believe it was Garth Garthy Bell, he
actually made the comment on air. He said, the police
(23:39):
told us that that our mother's caused death was asphyxia
um but we haven't seen autopsy report. That's quote unquote,
and so again, you know, just like these children, we
have yet to see the autopsy report. But the kids
are saying that they were informed that mom's death was
as a result of this fixy and I very curious
(24:01):
that during the same interview, it was kind of intimated
by the kids that well, Aspixy, it doesn't always mean homicide. Okay,
well maybe that's the case, and I guess in a
pure academic sense that would be the case. But you know,
as as we talk about, you know, day in and
day out, in these discussions that you and I have
(24:22):
here on body backs, we we know that most of
the time, when the police start talking about asphyxia, they're
gonna be talking about. Look, one of two things. Either
this is kind of a self inflicted event. You know,
you begin to think about, well, maybe somebody was hung
or uh, you know, maybe they placed a bag over
their own head and that that only occurs in very
(24:44):
rare circumstances, or they died at the hands of another individual.
But right now we're left with this kind of to
try to understand how did if they did in fact,
remember this hasn't come from an official source, how did
they in fact come to this conclusion? And well, that
would tell me that they found something on the physical
(25:05):
body at autopsy. If this is to be believed what
we heard the sun say they found something on the
physical body, Well, what would that be? Was there some
kind of damage to the neck that of course was
not seen beforehand because there was not uh an autopsy
immediately after death. Could you still see evidence that Yeah, yeah,
you could see a fraction hihoid, You could see uh
(25:28):
crushing trauma and the larynx, you know, the windpipe. We've
talked about that a lot. Is there a potential that
you could still see patiki. I think that's the big
question that everybody has. I think probably if you looked
close enough, particularly in the eyes. Um. But you know,
the thing about morticians is that when they embalm the body,
(25:49):
they do a curious thing with the eyes. They actually
put cups, these little um, these little cups uh over
the eyes and close the eyelids and then glue the
eyelids shut shut. And they do that with the mouth
as well. And my question is if there is patky
i present on the surface what's referred to as the
(26:11):
scleral surface of the eye, is it's still appreciable after
all this time. Remember she was actually in the ground
for weeks Jackie, and I mean for weeks down there
in Utah before they ever examined a body. And here's
another factor that you have to put into all of this,
because not only was she embombed and then transported down there,
but she was placed into uh, into this grave. What
(26:34):
condition was the grave then? Had it been compromised in anyway?
Was it? You know? They the funeral business sells coffins
to people on the uh with with the idea that
this thing is going to be sealed. It will be
sealed forever and ever, Amen, and that nothing's going to
impact the bodies. I've done a lot of exlamations. Bodies
(26:56):
get impacted, So I wonder how good was this a
real how effective was the embalming, because sometimes embalming can
go bad and you'll begin to have little focal areas
of decomposition that impacts certain areas of tissue. Is there
any chance that that happened in the case. So it's
really hard to try to understand how these individuals at
(27:20):
the Utah State Medical Examiner's office, which is where her
body eventually went to after the exhamation, what kind of
conclusions did they arrive at that point in time? And
I get the feeling we're gonna find out something really soon, Jackie,
because there are a number of trials on slate that
are going to be uh that are just over the horizon,
and at that point in time, evidence is going to
(27:41):
have to be presented and questions will be asked. We'll
just find out what kind of answers we get to them.
One of the things you mentioned, Joe was how long
Tammy had been buried. Well, along with that came how
long it took for us to have any findings. Even
just knowing that the toopsy itself was completed, Why is
(28:02):
that what what took so long? Yeah, that that's that's
a fantastic question, jack I gotta tell you, I've thought
about this quite a bit and around kind of been
the union, this odd universe of these day Bill cases.
We've got all these other deaths they are involved, and
let's think about all of the different jurisdictions. Well, now
(28:24):
we've got Idaho, We've got Utah involved because of Tammy,
and we go down to to Arizona, where we've got
desks down there that are you know, at least peripherally
involved in in these cases. And then you've got these
two individuals with U, with Chad and Lorie that run
(28:46):
off to to Hawaii to get to get married. What
you're looking at here is a multi jurisdictional event, Jackie.
And yeah, the you know, the people in Idaho are
going to have first shot at you know, having a
prosecution here. But you have to understand there's there are
(29:06):
other jurisdictions that have kind of authority in this. Even
the FEDS have an interest in this. Let's think about
j J entirely. Well, where were they actually kind of
last seen with videography, Well, uh, we know that um
(29:27):
at least tilely. The last time I think she was
seeing was over in Yellowstone. Well, who controls Yellowstone, Jackie,
that's fed. That's a fit. And then you've got people
crossing state lines, so you know you might have a
federal interest here as well. So I'm really wondering if
they are not holding back information because they're trying to
(29:47):
get this case put together that is highly highly complex
and very very complicated. I'm JOSEPHS. Gott Morgan, and this
is body Backs
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. Just spent your entire
life educating children. You know, I don't mean in a
normal classroom. I'm talking about in the library, servicing children
(00:32):
for maybe a couple of decades, where you're teaching them
how to read, one of the most basic things in
the world. You're beloved in school, and not just in
the school, but in the community at large. And suddenly
one morning your husband wakes up and find you dead
in the bed next to him, and you're only forty
nine years old. Today we're gonna talk about the Tammy
(00:56):
Day Bell case. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this his
body backs back with me again. Today is my good
friend Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie,
what can you tell us about the Tammy Day Bell case? Joe?
(01:17):
The death of Tammy Day Bell came seemingly out of nowhere.
In fact, in everyday life, Tammy Day Bell was a
healthy individual. In fact, she was training for a five
k race. Yet her husband, Chad Dave Bell, woke up
called saying that his wife was dead in the bed
next to him. No autopsy was done, no talk screen
(01:39):
was done. Nothing was done by the investigative team other
than to say that Tammy Day Bell was dead. You know,
one of one of the basic guiding principles in any
medical legal death investigation, Jackie, is that when someone is
actually found to cease, that is someone that doesn't just
(02:00):
you know how people turn it sometimes keel over dead,
you need to have a representative of the corner the
medical legal community, the corner of the medical examiner to
show up on the scene. And the reason is is
that you get one shot at this. When I teach
my classes, I talked about you can only enter a
room for the very first time. That is, you can
(02:22):
only cross that threshold one time. After that that moment's gone,
and those things that you decided to do at that
moment time are critical. And in Tammy Day Bell's case,
there's a thread that runs through the entire thing, the family,
even the corner, the police that were in the scene
that kept using the term appears to be consistent with
(02:43):
the natural death. And when that, when that's put forward,
you have to ask this question, Jackie, had the corner
come to that conclusion? How did how did this corner
come to the conclusion that Tammy Day Bell's death was
a natural death, because once you say that, once you
say that this is a natural death, that convinces the
(03:03):
family that you know, there's no need to go any further.
But you have to have an answer for that. You
have to be able to fill out a death certificate.
What are you gonna put down, suddenly died, God called
the end of life. Now you have to have substance
for reasons. And the reason this is so important is
that Tammy David was only forty nine years of age, Jackie,
(03:24):
Like you said, she was training to run in a race.
And if if you can do that, then that means
that more than likely you're not having some kind of
cardiac event that's ongoing. Because you know, the number one
killer in America is actually a cause of death, is
actually related to cardiac disease. There's no indication of that whatsoever.
(03:44):
And from what we're hearing what we're hearing, the only
official that actually showed up at the scene of her
death were members of the local sheriff's office, and and
they said, These deputies said, well, it appears to be
consistent with the natural death. Well, you know, my question
to that is, how can a deputy shaff in this
(04:05):
tiny little community look at a body, not knowing anything
about the medical history of this individual, and say, well,
everything appears to be consistent with the natural death. Did
this individual have some kind of special insight? No, they didn't.
They worked upon an assumption and then the base law
the basics of this the corner violet. They didn't even
(04:28):
show up to the scene from what we're hearing, And
it's just important. And this is why. First off, you've
got this woman that has died in her sleep. You
have no good reason, at least scientific reason to hang
your hat on at this moment time, and you're just
gonna release her directly from the scene. And one of
the most important things about conducting a death investigation from
(04:52):
the perspective of the corners, you have to see that
body in context. So what does that mean? I want
to see the body on the bed where there were found.
I want to see the body on the floor if
that's where they're found, adjacent to the bed. Is there
something that happened during the night when no one else
was witnessing this event that could give me clues as
a trained medical legal death investigator, as to what brought
(05:15):
about the end of her life and you know, was
there some kind of trauma that was sustained. Was their
blood on the pillow? Will never know that. But besides that,
we've got another issue. We don't know what the post
mortem interval is. And that's one of the things that
we do that's critical. Okay, you just threw one out
at me, post mortem interval. What the hey? Well with
(05:37):
post mortem interval, Jackie. What that means is when we're
talking about we've got three areas that we deal in
in medical legal death death investigation. We talked about anti mortem,
which think of a like an anti chamber in a
in a pyramid. That means the precursor. That's gonna mean
anti mortem before death. And then we have an event
(05:58):
that's called perimortem, which kind of means in the throws up.
That's like in the in the midst of the fatal event.
You're not quite dead yet, but you're in that kind
of lingering mode. There, say, an individual that is bleeding out,
that has sustained a gunshot wound um and then you
have post mortem. Well, post mortem means that period of
time from when your heart ceased beating until the moment
(06:21):
time when you're finally discovered by the authorities, and so
we have to be able to measure that. And the
way that we measure that is examining the body by
determining postmorum temperature, that is, how cool or warm the
body is to the touch. And also we can use
thermometers to facilitate that because what we know is the
(06:42):
body once once your heart stops beating, you begin to
bleed energy out until like the twelve hour after death,
and after that all of the energy and the heat
that your body is generated is gone. And at that
point you are just like any other um element of
a room room, say, for instance, a piece of furniture,
the bed, You're impacted directly by the environmental temperature. That
(07:06):
means your temperature or your body is gonna rise and
fall just like it would on a chair or end
table or something like that. And then after that we
have to do an assessment on the rider mortis that
is the stiffness in the body, how stiff is a body,
And that's done at a measured interval, you know, and
it starts in the small muscles of the face and
(07:27):
and then it extends out to the to the peripheral
areas like the legs and the elbows and all these
sorts of things. It kind of starts at the same
time and all the muscle groups. But you first appreciated
in the smaller muscles. And then we talked about stuff
like uh, postmortem ravidity or the settling of blood. You
and I have talked about that a lot, Jackie, and
and that again happens at a measured interval. None of
(07:49):
this stuff was done so at the end of the
day when you're doing a scene assessment on the body.
And in this particular case and Tammy day Bell's case,
guess what, we got a big fat doughnut here. There's
no data. There's no data whatsoever, no scientific data to
back this up so that we can make a determination
as to how long this individual has been dead the
(08:10):
context in which their body was found. Now, one very
interesting piece of this is that Tammy's kids, they were
in attendance. What we're hearing is that the children actually
came to the home after they had been notified that
their mom had passed on. And one little comment really
(08:31):
caught my ear in the midst of all of this.
One of the children at that point time is reported
to have said that Tammy had something coming out of
her nose potentially out of her mouth, and it sounded
to me, Jackie like what we referred to as a
frothy odemitus cone. Well, you're throwing those big ones out.
(08:53):
What does that mean? Well, anytime we see this kind
of and if people just a age and almost like
the head of a beer, if you will, you know
how when you pour beer too fast and that foam
kind of creeps up to the top. Um, it's froth
You've heard that term before. UH. Horses get frothy when
(09:13):
they run real fast. But this can happen in the
midst of a fatal event in which there is some
type of respiratory distress that's going on, where, for instance,
individuals having trouble breathing. UH. It can happen in the
event of some kind of UH direct asphyxial event, like
(09:34):
a suffocation or like a strangulation UH smothering, that sort
of thing. It can happen in certain cases relative to
UH utilizing drugs. We see it a lot in heroin
overdose victims because what we do know is that heroin,
for instance, depresses the respiratory UH system and so the
(09:55):
lung has become very very heavy. At that point in time,
you're really struggling to breathing. You know what, l what
other area that you see this in, Jackie, We actually
see it in drowning victims when we take a body
out of a body of water and pull them up
on the bank of say a lake or or river.
It's really kind of odd to see this. But suddenly
this frothiodemitist cone begins to emerge from the nose in
(10:18):
the mouth, and it's almost kind of kind of a
pink color to it, and that's again an indication that
something has compromised the respiratory system. And in Tammy's case,
I would want to go back and take a look
at this and say, well, oh my gosh, what in
the world would have impacted this forty nine year old, healthy, beautiful,
(10:38):
vibrant woman who's loved by all of these folks, that
doesn't have any kind of physical uh complaints and no
kind of medical history anything like that. What would have
brought her to this end suddenly in her death? You
know what, those answers could very well have been buried
with her. Jackie, Jackie, I gotta say that with Tammy's death,
(11:17):
we've and I know it's cliche to say this, but
you know, at the end of the day, we've we've
got far more questions than we do answers um and
all because one simple action was not taken, and that
is somebody picking up their car key's, getting in their
car and driving out to the scene of her death.
As as the content area expert for that particular county,
(11:40):
and I'm talking about the corner you were reading my
mind joke as a cut a couple of specific questions here.
We know, Joe, as we've been talking about that the
corner did not go to the scene. First off, there
is a difference between a corner and a medical examiner,
and in this county, Fremont County, it is a corner
that attends death. Not only does that raise questions that
(12:02):
she did not attend to the seeing Idaho does not
require autopsies. The family said no to an autopsy and
that was it. There's just so many questions there, Joe,
about how Tammy day Bell tied. Yeah, there are, and
it's it's really amazing, Jackie, when you begin to think
about how the decision by one individual can impact multiple
(12:26):
cases and as we well know, the day bell saga
that goes on and on and on. There seems like
their bodies all over the place. And in my estimation
this is one of certainly the most curious out of
all of them. And you're right, you are in that
Idaho is a corner state. That means that the official
(12:48):
death investigator, that is the medical legal death investigator also
referred to as the certifier of death for that county,
is an elected official And there are many, many, wonder
all corners all across this this this country. It is
up to the corner at that moment in time to
make a decision about what is going to be the
(13:12):
disposition of the body. And what I mean by that
is is the body going to be released from the
scene nothing else is going to be pursued, or is
the body going to be sent And in this case,
the body Tammy Davel's body would have been sent to
the Ada County Corner's office, which is rather large county,
(13:32):
which is where Boise is and that's where the autopsies
are done. Uh. They kind of the best way to
say is a subcontract to do all of the autopsies
for this little county Fremont County, that choice wasn't made.
The former was made. They decided the corner deside to
release that body from the scene and sent directly to
(13:55):
the funeral home. And what they're saying their default position
is saying, well, the family didn't want an autopsy. Well,
let me break this down for you. Yeah, the family
may not have wanted an autopsy, but at the end
of the day, when you have a death investigation involving
a forty nine year old woman who you know, let's
face it, there are other mysterious events that are going
(14:17):
on around this body. It relies. It comes down to
this corner making that decision, and they are hard decisions.
That's why you get elected to this office. To go
ahead and even if it doesn't abide by the wishes
of the family, you go ahead and you do this autopsy,
because if you don't, as we're seeing played out right
before us, you wind up with a gigantic mess on
(14:38):
your hand. That means that after this period of time
which everybody knows, Tammy day Bell was sent from Idaho,
eventually wound up in a graveyard down in Utah and
she's buried. So now you've got all kinds of other
complications that come in if you want to examine her body.
Now you've got to have her exhumed. And there is
the big problem, Joe, because with burial comes the preparation
(15:02):
of the body to be buried. At that point, if
she had been poisoned, if she had overdosed, if she
had any chemical in her body, that evidence is destroyed now.
And Jackie, in this particular case, this is another example
of if only, if only another decision had been made,
(15:25):
so we know that that there was a bad decision
made at the scene of Tammy Davil's death. All Right,
the body is released, it has to go to the
funeral home because you're you're not gonna be able to
transport her body across state lines without that body being embolved.
All right, there was another opportunity here. The corner could
(15:46):
have gone to the funeral home. And some reports say
that she did at that point in time what she saw.
I have no idea. Obviously she felt comfortable enough at
that moment time to release the body. But I'll tell
you what she didn't do, Jackie. We have these big
needles that we use, these big syringes, if you will,
the needle itself is actually called a ten gage needle,
(16:08):
and people at home may or may not know what
it is, but it's a brother large needle. It's not
something you would give an injection with, say, if you're
going to see your your family practitioners. Rather large. It's
what we're use in the morgue. We can go to
a funeral home and I've done this any number of
times and take a ten gage needle with a large
syringe and you go right through the breastplate and you
(16:28):
go into the order and you directly draw heart blood.
If you can't get heart blood out of the a
order you can go into you can do a slight
incision and draw out femeral blood. Now that's better than nothing.
What else you can do with the more you can
actually and this this means that you're not doing an autopsy,
you're not having to open the body. We do all
of this externally. We can take a similar needle and
(16:51):
go directly externally into the roof of the bladder if
you will, and draw out urine that wasn't done. If
you can't get that, we can always go of the eyes.
And what are the eyes do? Well? They're filled with
what's referred to as vitreous fluid, and a lot of
people aren't familiar with that. It's got a real kind
of cyclical rate. It doesn't it doesn't metabolize things, say,
(17:13):
for instance, like the blood does. It just kind of
it kind of sits there and kind of slowly kind
of churns in this area. And it it's what gives
our I form. But what's really interesting about it is
it holds on uh to certain chemicals that we can
actually go in and conduct toxicological studies on. That wasn't done, Jackie.
(17:33):
They missed the boat on that point too. So now
as you mentioned, as you mentioned, you've got all these
other people that are now touching the body, You've got
these funeral directors that are handling the body, the embalmer
that's going to be setting things up to start this
embalming process. And you know, I've had a lot of
people that have asked me, but we'll look, Morgan. You know,
(17:53):
why couldn't they just go back and draw talks on her?
You know, after she's been exhumed. You can't. It's an
empirical impossibility, Dina. Why because of all the blood is gone,
every single drop of it. Because the way embalming works,
it's a gravity driven process. They have a little pump
that pumps this embalming fluid into the body. It starts
(18:17):
up high, it comes down low, and so as they're
pumping the body, they're infusing it with this embalming fluid.
It's pushing all the blood out of the body. And
they have this return where they use these large metal trocars.
They're called to start this, to start this event, and
they're pulling the blood out of the body. And when
that when that fluid turns clear, you know that all
(18:40):
the blood is gone and the body is embalmed. So
you can't go back after the fact. And if you've
never if you've never actually placed your hands onto an
embalmed body, it's impacted by these chemicals, and rightly so,
because embalming the process itself turns the body very, very firm.
(19:01):
It preserves the body. The folks at home will just
imagine many times what an overinflated basketball feels like. That's
kind of the same texture that an embalmed body has.
It's got it's it's kind of it's very firm, but
yet it still has kind of a supple nature to it,
but you're not going to get anything out of that
body that is really worth having relative to fluids for toxicology.
(19:27):
There might be a saving grace if they can go
in and capture some of the tissue and look at
it microscopically, but again it's a long shot. When a
body is embalmed and the chemicals are flushed throughout the body,
it is going in through the veins. Is it going
into the organs and to the tissue as well? Yes,
(19:50):
it is. And I've been involved in many what are
referred to as exhimations where you take the body, um
you removed, the body is exhumed, and the body comes
back to the morgue. And many times this happens as
a result of the bodies uh not previously being an autopsy,
just like in this case. And when you get that
body out of the ground and you bring the body
(20:13):
back to the morgue where you're going to do the
autopsy again, when you not only is the external body
kind of firm to the touch, and it's got this
uh it's a smell that never leaves you. It's not
like a decomposition. It's got this real sickly sweet odor
to it, and that's the embalming fluid. And when you
open the body, uh, it just kind of slaps you
(20:33):
right in the face and you have to kind of
get past it, because when I say it's sickly sweet,
I'll put it to you this way. In my experience,
I would much rather be around a decomposed body than
I would an embalmed body. That's how sickening smells. I
listened to you and Nancy talk a lot about how
(20:53):
bad a decomposed body smells and how that is such
a distinctive odor that you ever forget and never want
to smell again. But you're telling me that an exhumed
body is worse. To me, it is and this is
why when when I go in as a scientist and
I am examining a decomposed body and yet they are foul,
(21:15):
I mean, it is really difficult to work in that environment.
But you understand that this is a natural biological process
that you're dealing with, okay, uh, But when you start
dealing with a uh, with a previously embalmed body, there's
something that's very unnatural about it, and it has again
like this sickly sweet smell. And one other factor to
(21:38):
it for me has always been in the back of
my mind when I first started the chemicals that were
being used. There was some evidence at that point in
time that these many of these these chemicals that were
being used, particularly a long long time ago UH two
inbalm bodies were carcinogenic. So you know, you're sitting there
and you're trying to keep your mind focused on the side.
(22:00):
It's this this examination that you're doing, but you're all
the while you're thinking, well, what in the heck am
I inhalating here with this sickly sweet kind of odor
of death? If you will. That's that's a man made
event that is uh on on every level for me,
at least very important Jackie. One of the biggest hurdles
(22:35):
that that these forensic scientists are going to have to
kind of negotiate as as this investigation into Tammy Davel's
death um UH continues on, is this idea that her
body has been embolved, and not only has the body
been embalmed, but the body has been buried. The body
(22:57):
has been buried in another state, and the big question
is what have they found? Why don't we have more
information at this point in time, that absolutely is the
million dollar question, Joe. And what I am curious about
after authorities exhumed the body, how are they going to
(23:17):
or how did they determine what caused Tammy's death and
what did she die from? Yeah, that that brings us
back to the original proposition. The kids all got together
with CBS on forty eight hours and actually one of
the sons, I believe it was Garth Garthy Bell, he
actually made the comment on air. He said, the police
(23:39):
told us that that our mother's caused death was asphyxia
um but we haven't seen autopsy report. That's quote unquote,
and so again, you know, just like these children, we
have yet to see the autopsy report. But the kids
are saying that they were informed that mom's death was
as a result of this fixy and I very curious
(24:01):
that during the same interview, it was kind of intimated
by the kids that well, Aspixy, it doesn't always mean homicide. Okay,
well maybe that's the case, and I guess in a
pure academic sense that would be the case. But you know,
as as we talk about, you know, day in and
day out, in these discussions that you and I have
(24:22):
here on body backs, we we know that most of
the time, when the police start talking about asphyxia, they're
gonna be talking about. Look, one of two things. Either
this is kind of a self inflicted event. You know,
you begin to think about, well, maybe somebody was hung
or uh, you know, maybe they placed a bag over
their own head and that that only occurs in very
(24:44):
rare circumstances, or they died at the hands of another individual.
But right now we're left with this kind of to
try to understand how did if they did in fact,
remember this hasn't come from an official source, how did
they in fact come to this conclusion? And well, that
would tell me that they found something on the physical
(25:05):
body at autopsy. If this is to be believed what
we heard the sun say they found something on the
physical body, Well, what would that be? Was there some
kind of damage to the neck that of course was
not seen beforehand because there was not uh an autopsy
immediately after death. Could you still see evidence that Yeah, yeah,
you could see a fraction hihoid, You could see uh
(25:28):
crushing trauma and the larynx, you know, the windpipe. We've
talked about that a lot. Is there a potential that
you could still see patiki. I think that's the big
question that everybody has. I think probably if you looked
close enough, particularly in the eyes. Um. But you know,
the thing about morticians is that when they embalm the body,
(25:49):
they do a curious thing with the eyes. They actually
put cups, these little um, these little cups uh over
the eyes and close the eyelids and then glue the
eyelids shut shut. And they do that with the mouth
as well. And my question is if there is patky
i present on the surface what's referred to as the
(26:11):
scleral surface of the eye, is it's still appreciable after
all this time. Remember she was actually in the ground
for weeks Jackie, and I mean for weeks down there
in Utah before they ever examined a body. And here's
another factor that you have to put into all of this,
because not only was she embombed and then transported down there,
but she was placed into uh, into this grave. What
(26:34):
condition was the grave then? Had it been compromised in anyway?
Was it? You know? They the funeral business sells coffins
to people on the uh with with the idea that
this thing is going to be sealed. It will be
sealed forever and ever, Amen, and that nothing's going to
impact the bodies. I've done a lot of exlamations. Bodies
(26:56):
get impacted, So I wonder how good was this a
real how effective was the embalming, because sometimes embalming can
go bad and you'll begin to have little focal areas
of decomposition that impacts certain areas of tissue. Is there
any chance that that happened in the case. So it's
really hard to try to understand how these individuals at
(27:20):
the Utah State Medical Examiner's office, which is where her
body eventually went to after the exhamation, what kind of
conclusions did they arrive at that point in time? And
I get the feeling we're gonna find out something really soon, Jackie,
because there are a number of trials on slate that
are going to be uh that are just over the horizon,
and at that point in time, evidence is going to
(27:41):
have to be presented and questions will be asked. We'll
just find out what kind of answers we get to them.
One of the things you mentioned, Joe was how long
Tammy had been buried. Well, along with that came how
long it took for us to have any findings. Even
just knowing that the toopsy itself was completed, Why is
(28:02):
that what what took so long? Yeah, that that's that's
a fantastic question, jack I gotta tell you, I've thought
about this quite a bit and around kind of been
the union, this odd universe of these day Bill cases.
We've got all these other deaths they are involved, and
let's think about all of the different jurisdictions. Well, now
(28:24):
we've got Idaho, We've got Utah involved because of Tammy,
and we go down to to Arizona, where we've got
desks down there that are you know, at least peripherally
involved in in these cases. And then you've got these
two individuals with U, with Chad and Lorie that run
(28:46):
off to to Hawaii to get to get married. What
you're looking at here is a multi jurisdictional event, Jackie.
And yeah, the you know, the people in Idaho are
going to have first shot at you know, having a
prosecution here. But you have to understand there's there are
(29:06):
other jurisdictions that have kind of authority in this. Even
the FEDS have an interest in this. Let's think about
j J entirely. Well, where were they actually kind of
last seen with videography, Well, uh, we know that um
(29:27):
at least tilely. The last time I think she was
seeing was over in Yellowstone. Well, who controls Yellowstone, Jackie,
that's fed. That's a fit. And then you've got people
crossing state lines, so you know you might have a
federal interest here as well. So I'm really wondering if
they are not holding back information because they're trying to
(29:47):
get this case put together that is highly highly complex
and very very complicated. I'm JOSEPHS. Gott Morgan, and this
is body Backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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