February 20, 2024 • 42 mins
Lacey Fletcher was on the volleyball team when she is in 9th grade, and she looks like any other healthy teen. But her parents say she is "on the spectrum" and take her out of school and take her home. For the next 20 years, they don't take their daughter to the doctor, they don't do anything with her until she becomes totally non-verbal. For the last 12 years of her life she didn't move from her spot on the couch, she slept in her spot, she ate in her spot, she went to the bathroom in her spot, and it was rarely cleaned. Lacey Fletcher dies at 36, after withstanding years of pain and suffering. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack take a look behind the sofa to answer the questions about the woman who melted into the couch.
Transcript Highlights
00:02:40Talking about melting
00:06:22 Talk about smell of urine, feces, nothing cleaned
00:09:46 Talk about staying in same spot for years
00:12:46 Discussion of healthy and active to dead on the couch
00:15:14 Talk about Lacey Fletcher on the couch 20 years
00:19:25 Discuss bed sores joining with other bed sores
00:23:15 Talk about chronic bone infection
00:27:17 Describing her condition at 36-years-old
00:31:10 Discussion of weight as Lacey Fletcher weighed 96 pounds
00:34:53 Talk about maggots in her body
00:38:56 How did Lacey Fletcher get covid?
00:42:01 Discussion – she is non-verbal, always in pain, and trapped
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. You can say many
things about my beloved home state of Louisiana that will
give you a sense of what people think about the place.
(00:29):
You know, the first thing I think of is, you know,
the love that I have for my family that are there.
I think about our food, our cuisine, arguably, i'd argue
with anybody, probably the most unique in the US. You
can talk about our music. No one touches our music,
whether it's zodiko or Country and Western or the jazz
(00:54):
clubs that inhabit those dark spaces in the French Quarter.
But one thing I think that everybody can consistently come
to grips with when it comes to New Orleans is
a temperature. And I can't tell you over the years
how many people I've heard say that they have never
(01:15):
been so hot as they were on a trip to
New Orleans during the middle of summer. And that brings
about thoughts. You think about, well, how did your ancestors
ever survive in that environment before days of conditioned air.
If you will, you feel like you're gonna melt. But
(01:42):
you know, there is a young woman, actually there was
a young woman. She's no longer with us, and she died,
but what was left behind of her has been described
(02:09):
in terms of having melted away. And I can tell
you this it had nothing to do with the heat
of Louisiana. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body vats.
(02:33):
It's often said, I think you know that you can
never take off enough clothes when it's hot outside, Dave.
Some people will say, well, if it's cold, I can
always bundle up. I can get a layer upon layer.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Now.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
I know my friends up in Minnesota and North Dakota
and up in Wisconsin will probably take exception to that.
And I'm not even going to talk to my friends
up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Beautiful area up there,
but they do no cold and they many of them
will say, I prefer the heat any day. But I
(03:10):
think you know where I'm going with this. If you
you can layer up and bundle up to a great degree. Now,
it makes it uncomfortable, you can't move around. But there's
just something about being in an environment where you're incredibly
hot and always sweating, miserable. It's almost like a sickness.
Sometimes you can't get past it. And we experience that
(03:33):
heat here in Alabama as well to a certain degree,
don't we, Dave, Yeah, somewhat, but yeah, you can, you know,
and but bodies, you know, that are subjected to this
kind of in these environmental conditions, they change and decay rapidly.
But you know, Dave, the story that that we're going
(03:59):
to talk about, I don't necessarily want to talk about it,
but I feel like it needs to be said. The
decay that took place where the young woman's body didn't
take place after death.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Dave, that's what you know as you're talking about melting
and those things, and it's because it's been described that
thirty six year old Lacey Fletcher melted into the couch
in her parents' home as we talk about this today,
and that's the end, Okay, the end is that she
(04:33):
was found melted into the counch. You're going to have
to describe this for us because I picture it from
a temperature standpoint, you know, as ice cream melts, But
in this case, we're dealing with the human being who
I'm looking at pictures of her when she's in ninth
grade and she's healthy, she's playing on the volleyball team,
(04:55):
and then her parents check her out of school and
homeschool her. And the next thing we find out is
that nobody's heard from her in years until they get
a call that she's passed away at the age of
thirty six.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
What was striking about Lacey's case is that the corner
who is in fact, who is in fact a physician,
and it's this actually, this case takes place in East
Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, is well, it's a it's in a
unique spot. It's it's a spot that if you have
(05:32):
any sense of South Louisiana and you know where, you
know where Lake Pontchatrain is, Lake Pontchatrain sits north of
New Orleans. And if you think of Louisiana as a boot,
which is kind of shaped like it would be the
top of the bottom of the boot, it's part of
(05:52):
South Louisiana. And this is where this family lived in
the corner who you know, attended the scene. He physically
bore witness to Lacey's body. This gentleman, his name is
doctor Yule Beckham. He actually came to the home. You know,
he saw this young lady laying on the sofa and
(06:13):
she had smell of urine, which I know that obviously
many people can identify, you know what the smell of
urine is like. But after an area has been super
saturated with urine, it takes on a very strong ammonia smell,
and so that would be one of these things that
like hits you in the face. It's assaulting. The smell
(06:33):
itself is assaulting you. Couple that with also this this
idea that she's not clean relative to her backside, and
so she's laying in her own feces, so urine and feces.
It looks as though to him that she's been laying
there for a protracted time, and she's actually on a sofa,
(06:54):
family sofa, and there are other seating areas around her.
So whoever is in dwelling this house, which turns out
to be her parents, they're in dwelling this environment with
their daughter laying on the sofa and smelling like this
all of the time. And one of the things he
describes is that he saw in dwelling maggots and these
(07:16):
maggots had taken up home in her body. And this
is not unheard of. I've worked several cases like this.
A lady that had untreated breast cancer, and she had
in dwelling maggots in one of her breast And I've
seen this before, but to this degree, I just don't know.
(07:38):
But doctor Yule, he actually made the comment, Dave, that
it appeared as though that this poor woman had melted.
That's an inaccurate term, because she's not. You know, to melt.
To for something to melt, you have to have a
constant heat source. You know, you think about take an
(08:00):
ice cube, you put it adjacent to to the flame,
and it's going to, you know, go from solid into
a liquid. It could vaporize. That's not what we're talking
about here. We're literally talking about this young woman who
has laid on the sofa for so long day that
her body has begun to digest itself and there is
(08:23):
this liquid product that is produced by the cells beginning
to break down. The cyte applasm actually in the cells
himself is leaching out. The maggots are feeding off of
this because this is a source of protein for them.
And I can't even I don't know that anybody out
there could even actually begin to imagine the level of
(08:48):
discomfort an individual would have to be suffering from in
order to not sense this. But here's here's the real
road with this day. She was in an infirmed static position.
She was in what the medical professionals referred to in stasis,
(09:10):
just laying there, and she required assistance because she's autistic
and she's nonverbal. So wherever her placement is on the
spectrum of autism, it had the component of it where
she apparently over these years she had mentioned that she
(09:30):
had attended school at one point in time, but she
was noncommunicative. She's laid their day. She laid there as
her body began to give up. She laid there as
the sofa began to give way, its threadbare. You can
see the cushions, the interior, this foam rubber. Laid there
(09:52):
and just wasted, wasted away. She's nonverbal. How is she
going to complain? What's she going to do? We do
know this though it was twenty years Dave, It was
twenty years since the last time anyone had any awareness
of the status of Lacey. You read these old stories
(10:31):
out of the Bible, and you think about these people
that were in these miserable conditions. Maybe they had leprosy,
or they were deemed unclean, they were unhealthy. Maybe they
were paralytic, and they're laying outside the gates of the
city and they're crying mercy, mercy, you know, for anybody
(10:52):
that would come by and extend extend mercy to them
to help them. But Dave, you know, in this case
with we've got a thirty six year old woman with
autism that's nonverbal, and I think, at least in my
estimation that I don't I don't know of anyone maybe
(11:12):
an East FOLII in a parish that deserved more mercy
than her, and it wasn't even extended by her own family. Day.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
That's what we're dealing with here. And Sheila Fletcher and
Clay Fletcher are the parents of Lacey Fletcher. Now they're
both sixty six. Lacey was thirty six. I say was
because she is no more. To say that she melted
is not to be disrespectful. Joe and I both, in
looking at this story, have come to it from different ways.
(11:43):
Because I'm not a medical doctor. I don't know biology.
I fell asleep in those classes. The science classes didn't
attract my attention. I probably was watching something different. But
what does get me as a as a father is
to think of about how when I look at my children,
my grandchildren, I think about what can I do to
(12:04):
make their day better? What can I do to protect
them from harm? What can when they cry, when they
stub a toe? I want to take the pain away.
I don't want them to even have that. And I
think about that as a as a father, and now
as this mom and dad who I don't know how
this happened. This Lacey Fletcher was active, was okay. I
(12:25):
know she's on the spectrum with autism and was non verbal. Joe,
is that something that can happen after?
Speaker 1 (12:32):
It would seem, Yeah, it would seem because I think
you even had mentioned that the image that we saw
of her, she was in the chorus.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
She's yes, I've got a picture of her. She looks
to be about sixteen years old. She is active, she played,
She played on the volleyball team. I don't know how
one becomes.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
I don't either, because I go at Jacksonville State, my
family and I we go support our women's volleyball team.
And let me tell you something that might be some
of the most verbal human beings I've ever been around
in my life. And so the shouting and the screaming
and everything that goes on there, and then of course,
so yeah, you would think that something triggered, triggered, you know,
(13:12):
along the way. And isn't it kind of interesting that
she was in a private school setting and then she's
abruptly removed and then for all we know, she just
she just shut down and they placed her on the sofa. Dave,
I got to tell you in full. I have to fully,
(13:38):
you know, kind of tell you how I got involved
in this case. I'd had the folks at News Nation
reach out to me with Ashley Banfield Show, and they
wanted me to talk about the Shong woman that had
melted into the sofa and breaking news happened and whatever.
We couldn't make it happen for that appearance, but you know,
(13:59):
I just did a cursory read at first, she's melting
the sofa, and I'm thinking, Okay, this is one of
these cases where someone has died and the family just
ignored the body and left the body on the sofa.
And I've been around those cases. I've worked those kinds
of cases. People do do that where they have a
loved one that just dies in the house. You see
them in the news frequently and the bodies are decomposing,
(14:22):
the people are still living around them day. That's not
what happened here. You're talking about this slow role. How
many years? Tell me again? How many years? Again?
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Was I We know for at least twenty years, at
least twenty years she was left unchecked. We had no
health insurance claims, we had no visits to a doctor.
We only know that she last saw a doctor in
two thousand and two, when she was sixteen years old.
(14:52):
That's the last record we have of her. And as
you look into this, you're thinking, she's sixteen, we're looking
at pictures, she's playing volleyball. Now we go twenty years
later and she's dead, and we're told that she was autistic,
diagnosed with autism, and she was nonverbal after this had
to be after she was taken out of the private
(15:13):
school and she was on the couch. And here's the
other part, because we know that she didn't see a
doctor for twenty years, and she's autistic with you know,
and on the spectrum that you would expect her to
have to see a doctor.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Yeah, yeah, you would. And if she's nonverbal, if let's
just say that she has developed that she was on
the spectrum, and because she was not receiving any kind
of therapy, you know, to just live day to day.
That buddy, let me tell you, the breaks came off,
and she just began flying down the hill. And she's
(15:49):
going down the hill so fast that as she begins
to diminish over a period of time, maybe she completely
shuts down and she just goes into this status where
she is non mobile, she's nonverbal, she can't tell them
what she wants, but she's suffering from all these maladies
all of her body.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
The coroner suggesting that she had not moved from that
spot on the couch for twelve years. Not moved. That
means that her mother and father brought her her food.
I want to go over something very quickly. But they
brought her food, they brought her water, They brought her
(16:31):
and allowed her to Granted, they had to have cleaned
up some of her They had to have cleaned up something.
There's no way you could have twelve years of human waste,
of excrement urine all around you. You couldn't hold that much.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
I will no, you couldn't. And here's another thing, Dave,
that I find very interesting, because they've got these ghastly images.
And it might be the Post or Daily Mail. I'm
not really sure which one, but they had gotten these
image just where her body is actually blurred out. But Dave,
this is like a The sofa that she's on is
(17:08):
a brown leather. It looks like leather. It's probably some
kind of naugahide or something like that. She's laying it,
and you know it's the ones with the big cushions.
Well in the center of these you can make this
out the entire sofa. That cushion has cratered out. Man,
(17:31):
it's cratered out. And I mean it's worn down. I
mean we all know. I mean, if you got and
you buy a sofa, right, you buy a sofa, maybe
your old one has gotten threadbare. It is worn. It's
like it doesn't have the same spring to it anymore.
And so it's like I want to divest myself with
the thing. I'm going to throw it on the junk
pile or maybe you know somebody can come and pick
it up for charity. And you got and buy a
(17:53):
new one, well, you want a new one and you
want it to be nice so you can sit on it.
You're also how long it would take for someone to
wear through, to wear through all of those various surfaces
on top of that sofa. So when the corner comes
out and he's already been assaulted, his senses have been assaulted.
(18:17):
He's assaulted, you know, certainly with what he smells and
then what he sees, and then laying there before him,
when he begins to do his examination, there are things
that are going to stand out to him. He's going
to see the filth that this young lady is surrounded by.
He knows that it's been in dwelling for some time.
(18:38):
Because I think anybody, any right thinking person can look
at an area that's blown out on the sofa and
know that this is something that didn't happen overnight. This
is because look all the other cushions around her, they were.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Intact, and so she had set You can see where
she sat spot.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
How do you know, how does that happen over that
period of time?
Speaker 2 (19:02):
The parents mom took her to a psychologist in ninth grade,
well at fourteen, to a clinical psychologist, because she suffered
severe social anxiety. Apparently, and this is what the defense
is saying. The parents loved her so much they just
put her on the couch and weighted on her hand
and foot. That's what they're trying to say, these parents did.
(19:23):
But Joe, there were bed sores. She has sonic bone infection.
She has is covered in ulcers with fibers from the
sofa maggots that she had. They're embedded in the exposed
surface of the bones. She had to be alive when
(19:47):
the exposed surface of her bones are there for mom
and dad at sea before she passed away. Of course,
there was fecal matter in several places around her body.
They had to have cleaned yup some but I mean
twelve years. She didn't move for twelve years, she did
not She stayed in that spot. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Well, yeah, you think about that, and you think about
these these indwelling sowres that she has. And one of
the reasons, and for those in the audience that have
had to bear the burden of taking care of an
infirmed family member or maybe somebody that's up in age,
you know, one of the most important things they tell
you to do with people in this status is to
(20:30):
roll them. You have to. You have to roll them
to get them out of those dependent, gravitationally dependent areas.
So is that what causes it is not moving. You
leave them in one spot. And if folks at home
will just think about just think about if you right now,
if you reach over and you feel your ribs, okay,
(20:53):
and you can actually feel the margins of your ribs.
So just imagine if you lay on I don't know,
pick aside left or right side, and you stay in
that position forever and ever a men, even though you
have soft tissue in between your ribs and the outer
portion of your body, over a period of time, if
(21:13):
you don't move from that position. I'm merely using the
ribs as an example. Because that bone is very close
to the surface. The surface of the bone is going
to wear through the underlying subcu fat, through any kind
of musculature that might be there, and then into the
dermis of the skin. It's kind of the pressure is
(21:35):
coming from internally as opposed to getting having an external injury.
This is something that is eroding from the outside, I
mean from the inside and then outward because of that pressure,
and then externally the contact surface, which in this case
would have been the surface of the sofa. It's also
(21:55):
rubbing up against this area. So if she even made
the slide, this movement but stayed roughly in the same
same position. That's creating friction on the surface of the skin,
and it's wearing away day. It's wearing a way every
single day because she's not being moved, her body's not
being tended to, she's certainly not being cleaned. Because when
(22:18):
somebody in a nursing home and it does happen, it
doesn't mean that someone's being necessarily neglected in nursing home
if they have a bet sore. However, if you do
not attend to bed sores, they are absolutely positively lethal.
They have to be essentially debreded, kind of scraped out.
(22:39):
They have to be treated with various creams, antibiotics, these
sorts of things, and the idea is to get them
off of those gravitationally depended areas so you can have healing.
The prob that rub is here is that if you
have someone that can't move themselves, what are you going
to do? I mean, you can only flip somebody so
(23:02):
many times. But it sounds to me as though that
there was so little movement and care taken with her
that it just wore away.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
How do you get a chronic bone infection that sounds.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
It's markedly painful, and a lot of a lot of
that well, it goes to the fact that the bone
is wearing as well, and so you know, the bone
actually has vasculature itself, it actually has vessels that come
through the bone, and so the wear on that surface,
you know, one of one of the things I always
(23:36):
always imagine many times if I ever go out to
the West Coast and I see the shoreline out there
with those big rocks, and I think about how big
were those rocks at one point in time, because they're huge,
particularly if you go up toward northern California and Oregon.
You get up in that area, but you know, over
a period of time, the wear from the wind and
the sand, you know, kind of pummeling that area. Once
(23:57):
you get past that cushion that you have have with
the body, where you have this layer of skin subkey fat,
you have overlying muscle tissue. Once that's gone, the bone
now is as tough and resilient as we think that
it is. It's now exposed to the outside world. Bone
(24:17):
is not meant to be exposed to the outside world
in a living creature. And we've even got it to
the point now where the bone is apparently eroded to
the point where they've got indwelling maggots that are there.
And you know that that's the other thing that's that's
quite striking about this case, Dave. You know, when you
think about that in dwelling in the in these sores
(24:40):
are going to be maggots. You're going to have eggs
that have been laid and here's what they spring forward
from the eggs of flies. All right, And every species
of insect out there has some form, but particularly in
a case like this, what we're talking about are probably
(25:01):
common house fly, the blowfly, and when these creatures deposit
their eggs, there's a cycle that they go through. And
you know, and my friends that work in forensic entomology,
such as the great Jason Bird, if you ever get
a chance to reading things by doctor Bird, he's a
(25:22):
fascinating guy. But you know, we measured in death investigation,
now we're talking about dead bodies here. We measure the
life cycle of how many generations of flies have come
into a location and laid eggs, and they've gone through
the whole cycle where they have the eggs and they
(25:43):
shed their their the husk and they blossom into you know,
adult flies. How do you how do you take to
measure that with a living person. Now, there have been
throughout history cases where people have had infection in their
bodies and maggots at one point in time were actually
(26:04):
prescribed by the medical community because the maggots placed into
a sore would go in and they would eat all
the nasties in there, particularly the bacteria. They would feast
off of it, and it would keep a sore clean.
But you know, in this case, this is not.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Just that's something that'd be kind of going like blood letting.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
No, No, it's it's a step above blood letting leah
and leech's, you know, which is probably ultimately what killed
George Washington. They I think they let blood on him
so many times. But maggots can have been proven to serve,
you know, to serve a therapeutic. But that's that's not
what we're talking about here, Dave.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
We're about live. She was alive in that one spot
and had maggots and had Now these conditions now that
you've explained them to me, from the bedswords to the
chronic bone infection, and now the maggots all say the
same thing. And and the fegal matter, the urine. They
all say that she was not being tended to, that
she was being fed but not bathed. When they found her,
(27:08):
she was partially clothed, so we know they weren't changing
her clothes because they would have had to move her
to do that. And I just keep thinking what you
just explained to me, Joe. I mean, bless her heart,
this thirty six year old woman would have had nothing
from her back down her life.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
That's quite possible. And we have yet to see the
images from her examination yet, but I can only imagine
that the extent of these bed sores would first off,
they would be communicating with one another. And what I
mean is that you can have one bet sword that
might start off, say, I don't know, maybe three inches
(27:45):
away from another. But as that erosion continues on a
layer of skin, you can have these betstrees that suddenly
become conjoined and now it kind of erupts and they're
filled with puss. You have puss, you have this exitday
that comes out of them. They're always tacky to the
feel and you many people with bed sores develop septicemia,
(28:11):
which is a system wide infection, and that's That's that's
the thing about this case. I can I don't know
what they're actually going to conclude at the end of
the day relative to her, but I begin to think
about this, and I think, you know, how in the
world did she did she avoid going completely septic in
(28:38):
like a matter of just a couple of years. You know,
you've got somebody that we believe have has has probably
enjoelled that sofa for over a decade. Dave, just let
that sink in just for a second. And how how
did she not develop septosemia? Then? And it's it's absolutely mate.
How did she? How did her kidneys not fail? Did
(29:00):
she not go into hypatic failure? Because you got all
kinds of things working here. You know, she's laying around
her own expelled waist. So you've got these these conditions
that are essentially non compatible with life, if you will.
And we haven't even touched on this idea about the
sofa being integrated into the body, but I know this,
(29:24):
This poor young lady would have had a better shot
at life had they just driven up to an ambulance
route at a hospital somewhere, looked at the people on
the other side of the sliding glass doors and said
we don't want to do this anymore, and they left
her there. But that's not what happened, David.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
I was.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
I think the last toime I weighed ninety six pounds,
I was probably nine. I think that might have been
you know, I think I might have been nine, you
know when I weighed that much. Yeah, I was a
big kid. I mean I was healthy, robust, still pretty
(30:28):
big man, you know. And but.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
With in this case, the coroner's office said this, that's.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
What she weighed lately.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Yeah, at thirty six years old. Six yeah, yeah, and
she weighs ninety six pounds. But the corners, I I
was trying to ask you because I not that I'm
making light of it at all, because but I don't
know how tall she is or anything else. But ninety
six pounds is not what I would think of as
a starvation size. But there are ways that you can
(31:00):
be starved without being teeny, but being malnursed, not being
served the proper things. But odd that that would, even
with all the other things she has all together, with
everything else going on with her medically, weighing ninety six
pounds surprised me, But then listing starvation as a contributing factor.
There was also one little note. She was found semi nude,
(31:24):
semi naked and sitting upright in a sunken crevice in
the sofa, that is the area between two cushions. But
as you and I were looking at these pictures, you
can see where she spent her time, and you can
see where the crevice is between the two and that.
But it was almost like it had shuffled, it had
(31:45):
moved where her body was, because it didn't move. She
was in the same position, sitting upright for however many years,
they think, possibly twelve years not moving, twelve years sitting
upright in the same spot. And all I could think
of was her back, her buttocks, yeah, all on the
(32:05):
back side, but her arms around the eye.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
With with bed sores you mentioned this show, I wanted
to point that out. You've got the shoulders, you know who.
One of the worst features, uh, relative to relative to
bed sores and the presentation are your shoulder blades. And
you can imagine why. I mean, you know, we talked about,
(32:30):
you know, kind of the architecture of that. You know,
we mentioned ribs, and think about the architecture of your
shoulder blade. If you're laying on that area. It's it's palpable.
I mean, you can put your hand on it. You know,
most of us can make out even you know, it's
kind of triangular in shape, and you can make out
the edges of it. It's really close to the surface.
And and then the spine as well. Those you know
(32:51):
that the all of the little features along the spine,
So any any of those bony what they refer to
as bony prominences. As a matter of fact, that folks,
if you'll take your thumb and go to your waistline
and you can feel your it's it's actually called your
iliac crest. It's it's kind of it's part of the pelvis,
(33:12):
all right, and they look like wings and you can
feel it. You know. Some people might call it their hip,
but it's not really their hip. It's the iliac crest.
The iliac crest right there. Also, that's a point where
you can develop bet sores. The coccacs, which is at
the base of the spine, which you know is essentially
our tailbone, that is really really close to the surface,
(33:37):
so it can you rode through there. I got and
here's another thing too, I don't want to You know,
I don't dwell on this too much, but one thing
that is amazing to me. Working in the Morgue for
as long as I did, I worked on a lot
of decomposing bodies. Dave, and flies were part of that environment.
(34:02):
Going out on cases were part of that environment. You know,
where I'm in a house, all my colleagues are in
the house, We've got flies coming off of the body.
They're landing on us. It's part of what we do.
We accept it, all right, you go to the morgue,
it's the same thing. As a matter of fact, we
would hang up do you remember the old Gulf pestrips.
(34:22):
You know that we would have the sticky ones. And
you can still go into morgs and see these. They
hang them from the ceilings because you have so many
bodies that come in that have maggots, and there you
have associated flies that will come into body backs. And
so because of that you capture these flies, you know,
(34:42):
in these environments you're working in, particularly in the Morgue.
But Dave, if if what they are saying is accurate
and she has in dwelling magots, the family would have
had flies everywhere. They would have been lighting on anybody
(35:06):
that came into that home. Just let that sink in
just for a moment. And I keep going back to
time here, this period of time that she was in
stasis on this sofa for all of these years. I
can't even begin to kind of do the arithmetic that
it would require to think about how many cycles life
(35:28):
cycles of maggots, how many generations You're talking hundreds upon
hundreds upon hundreds of generations of flies that may have
come through that residence. And I wonder, you know, did
they have those pest strips hanging from the ceiling in there?
Were they so aware of it that they got sick
(35:49):
and tired of maggots or flies so they would put
the pest strips up and catch the flies to knock
it down.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Is it possible that you can become because you're in
it all the time, and because it grew over a period,
It didn't just start in one day and the smell
and all it got you. Is it possible that over
a period of time, kind of like when you first
time I ever went to Charleston, South Carolina, as you
hit Summerville, which is a suburb, as you're coming into
(36:18):
I twenty six and you smell the wood that the
paper bills, and it's a very strong smell. And they
will tell you you won't smell it in a couple
of days, Yeah, and it really does. After about a week,
you don't even smell it anymore. Is it the same
way where if you're in this environment every day where
you just your senses ignore it.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
I you know, I can't speak to these people. I
would think that if it becomes your norm perhaps, and
it's hard. It's hard when you begin to think about
normalizing this, you know, because you look at this life
that as parents you have created, all right, or that
you've brought into being. And you've been with this child
(37:00):
obviously since the beginning, and here she is. She's thirty
six years old, and she is she's been robbed of
her humanity at this point in time. You know, certainly
there's it would seem that it's one of the most
undignified things if you're talking about respecting disrespecting a fellow human,
(37:23):
not even talking about we're not even ascending to the
level of parent now, we're just talking about just your
basic human needs. That's why I made the comment, you know,
at the end of our last break about you. You
would think that at some point in time you would
be moved by compassion and that you would Yeah, exactly.
And it sounds to me as if, my god, you
(37:46):
think about how many people get disability that are across
this country right now, and some they say are not
truly disabled. I think in this particular case, this young
lady would have been ruled to have been disabled was
she even on the rolls, because even with disabilities she
could get some kind of home care, She could get
(38:07):
something that would have made it less miserable.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
And this is neglect in a way when you point
that out. But you know what the corner suggested. The
corner suggested that they didn't live inside that house. That
he said, there's no way. He actually said that he
does not believe. He believes the parents were not living
(38:32):
in the house because quote nobody could stand the stench.
And that might throw a monkey rnge into our idea
that you could get used to it. Maybe you can't.
I don't know, but I do like this. Is that
you were mentioning a minute ago about how the bedsorts
can all kind of move together, yes, and grow? Is
that that way? With other infection? She had COVID nineteen.
(38:55):
And in order to get COVID nineteen, I thought you
kind of had to be out in kind cota with
other people. You know, that it wouldn't just breed inside
of a home where you haven't moved in twelve years
from the place you're sitting. That seemed odd to me.
But maybe the parents.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yeah, the parents, you know, they've got to provide for
the rest of the household for themselves, so they're out
in public at some point in time. So anything that's
out there, you know, could potentially have made it in
visa VI them. And here's the other thing is that
COVID at its height was killing a lot of people
that were infirmed. And the fact that she did contract
(39:30):
COVID is kind of interesting that it didn't compromise her
to the point of death. And you're talking about somebody. Look,
if anybody on their block had a weekend immune system,
I think that she'd be number one in line, considering
what she had been subjected to over all these many years. Dave,
(39:52):
I got to tell you, I'm look, I don't wish
any ill will on anybody, but I think that in
a case this, this is something that the public needs
to be aware of. It's something that I think that
society should not be tolerant of on any level, and
it would seem to me that some type of message
(40:14):
should be sent. I'm hoping that in this poor woman's
case that there has been a message sent. Can you
kind of fill me in on this.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
They actually agreed, they being the powers that be within
the prosecutor's office. Originally they were charged a second degree
murder and they were stayed for eighteen months saying we
loved her, we did not kill her, it was not intentional.
They actually changed the charges to manslaughter, and they went
ahead and took a plead to a manslaughter charge.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
On one hand, I think that a trial would have
been good because I want to try to understand, and
I would hope that the public would want to try
to understand what she went through and how long this
went on, you know, till she finally succumbed, you know,
sitting in that filth, in her own filth, you know,
(41:05):
and had had no way of expressing herself. Dave, and
I think that's that's a real tragedy in all of this,
because we complain about all kinds of things day in
and day out, I'm saying that in universal sense, not
you directly, Dave, but we all complain about things. But
can you imagine having some kind of physical discomfort, some
(41:28):
type of malady that no matter what position you try
to put yourself in, on a surface that you're sitting in,
you can't get any comfort. You try to adjust, maybe
maybe you've gotten too weak to adjust, but in your brain,
(41:49):
maybe your pain centers are screaming out and you can't
express that to anybody. There is no relief, and you're
just trapped. You're not just trapped in this else and
on the sofa and in this field that you're trapped
in your mind. Hopefully this young woman is finally free
(42:15):
of pain. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body
Bags
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. You can say many
things about my beloved home state of Louisiana that will
give you a sense of what people think about the place.
(00:29):
You know, the first thing I think of is, you know,
the love that I have for my family that are there.
I think about our food, our cuisine, arguably, i'd argue
with anybody, probably the most unique in the US. You
can talk about our music. No one touches our music,
whether it's zodiko or Country and Western or the jazz
(00:54):
clubs that inhabit those dark spaces in the French Quarter.
But one thing I think that everybody can consistently come
to grips with when it comes to New Orleans is
a temperature. And I can't tell you over the years
how many people I've heard say that they have never
(01:15):
been so hot as they were on a trip to
New Orleans during the middle of summer. And that brings
about thoughts. You think about, well, how did your ancestors
ever survive in that environment before days of conditioned air.
If you will, you feel like you're gonna melt. But
(01:42):
you know, there is a young woman, actually there was
a young woman. She's no longer with us, and she died,
but what was left behind of her has been described
(02:09):
in terms of having melted away. And I can tell
you this it had nothing to do with the heat
of Louisiana. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body vats.
(02:33):
It's often said, I think you know that you can
never take off enough clothes when it's hot outside, Dave.
Some people will say, well, if it's cold, I can
always bundle up. I can get a layer upon layer.
Speaker 2 (02:49):
Now.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
I know my friends up in Minnesota and North Dakota
and up in Wisconsin will probably take exception to that.
And I'm not even going to talk to my friends
up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Beautiful area up there,
but they do no cold and they many of them
will say, I prefer the heat any day. But I
(03:10):
think you know where I'm going with this. If you
you can layer up and bundle up to a great degree. Now,
it makes it uncomfortable, you can't move around. But there's
just something about being in an environment where you're incredibly
hot and always sweating, miserable. It's almost like a sickness.
Sometimes you can't get past it. And we experience that
(03:33):
heat here in Alabama as well to a certain degree,
don't we, Dave, Yeah, somewhat, but yeah, you can, you know,
and but bodies, you know, that are subjected to this
kind of in these environmental conditions, they change and decay rapidly.
But you know, Dave, the story that that we're going
(03:59):
to talk about, I don't necessarily want to talk about it,
but I feel like it needs to be said. The
decay that took place where the young woman's body didn't
take place after death.
Speaker 2 (04:10):
Dave, that's what you know as you're talking about melting
and those things, and it's because it's been described that
thirty six year old Lacey Fletcher melted into the couch
in her parents' home as we talk about this today,
and that's the end, Okay, the end is that she
(04:33):
was found melted into the counch. You're going to have
to describe this for us because I picture it from
a temperature standpoint, you know, as ice cream melts, But
in this case, we're dealing with the human being who
I'm looking at pictures of her when she's in ninth
grade and she's healthy, she's playing on the volleyball team,
(04:55):
and then her parents check her out of school and
homeschool her. And the next thing we find out is
that nobody's heard from her in years until they get
a call that she's passed away at the age of
thirty six.
Speaker 1 (05:10):
What was striking about Lacey's case is that the corner
who is in fact, who is in fact a physician,
and it's this actually, this case takes place in East
Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, is well, it's a it's in a
unique spot. It's it's a spot that if you have
(05:32):
any sense of South Louisiana and you know where, you
know where Lake Pontchatrain is, Lake Pontchatrain sits north of
New Orleans. And if you think of Louisiana as a boot,
which is kind of shaped like it would be the
top of the bottom of the boot, it's part of
(05:52):
South Louisiana. And this is where this family lived in
the corner who you know, attended the scene. He physically
bore witness to Lacey's body. This gentleman, his name is
doctor Yule Beckham. He actually came to the home. You know,
he saw this young lady laying on the sofa and
(06:13):
she had smell of urine, which I know that obviously
many people can identify, you know what the smell of
urine is like. But after an area has been super
saturated with urine, it takes on a very strong ammonia smell,
and so that would be one of these things that
like hits you in the face. It's assaulting. The smell
(06:33):
itself is assaulting you. Couple that with also this this
idea that she's not clean relative to her backside, and
so she's laying in her own feces, so urine and feces.
It looks as though to him that she's been laying
there for a protracted time, and she's actually on a sofa,
(06:54):
family sofa, and there are other seating areas around her.
So whoever is in dwelling this house, which turns out
to be her parents, they're in dwelling this environment with
their daughter laying on the sofa and smelling like this
all of the time. And one of the things he
describes is that he saw in dwelling maggots and these
(07:16):
maggots had taken up home in her body. And this
is not unheard of. I've worked several cases like this.
A lady that had untreated breast cancer, and she had
in dwelling maggots in one of her breast And I've
seen this before, but to this degree, I just don't know.
(07:38):
But doctor Yule, he actually made the comment, Dave, that
it appeared as though that this poor woman had melted.
That's an inaccurate term, because she's not. You know, to melt.
To for something to melt, you have to have a
constant heat source. You know, you think about take an
(08:00):
ice cube, you put it adjacent to to the flame,
and it's going to, you know, go from solid into
a liquid. It could vaporize. That's not what we're talking
about here. We're literally talking about this young woman who
has laid on the sofa for so long day that
her body has begun to digest itself and there is
(08:23):
this liquid product that is produced by the cells beginning
to break down. The cyte applasm actually in the cells
himself is leaching out. The maggots are feeding off of
this because this is a source of protein for them.
And I can't even I don't know that anybody out
there could even actually begin to imagine the level of
(08:48):
discomfort an individual would have to be suffering from in
order to not sense this. But here's here's the real
road with this day. She was in an infirmed static position.
She was in what the medical professionals referred to in stasis,
(09:10):
just laying there, and she required assistance because she's autistic
and she's nonverbal. So wherever her placement is on the
spectrum of autism, it had the component of it where
she apparently over these years she had mentioned that she
(09:30):
had attended school at one point in time, but she
was noncommunicative. She's laid their day. She laid there as
her body began to give up. She laid there as
the sofa began to give way, its threadbare. You can
see the cushions, the interior, this foam rubber. Laid there
(09:52):
and just wasted, wasted away. She's nonverbal. How is she
going to complain? What's she going to do? We do
know this though it was twenty years Dave, It was
twenty years since the last time anyone had any awareness
of the status of Lacey. You read these old stories
(10:31):
out of the Bible, and you think about these people
that were in these miserable conditions. Maybe they had leprosy,
or they were deemed unclean, they were unhealthy. Maybe they
were paralytic, and they're laying outside the gates of the
city and they're crying mercy, mercy, you know, for anybody
(10:52):
that would come by and extend extend mercy to them
to help them. But Dave, you know, in this case
with we've got a thirty six year old woman with
autism that's nonverbal, and I think, at least in my
estimation that I don't I don't know of anyone maybe
(11:12):
an East FOLII in a parish that deserved more mercy
than her, and it wasn't even extended by her own family. Day.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
That's what we're dealing with here. And Sheila Fletcher and
Clay Fletcher are the parents of Lacey Fletcher. Now they're
both sixty six. Lacey was thirty six. I say was
because she is no more. To say that she melted
is not to be disrespectful. Joe and I both, in
looking at this story, have come to it from different ways.
(11:43):
Because I'm not a medical doctor. I don't know biology.
I fell asleep in those classes. The science classes didn't
attract my attention. I probably was watching something different. But
what does get me as a as a father is
to think of about how when I look at my children,
my grandchildren, I think about what can I do to
(12:04):
make their day better? What can I do to protect
them from harm? What can when they cry, when they
stub a toe? I want to take the pain away.
I don't want them to even have that. And I
think about that as a as a father, and now
as this mom and dad who I don't know how
this happened. This Lacey Fletcher was active, was okay. I
(12:25):
know she's on the spectrum with autism and was non verbal. Joe,
is that something that can happen after?
Speaker 1 (12:32):
It would seem, Yeah, it would seem because I think
you even had mentioned that the image that we saw
of her, she was in the chorus.
Speaker 2 (12:41):
She's yes, I've got a picture of her. She looks
to be about sixteen years old. She is active, she played,
She played on the volleyball team. I don't know how
one becomes.
Speaker 1 (12:52):
I don't either, because I go at Jacksonville State, my
family and I we go support our women's volleyball team.
And let me tell you something that might be some
of the most verbal human beings I've ever been around
in my life. And so the shouting and the screaming
and everything that goes on there, and then of course,
so yeah, you would think that something triggered, triggered, you know,
(13:12):
along the way. And isn't it kind of interesting that
she was in a private school setting and then she's
abruptly removed and then for all we know, she just
she just shut down and they placed her on the sofa. Dave,
I got to tell you in full. I have to fully,
(13:38):
you know, kind of tell you how I got involved
in this case. I'd had the folks at News Nation
reach out to me with Ashley Banfield Show, and they
wanted me to talk about the Shong woman that had
melted into the sofa and breaking news happened and whatever.
We couldn't make it happen for that appearance, but you know,
(13:59):
I just did a cursory read at first, she's melting
the sofa, and I'm thinking, Okay, this is one of
these cases where someone has died and the family just
ignored the body and left the body on the sofa.
And I've been around those cases. I've worked those kinds
of cases. People do do that where they have a
loved one that just dies in the house. You see
them in the news frequently and the bodies are decomposing,
(14:22):
the people are still living around them day. That's not
what happened here. You're talking about this slow role. How
many years? Tell me again? How many years? Again?
Speaker 2 (14:30):
Was I We know for at least twenty years, at
least twenty years she was left unchecked. We had no
health insurance claims, we had no visits to a doctor.
We only know that she last saw a doctor in
two thousand and two, when she was sixteen years old.
(14:52):
That's the last record we have of her. And as
you look into this, you're thinking, she's sixteen, we're looking
at pictures, she's playing volleyball. Now we go twenty years
later and she's dead, and we're told that she was autistic,
diagnosed with autism, and she was nonverbal after this had
to be after she was taken out of the private
(15:13):
school and she was on the couch. And here's the
other part, because we know that she didn't see a
doctor for twenty years, and she's autistic with you know,
and on the spectrum that you would expect her to
have to see a doctor.
Speaker 1 (15:26):
Yeah, yeah, you would. And if she's nonverbal, if let's
just say that she has developed that she was on
the spectrum, and because she was not receiving any kind
of therapy, you know, to just live day to day.
That buddy, let me tell you, the breaks came off,
and she just began flying down the hill. And she's
(15:49):
going down the hill so fast that as she begins
to diminish over a period of time, maybe she completely
shuts down and she just goes into this status where
she is non mobile, she's nonverbal, she can't tell them
what she wants, but she's suffering from all these maladies
all of her body.
Speaker 2 (16:09):
The coroner suggesting that she had not moved from that
spot on the couch for twelve years. Not moved. That
means that her mother and father brought her her food.
I want to go over something very quickly. But they
brought her food, they brought her water, They brought her
(16:31):
and allowed her to Granted, they had to have cleaned
up some of her They had to have cleaned up something.
There's no way you could have twelve years of human waste,
of excrement urine all around you. You couldn't hold that much.
Speaker 1 (16:45):
I will no, you couldn't. And here's another thing, Dave,
that I find very interesting, because they've got these ghastly images.
And it might be the Post or Daily Mail. I'm
not really sure which one, but they had gotten these
image just where her body is actually blurred out. But Dave,
this is like a The sofa that she's on is
(17:08):
a brown leather. It looks like leather. It's probably some
kind of naugahide or something like that. She's laying it,
and you know it's the ones with the big cushions.
Well in the center of these you can make this
out the entire sofa. That cushion has cratered out. Man,
(17:31):
it's cratered out. And I mean it's worn down. I
mean we all know. I mean, if you got and
you buy a sofa, right, you buy a sofa, maybe
your old one has gotten threadbare. It is worn. It's
like it doesn't have the same spring to it anymore.
And so it's like I want to divest myself with
the thing. I'm going to throw it on the junk
pile or maybe you know somebody can come and pick
it up for charity. And you got and buy a
(17:53):
new one, well, you want a new one and you
want it to be nice so you can sit on it.
You're also how long it would take for someone to
wear through, to wear through all of those various surfaces
on top of that sofa. So when the corner comes
out and he's already been assaulted, his senses have been assaulted.
(18:17):
He's assaulted, you know, certainly with what he smells and
then what he sees, and then laying there before him,
when he begins to do his examination, there are things
that are going to stand out to him. He's going
to see the filth that this young lady is surrounded by.
He knows that it's been in dwelling for some time.
(18:38):
Because I think anybody, any right thinking person can look
at an area that's blown out on the sofa and
know that this is something that didn't happen overnight. This
is because look all the other cushions around her, they were.
Speaker 2 (18:52):
Intact, and so she had set You can see where
she sat spot.
Speaker 1 (18:58):
How do you know, how does that happen over that
period of time?
Speaker 2 (19:02):
The parents mom took her to a psychologist in ninth grade,
well at fourteen, to a clinical psychologist, because she suffered
severe social anxiety. Apparently, and this is what the defense
is saying. The parents loved her so much they just
put her on the couch and weighted on her hand
and foot. That's what they're trying to say, these parents did.
(19:23):
But Joe, there were bed sores. She has sonic bone infection.
She has is covered in ulcers with fibers from the
sofa maggots that she had. They're embedded in the exposed
surface of the bones. She had to be alive when
(19:47):
the exposed surface of her bones are there for mom
and dad at sea before she passed away. Of course,
there was fecal matter in several places around her body.
They had to have cleaned yup some but I mean
twelve years. She didn't move for twelve years, she did
not She stayed in that spot. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
Well, yeah, you think about that, and you think about
these these indwelling sowres that she has. And one of
the reasons, and for those in the audience that have
had to bear the burden of taking care of an
infirmed family member or maybe somebody that's up in age,
you know, one of the most important things they tell
you to do with people in this status is to
(20:30):
roll them. You have to. You have to roll them
to get them out of those dependent, gravitationally dependent areas.
So is that what causes it is not moving. You
leave them in one spot. And if folks at home
will just think about just think about if you right now,
if you reach over and you feel your ribs, okay,
(20:53):
and you can actually feel the margins of your ribs.
So just imagine if you lay on I don't know,
pick aside left or right side, and you stay in
that position forever and ever a men, even though you
have soft tissue in between your ribs and the outer
portion of your body, over a period of time, if
(21:13):
you don't move from that position. I'm merely using the
ribs as an example. Because that bone is very close
to the surface. The surface of the bone is going
to wear through the underlying subcu fat, through any kind
of musculature that might be there, and then into the
dermis of the skin. It's kind of the pressure is
(21:35):
coming from internally as opposed to getting having an external injury.
This is something that is eroding from the outside, I
mean from the inside and then outward because of that pressure,
and then externally the contact surface, which in this case
would have been the surface of the sofa. It's also
(21:55):
rubbing up against this area. So if she even made
the slide, this movement but stayed roughly in the same
same position. That's creating friction on the surface of the skin,
and it's wearing away day. It's wearing a way every
single day because she's not being moved, her body's not
being tended to, she's certainly not being cleaned. Because when
(22:18):
somebody in a nursing home and it does happen, it
doesn't mean that someone's being necessarily neglected in nursing home
if they have a bet sore. However, if you do
not attend to bed sores, they are absolutely positively lethal.
They have to be essentially debreded, kind of scraped out.
(22:39):
They have to be treated with various creams, antibiotics, these
sorts of things, and the idea is to get them
off of those gravitationally depended areas so you can have healing.
The prob that rub is here is that if you
have someone that can't move themselves, what are you going
to do? I mean, you can only flip somebody so
(23:02):
many times. But it sounds to me as though that
there was so little movement and care taken with her
that it just wore away.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
How do you get a chronic bone infection that sounds.
Speaker 1 (23:15):
It's markedly painful, and a lot of a lot of
that well, it goes to the fact that the bone
is wearing as well, and so you know, the bone
actually has vasculature itself, it actually has vessels that come
through the bone, and so the wear on that surface,
you know, one of one of the things I always
(23:36):
always imagine many times if I ever go out to
the West Coast and I see the shoreline out there
with those big rocks, and I think about how big
were those rocks at one point in time, because they're huge,
particularly if you go up toward northern California and Oregon.
You get up in that area, but you know, over
a period of time, the wear from the wind and
the sand, you know, kind of pummeling that area. Once
(23:57):
you get past that cushion that you have have with
the body, where you have this layer of skin subkey fat,
you have overlying muscle tissue. Once that's gone, the bone
now is as tough and resilient as we think that
it is. It's now exposed to the outside world. Bone
(24:17):
is not meant to be exposed to the outside world
in a living creature. And we've even got it to
the point now where the bone is apparently eroded to
the point where they've got indwelling maggots that are there.
And you know that that's the other thing that's that's
quite striking about this case, Dave. You know, when you
think about that in dwelling in the in these sores
(24:40):
are going to be maggots. You're going to have eggs
that have been laid and here's what they spring forward
from the eggs of flies. All right, And every species
of insect out there has some form, but particularly in
a case like this, what we're talking about are probably
(25:01):
common house fly, the blowfly, and when these creatures deposit
their eggs, there's a cycle that they go through. And
you know, and my friends that work in forensic entomology,
such as the great Jason Bird, if you ever get
a chance to reading things by doctor Bird, he's a
(25:22):
fascinating guy. But you know, we measured in death investigation,
now we're talking about dead bodies here. We measure the
life cycle of how many generations of flies have come
into a location and laid eggs, and they've gone through
the whole cycle where they have the eggs and they
(25:43):
shed their their the husk and they blossom into you know,
adult flies. How do you how do you take to
measure that with a living person. Now, there have been
throughout history cases where people have had infection in their
bodies and maggots at one point in time were actually
(26:04):
prescribed by the medical community because the maggots placed into
a sore would go in and they would eat all
the nasties in there, particularly the bacteria. They would feast
off of it, and it would keep a sore clean.
But you know, in this case, this is not.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Just that's something that'd be kind of going like blood letting.
Speaker 1 (26:24):
No, No, it's it's a step above blood letting leah
and leech's, you know, which is probably ultimately what killed
George Washington. They I think they let blood on him
so many times. But maggots can have been proven to serve,
you know, to serve a therapeutic. But that's that's not
what we're talking about here, Dave.
Speaker 2 (26:42):
We're about live. She was alive in that one spot
and had maggots and had Now these conditions now that
you've explained them to me, from the bedswords to the
chronic bone infection, and now the maggots all say the
same thing. And and the fegal matter, the urine. They
all say that she was not being tended to, that
she was being fed but not bathed. When they found her,
(27:08):
she was partially clothed, so we know they weren't changing
her clothes because they would have had to move her
to do that. And I just keep thinking what you
just explained to me, Joe. I mean, bless her heart,
this thirty six year old woman would have had nothing
from her back down her life.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
That's quite possible. And we have yet to see the
images from her examination yet, but I can only imagine
that the extent of these bed sores would first off,
they would be communicating with one another. And what I
mean is that you can have one bet sword that
might start off, say, I don't know, maybe three inches
(27:45):
away from another. But as that erosion continues on a
layer of skin, you can have these betstrees that suddenly
become conjoined and now it kind of erupts and they're
filled with puss. You have puss, you have this exitday
that comes out of them. They're always tacky to the
feel and you many people with bed sores develop septicemia,
(28:11):
which is a system wide infection, and that's That's that's
the thing about this case. I can I don't know
what they're actually going to conclude at the end of
the day relative to her, but I begin to think
about this, and I think, you know, how in the
world did she did she avoid going completely septic in
(28:38):
like a matter of just a couple of years. You know,
you've got somebody that we believe have has has probably
enjoelled that sofa for over a decade. Dave, just let
that sink in just for a second. And how how
did she not develop septosemia? Then? And it's it's absolutely mate.
How did she? How did her kidneys not fail? Did
(29:00):
she not go into hypatic failure? Because you got all
kinds of things working here. You know, she's laying around
her own expelled waist. So you've got these these conditions
that are essentially non compatible with life, if you will.
And we haven't even touched on this idea about the
sofa being integrated into the body, but I know this,
(29:24):
This poor young lady would have had a better shot
at life had they just driven up to an ambulance
route at a hospital somewhere, looked at the people on
the other side of the sliding glass doors and said
we don't want to do this anymore, and they left
her there. But that's not what happened, David.
Speaker 2 (30:03):
I was.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
I think the last toime I weighed ninety six pounds,
I was probably nine. I think that might have been
you know, I think I might have been nine, you
know when I weighed that much. Yeah, I was a
big kid. I mean I was healthy, robust, still pretty
(30:28):
big man, you know. And but.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
With in this case, the coroner's office said this, that's.
Speaker 1 (30:36):
What she weighed lately.
Speaker 2 (30:37):
Yeah, at thirty six years old. Six yeah, yeah, and
she weighs ninety six pounds. But the corners, I I
was trying to ask you because I not that I'm
making light of it at all, because but I don't
know how tall she is or anything else. But ninety
six pounds is not what I would think of as
a starvation size. But there are ways that you can
(31:00):
be starved without being teeny, but being malnursed, not being
served the proper things. But odd that that would, even
with all the other things she has all together, with
everything else going on with her medically, weighing ninety six
pounds surprised me, But then listing starvation as a contributing factor.
There was also one little note. She was found semi nude,
(31:24):
semi naked and sitting upright in a sunken crevice in
the sofa, that is the area between two cushions. But
as you and I were looking at these pictures, you
can see where she spent her time, and you can
see where the crevice is between the two and that.
But it was almost like it had shuffled, it had
(31:45):
moved where her body was, because it didn't move. She
was in the same position, sitting upright for however many years,
they think, possibly twelve years not moving, twelve years sitting
upright in the same spot. And all I could think
of was her back, her buttocks, yeah, all on the
(32:05):
back side, but her arms around the eye.
Speaker 1 (32:09):
With with bed sores you mentioned this show, I wanted
to point that out. You've got the shoulders, you know who.
One of the worst features, uh, relative to relative to
bed sores and the presentation are your shoulder blades. And
you can imagine why. I mean, you know, we talked about,
(32:30):
you know, kind of the architecture of that. You know,
we mentioned ribs, and think about the architecture of your
shoulder blade. If you're laying on that area. It's it's palpable.
I mean, you can put your hand on it. You know,
most of us can make out even you know, it's
kind of triangular in shape, and you can make out
the edges of it. It's really close to the surface.
And and then the spine as well. Those you know
(32:51):
that the all of the little features along the spine,
So any any of those bony what they refer to
as bony prominences. As a matter of fact, that folks,
if you'll take your thumb and go to your waistline
and you can feel your it's it's actually called your
iliac crest. It's it's kind of it's part of the pelvis,
(33:12):
all right, and they look like wings and you can
feel it. You know. Some people might call it their hip,
but it's not really their hip. It's the iliac crest.
The iliac crest right there. Also, that's a point where
you can develop bet sores. The coccacs, which is at
the base of the spine, which you know is essentially
our tailbone, that is really really close to the surface,
(33:37):
so it can you rode through there. I got and
here's another thing too, I don't want to You know,
I don't dwell on this too much, but one thing
that is amazing to me. Working in the Morgue for
as long as I did, I worked on a lot
of decomposing bodies. Dave, and flies were part of that environment.
(34:02):
Going out on cases were part of that environment. You know,
where I'm in a house, all my colleagues are in
the house, We've got flies coming off of the body.
They're landing on us. It's part of what we do.
We accept it, all right, you go to the morgue,
it's the same thing. As a matter of fact, we
would hang up do you remember the old Gulf pestrips.
(34:22):
You know that we would have the sticky ones. And
you can still go into morgs and see these. They
hang them from the ceilings because you have so many
bodies that come in that have maggots, and there you
have associated flies that will come into body backs. And
so because of that you capture these flies, you know,
(34:42):
in these environments you're working in, particularly in the Morgue.
But Dave, if if what they are saying is accurate
and she has in dwelling magots, the family would have
had flies everywhere. They would have been lighting on anybody
(35:06):
that came into that home. Just let that sink in
just for a moment. And I keep going back to
time here, this period of time that she was in
stasis on this sofa for all of these years. I
can't even begin to kind of do the arithmetic that
it would require to think about how many cycles life
(35:28):
cycles of maggots, how many generations You're talking hundreds upon
hundreds upon hundreds of generations of flies that may have
come through that residence. And I wonder, you know, did
they have those pest strips hanging from the ceiling in there?
Were they so aware of it that they got sick
(35:49):
and tired of maggots or flies so they would put
the pest strips up and catch the flies to knock
it down.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Is it possible that you can become because you're in
it all the time, and because it grew over a period,
It didn't just start in one day and the smell
and all it got you. Is it possible that over
a period of time, kind of like when you first
time I ever went to Charleston, South Carolina, as you
hit Summerville, which is a suburb, as you're coming into
(36:18):
I twenty six and you smell the wood that the
paper bills, and it's a very strong smell. And they
will tell you you won't smell it in a couple
of days, Yeah, and it really does. After about a week,
you don't even smell it anymore. Is it the same
way where if you're in this environment every day where
you just your senses ignore it.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
I you know, I can't speak to these people. I
would think that if it becomes your norm perhaps, and
it's hard. It's hard when you begin to think about
normalizing this, you know, because you look at this life
that as parents you have created, all right, or that
you've brought into being. And you've been with this child
(37:00):
obviously since the beginning, and here she is. She's thirty
six years old, and she is she's been robbed of
her humanity at this point in time. You know, certainly
there's it would seem that it's one of the most
undignified things if you're talking about respecting disrespecting a fellow human,
(37:23):
not even talking about we're not even ascending to the
level of parent now, we're just talking about just your
basic human needs. That's why I made the comment, you know,
at the end of our last break about you. You
would think that at some point in time you would
be moved by compassion and that you would Yeah, exactly.
And it sounds to me as if, my god, you
(37:46):
think about how many people get disability that are across
this country right now, and some they say are not
truly disabled. I think in this particular case, this young
lady would have been ruled to have been disabled was
she even on the rolls, because even with disabilities she
could get some kind of home care, She could get
(38:07):
something that would have made it less miserable.
Speaker 2 (38:10):
And this is neglect in a way when you point
that out. But you know what the corner suggested. The
corner suggested that they didn't live inside that house. That
he said, there's no way. He actually said that he
does not believe. He believes the parents were not living
(38:32):
in the house because quote nobody could stand the stench.
And that might throw a monkey rnge into our idea
that you could get used to it. Maybe you can't.
I don't know, but I do like this. Is that
you were mentioning a minute ago about how the bedsorts
can all kind of move together, yes, and grow? Is
that that way? With other infection? She had COVID nineteen.
(38:55):
And in order to get COVID nineteen, I thought you
kind of had to be out in kind cota with
other people. You know, that it wouldn't just breed inside
of a home where you haven't moved in twelve years
from the place you're sitting. That seemed odd to me.
But maybe the parents.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Yeah, the parents, you know, they've got to provide for
the rest of the household for themselves, so they're out
in public at some point in time. So anything that's
out there, you know, could potentially have made it in
visa VI them. And here's the other thing is that
COVID at its height was killing a lot of people
that were infirmed. And the fact that she did contract
(39:30):
COVID is kind of interesting that it didn't compromise her
to the point of death. And you're talking about somebody. Look,
if anybody on their block had a weekend immune system,
I think that she'd be number one in line, considering
what she had been subjected to over all these many years. Dave,
(39:52):
I got to tell you, I'm look, I don't wish
any ill will on anybody, but I think that in
a case this, this is something that the public needs
to be aware of. It's something that I think that
society should not be tolerant of on any level, and
it would seem to me that some type of message
(40:14):
should be sent. I'm hoping that in this poor woman's
case that there has been a message sent. Can you
kind of fill me in on this.
Speaker 2 (40:24):
They actually agreed, they being the powers that be within
the prosecutor's office. Originally they were charged a second degree
murder and they were stayed for eighteen months saying we
loved her, we did not kill her, it was not intentional.
They actually changed the charges to manslaughter, and they went
ahead and took a plead to a manslaughter charge.
Speaker 1 (40:44):
On one hand, I think that a trial would have
been good because I want to try to understand, and
I would hope that the public would want to try
to understand what she went through and how long this
went on, you know, till she finally succumbed, you know,
sitting in that filth, in her own filth, you know,
(41:05):
and had had no way of expressing herself. Dave, and
I think that's that's a real tragedy in all of this,
because we complain about all kinds of things day in
and day out, I'm saying that in universal sense, not
you directly, Dave, but we all complain about things. But
can you imagine having some kind of physical discomfort, some
(41:28):
type of malady that no matter what position you try
to put yourself in, on a surface that you're sitting in,
you can't get any comfort. You try to adjust, maybe
maybe you've gotten too weak to adjust, but in your brain,
(41:49):
maybe your pain centers are screaming out and you can't
express that to anybody. There is no relief, and you're
just trapped. You're not just trapped in this else and
on the sofa and in this field that you're trapped
in your mind. Hopefully this young woman is finally free
(42:15):
of pain. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body
Bags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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