December 26, 2023 • 32 mins
When Camille Balla calls a coworker and says "I think I killed my mother", the coworker calls 911 on her way to Balla's mother's house. Police find a scene straight out of a horror movie as the follow a blood splatter trail leading to the body of Francisca Monteiro-Balla. Checking the body for vitals an officer notices something on a box a few feet away. It isn't something anyone expects to see, two eyeballs, sitting on a box, appearing to watch the officers as they try to save the life of Francisca Monteiro-Balla.
Join Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack as they take a close-up look at a case that is just as scary and strange at the beginning as it is in the end.
Transcript Highlights
00:01:26 Joseph Scott Morgan compares Lewis Powell screaming “I am Mad” to
Camille Balla screaming “I am a murderer”
00:02:50 Talk about Police arrive to scene and find woman’s eyes removed
00:04:05 Dave Mack breaks down story of Camille Balla calls co-worker and tells her “I think I killed my mother”
00:06:12 Talk about County Jail versus prison
00:08:05 Discussion about Camille Balla screaming “I’m a murderer”
00:10:08 Discussion of bloody crime scene, eyeballs removed from victim, placed on cardboard box
00:11:25 Describing difference between blood “spatter” and blood “splatter”
00:13:46 Discussion about victim’s injuries
00:16:01 Talk about the fight between mother and daughter, and eyeballs removed from victim
00:17:56 Joe describes removal of eyeball
00:20:37 Discussion of suspect removing eyes from the front
00:22:43 Talk about Camille Balla claims to have smoked marijuana laced with Flocka prior to attack on her mother
00:26:12 Discussion of charges being reduced from First-Degree Murder to Manslaughter
00:28:34 Talk about broken glass around scene, blood from perpetrator and victim co-mingled making thing forensically more complicated
00:29:06 Camille Balla pleaded guilty to manslaughter, sentenced to 15-years in prison followed by 15-years on probation.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Bodybags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Historically, when we think of
the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, it kind of begins and
ends with the shooting and subsequent death of Abraham Lincoln
(00:29):
at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. But you know
there were other people involved in this plot to kill
the president other than John Wilkes Booth. One in particular
was a fellow who was named Lewis Powell, and Louis Powell,
on the same night that Lincoln was assassinated for its theater,
(00:54):
was given the assignment. He was part of the conspirators
to kill the Secretary of State, William Sewart. William Seward
was in his home in Washington. He had neck brace on.
He had been involved in a carriage accident some days earlier,
and he was bedridden. And Lewis Powell made his way
(01:16):
into Seward's bedroom with a knife after he had pushed
past the matre d in the house had attacked and
when he made his way to William Sewart's bed, he
begins stabbing him over and over again. The only thing
that saved Seward's life was the fact that he had
(01:38):
this neck brace in and he was trying to stab
him in the neck. Lewis Powell eventually fled from Sewart's
home and ran into the streets and I quote screaming,
I'm mad. I'm mad, and I don't mean mad like angry,
I mean like he's saying that he's crazy. On today's case,
(02:01):
on Bodybags, we're going to talk about a woman who
was actually saying something very similar to what Lewis Powell
said all those years ago. She said, I'm a murderer.
I'm a murderer. And you know what, that was confirmed
(02:22):
when the police entered into the home of her mother
and found not just the greatly traumatized body of her mother,
but they were staring at something, something that was staring
back at them, her mother's eyes that had been removed
and placed on a cardboard box adjacent to her remains.
(02:45):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body bags. There's
something about anything affecting my sight. I've always had to
wear glasses. I say always, I guess since I was
about eleven, I've worn glasses. I've always wanted to be
freed from this prison of eyewear, and anything that has
(03:11):
to do with eyes always unnerves me, and this case
caught my attention because it's recently been adjudicated, and I
was just fascinated by it. I think, not just the trauma,
but the anatomy of this. How is this even possible
for someone to do it? How is it possible for
(03:32):
somebody to actually have the will to do this to
your own mother. It's not like she shot her to death.
This is the stuff of horror movies, Dave.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
This story begins with a phone call from Camille Bala
actually calls a coworker and says, Hey, you need to
come over here. I need help. I think I've just
killed my mother.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Yeah, that's the thing I think, Yeah, I think I
think I've just killed my mother. It's not a definitive statement, yea,
I have killed my mother. It's like you pause for
a second and talk about madness. You begin to consider
what's being implied there. Okay, I'm calling my coworker to
(04:15):
come over and okay, here's my statement to you. I
think I've killed my mother. Please come over here and
give me a confirmation. Can you confirm that I have
either killed my mother or haven't killed my mother? And
you ask you know, what could be the driver? Behind this,
that your perception of reality is something that is altered. Yeah,
(04:41):
it is altered, an altered state. If you will, I
love that, I submit to you that. The reason that
not many people have heard of this case is because
the perpetrator has been cooling her heels in jail since
twenty eighteen in county jail. County Jail's not not even prison,
(05:02):
she's in a county jail.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
County jail is different than being in prison. Being in prison,
you have certain boy, you have access to so many
different things. It's prison is a life. You have a
prison life.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
You have.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Access to TV and things that you don't have in
a county jail library. Right, Yeah, just everything is different
because it's made at prison. Is you've gone through the system,
you've been sentenced, You're going to be here for a
couple of years. This is your life, whereas county jail
could be anything from somebody who got a dui last
night to somebody who got into a bar fight to
(05:40):
somebody who didn't pay enough tickets, and they're all lumped together.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
All lumped together, and you never know. It's it's a
mixed bag. You never know what's what's going to be
in there, and just so folks know, I you know,
I've I've over the course of my career as a professor,
I've had students that have started out right out of
college working in jails because they're trying to get on
(06:03):
with whatever police department or sheriff's office. And it's amazing
the stories I've heard about their time spent working at
a county correctional facility. Some of the individuals that would
be in jail being and this is what it generally
spends out. They're either being held for a number of
(06:25):
medical reasons perhaps, or they're there. I know, in one
set of circumstances, I had a student that was working
at a county jail that had been reserved part of
been reserved by the Feds because they were keeping people
there for protective custody. And so you've got this gamut,
(06:46):
you know, this population when you look at this thing
and you're thinking, oh my god. And here's the really
interesting thing, Dave. When Camille Bala was initially arrested for
this brutal homicide of her mother, she was charged with
(07:10):
first degree premeditated murder day and in Florida, that's that's
a ticket that's that's a one way ticket to the
death house. You know, that's that's a capital offense. And
so that's a it's interesting that she's been You've got
this person that has at least the authority thought at
(07:32):
the time that this is so egregious, that it's so
over the top that we're going to hook her up
on charges for first degree premeditated and we're going to
keep her in the county jail since twenty eighteen. That's
a that's that's kind of a hard thing to digest.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
There's kind of a Paul Harvey here. Now you know
the rest of the story. There's got to be more.
I don't know what it is, but anyway you look
at it, anyway you look at somebody sitting in county
jail for five years is a long stretch. Now, not
that she doesn't deserve it or anything else, it's just weird.
It's just an odd amount of time to spend in
a county lock up when you're not dealing with a conspiracy,
(08:11):
you're not dealing with any other people that are part
of this. You're the sole person responsible for the crime
you're accused of. And again, they can't move it along
to get you to trial. There just has to be more.
But they're not letting us know. They're not letting us
know a lot of things, even right now, Joe, when
(08:31):
we started off by saying she doesn't, she calls a
co worker and says, I think I might have just
killed my mother. The co worker then calls nine one
one and says, meet me over here. Because or that's
actually one story says she called on the way. Another
story says she called when she got there. But either
way you look at it, it was the co worker
that called nine one one and made the claim that
(08:53):
her friend believes she has killed her mother.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
I can't imagine being the co worker and showing up.
And when the worker arrived, Camille was actually perched on
the front steps of her mama's house, covered in blood.
Can you imagine rolling up to that disaster. And it's
(09:16):
at that point in time that I think the coworker
called nine one one and when the cops rolled up.
When the cops rolled up, she looked at the cops,
handed them a bloody set of keys, and started screaming,
I'm a murderer, I'm a murderer. When the first deputy
(09:54):
rolls up to this scene that he's been summoned to.
And by the way, this is this is the home
of Francesco Monteiro Bala, who is the mother of Camille Bala.
This is her home. It's a nice, very nice home.
You know, when this deputy rolls up, not only is
(10:16):
she screaming that she's a murderer, she's a murderer. She
looks at the deputy and then says, and this is
what we actually call a spontaneous admission. Investigators will and
whatever you do, you don't stop anybody. When in the
midst of this she says, I killed my mother and
I need help. And that's when you know, she hands
(10:37):
over the keys and she points to the garage. I
cannot imagine being the deputy and making entry into this
home because you know, at this point, just so folks
understand the deputy, because this is at this point in time,
this is still a welfare check because the deputy has
to confirm that they have someone de ceased. Now you
(11:00):
have somebody that's saying I killed my mother. I killed
my mother, but they still have to go in and
confirm that this is what happens. This doesn't mean that
they're going into actually search or conduct a detailed investigation.
When when this deputy walks in and he goes into
that garage, he just absolutely is witnessed to a blood bath.
(11:23):
And there was literally a dynamic blood distribution on the
walls all over the place, in the garage and within
the house itself. And there's a you know, there's a
box not too far away from the body, cardboard box,
and he sees something on it. That's when he calls
CID and they roll the home side detectives out there.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
When the deputy gets there, and you've got this person
who is uttering, by the way, she was also talking
out of her mind and saying things under her breath
that didn't make sense. They knew something obviously was a miss.
She's covered in blood. She is also wounded, by the way,
and I'm talking about Camille Bala. When the deputies are
(12:05):
walking through their house, there was blood spatter everywhere. What's
the difference between splatter and spatter.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah, with both of these terms, one is an action
word and one is a deposition word. Traditionally, what the
deposition of blood, how it is defined, and how it's
defined linguistically. When you talk about the spattering of blood
SPA T t R. You're talking about small particulate bits
(12:38):
of blood or tissue that are deposited in a wide
range of area. But when you think about the word splatter,
that's a combination of and spatter came before splatter, all right.
Linguistically historically it did, and so when you think about
splatter that it's a combination. You're ready for this of
(13:02):
the words spatter and splash, and splatter has always had
the connotation that you're talking about. If I took a
bucket of paint or you know, a container of blood
and just kind of tossed it everywhere, that would be splatter,
(13:23):
all right. Whereas if you have, like spatter, and you
have have a dynamic event like a gunshot wound where
they're adjacent to a wall, and you get these kind
of fine particulate bits of blood that are kind of
satellited out all over the place because you know, the
high velocity nature of it it causes it to be smaller,
(13:45):
then that would be spatter. Now, some people have interpreted
these two words differently, as one is an action word
and one is actually a definitive word that's used as
a noun, you know, like that is in fact splatter
there as opposed to spatter or conversely. So people get
(14:07):
these confused all the time. The news media in particular
get them confused. But they do traditionally have two distinct meanings.
And in a case like this, where you're not necessarily
talking about a high velocity event because we do know
that an edged weapon is involved in this case, so
(14:27):
you're not going to have that huge dynamic event where
you have this big bolt spray unless you clip an
artery and it's still not going to look like a
high velocity spray. You're going to be seeing these big
swaths of blood all over the place. You'll have because
(14:49):
I can only imagine that Camille, since she's done this
d to her mother, where she's got the mother has
got multiple injuries and they're some of these. Again, this
is very confusing because they're using the term laceration in
Francesca's description of Francesca's injuries. They're saying that some of
(15:13):
these are lacerations. Well, what if we what have we
talked about on body bags for multiple episodes? Now, relative
to lacerations, lacerations are not commonly termed as sharp force injuries.
Those come about as a result of blunt force injuries.
So it's very interesting the language that's involved in here.
(15:36):
But suffice it to say this, there was an effuse
amount of blood at the scene, as you can expect
because the mother has been has been cut at least
we know the skin has been opened on her face,
her neck, her chest, her abdomen, and oh, by the way,
her eyes are no longer in dwelling in their sockets.
(16:17):
You examine this case, look at it very carefully, and
you begin to understand that there has to be some
kind of motivating impetus behind a daughter's desire to absolutely
wreck her mother, and could it? And yeah, I have
(16:41):
worked cases, Dave where you have a lot of rage
on the part of a child, where you have a
what's it called a parricide, where you have the child
that kills the parent. And I've had some that were
absolutely brutal. I tell you I, to the best of
my recollection, I've never worked a case involving a child
(17:03):
where they did this kind of disfigurement to a loved
one or specifically to a parent. There's got to be
more at work here.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Well. When the deputy finds his way in the garage.
He has to go through the house and he talks
about the blood spladder everywhere, lots of blood in this house,
and traces it all the way to the garage. There's
like a trail of blood all the way through the
house leading to the garage where we find the victim,
(17:35):
Francesca Montero Bala. She's fifty seven years old at the
time of her death. She has been cut up. It
has been it has to have been a monstrous fight.
Her daughter is screaming, I'm a murderer, and she's got
cuts on her hands, so much so that even for
her first court appearance, the daughter's hand was totally wrapped
(17:58):
up in gauze from a trip to the hospital. And yet,
the one thing that you or I and anybody else
I know is going to take away from this is
that as the deputy is looking at the deceased victim,
he looks up because there's trauma to her eyes, and
(18:21):
he looks up and on a box several feet away
are two eyeballs. Yeah, I can only imagine this is
going to be a shocking thing to see. I don't
know how an eyeball can even come out of the socket,
how big it is. I know. All I know is
I can't figure it out sitting here looking at you.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
How is it?
Speaker 2 (18:44):
How does it come out? How can you take an eyeball.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Out from this perspective? It's very difficult. And I have
removed eyes, but I have done them in the morgue,
and I'd never go in anteriorly and take them out
of the socket. Okay, really wait.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
A minute, so you wouldn't wait, You wouldn't get you
got the head land there, you would not just pull
it out.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
No no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no way. Uh.
I would go in first off, if in the cases
of a homicide where we're doing an autopsy, we're going
to take off the skull cap. And when you take
off the skull cap, which is actually referred to as
the calvarium, when you pop that thing off after you've
used the agitating saw the striker saw, you've taken out
(19:28):
the brain. When you're looking at the floor of the skull,
there is almost a shelf that is right behind the
frontal bone, and it's very thin, and doctors will describe
it the thickness of it, and this is how fragile.
Just point of order here, So people understand how fragile
your skull is. It is the floor of the skull
(19:52):
right there has a translucence that is equivocal to an
extra If that doesn't terrify you, you would, yeah, well yeah,
and it's it's in a socket. Okay, don't get me wrong.
It's actually you know this this socket that you have.
You hear about your eye sockets where you have super
(20:15):
and suborbital ridges, you know, above and below, and it
makes up the socket. But behind you know, you've got
a major optic nerve, which is you know, people think
of nerves and they think that you can't see them,
but you have the optic nerves that run into the
back of the eye. They look like the only way
I could really describe it's kind of interesting. They look
(20:37):
like little white cables like you would think that are
going into the back of the eye. So those have
to be trimmed away. And then there's muscle and ligament
attachments for the eyeball itself. And so we would cut
through the floor of that shelf that's right above the
eye and we can take it out more gently and
you can appreciate you say, well, Morgan, why would you
(20:59):
need to do that. Well, if we're tracking gunshot wounds
many times that are passing through the head, you want
to be able to appreciate the eye. And there's any
number of other reasons. Also if the floor of the
skull is fractured beneath that level. Have you seen people
that have been either had like nose jobs. You've seen
(21:19):
somebody that has been in a fight where they've had
a broken nose. I've broken my nose multiple times. You
get bilateral raccoon eyes, and what happens. It's the floor.
It is so fragile in there that you get this
build up of blood and hemorrhage is in there and
it takes a while for it to recede, you know.
But we would go in posterily and interiorly and posteriorly
(21:43):
to remove the eye. That way, the fact that this
daughter obviously she didn't open up the skull, right, she
actually goes in and tierarily and rips the eye out.
You hear about eye gains agaen and this sort of thing. Well,
it's one thing to gouge an eye, because an eye,
(22:04):
if you're in a fight and you kind of and
you can blind somebody by doing it, don't get me wrong,
and police, I'd say, nobody try this. But if you know,
you see in movies and whatnot, will people are trying
to defend themselves where their eyes striking or sticking their
thumbs in people's eyes. Yes, that can be a catastrophic event,
but you don't think of the eye actually being removed.
(22:27):
It would take work, and it would take a significant
amount of trauma because the eye is anchored in the rear.
They're actually and on the sides and on the top
with these little muscular attachments. There's ligament attachments that are
there and it's holding the eye in place. And it
is so complex that if everybody listening to me right now,
(22:47):
will just think about keeping your head static and not
moving your head, but looking the left or right or
up or down with your eyes. That's controlled by these
muscles that are in dwelling in the eyes. A fascinating thing.
The fact that the daughter went in and probably used
an instrument. I can't imagine that she would use her
(23:08):
finger to do this. I guess she could have, but
we do believe that she had some type of knife
because they allude to this and essentially kind of cut around. Well,
how would you get it out because you have to
get passed, not just these muscular attachments. You got to
get past the eyelids. There's two of them, right, upper
and the lower. You've got to manipulate all of this.
And here's the other thing. How can you be so
(23:31):
very numb to all of this in the midst of
this and you look down and you're doing you're perpetrating.
Let me say that this act upon the mother, who
we can only assume at some point in tom gazed
upon her daughter with these same eyes, maybe in a
(23:54):
loving manner, I don't know, and now you're taking them out.
How could she be that numb to it?
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Dave Well, what we've been told is that Camille Bala
claims to have smoked marijuana prior to this incident and
believes that it had been laced with floka or something
along those lines. For those who don't know what floka is,
(24:25):
it has If you've heard a PCP, which you know,
angel dust, where somebody would have superhuman strength and be
totally out of control and didn't resemble the person, you
know that type of behavior that is consistent with PCP
is also consistent with floka. And at the time this
happened in twenty eighteen. The state of Florida was dealing
(24:50):
with a huge rise in Floka and bath Salt's related
events like this, where people were eating the faces off
of other people. I'm not saying that as a joke.
That's not a term. I mean physically eating faces off
of human beings that are alive. So when you take
(25:10):
it to this level, I didn't know what all it
took to get an eyeball out Joe. I really didn't
even have a clue.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah, and she freely admits to the police that she
has smoked marijuana. They did find rolling papers there and
that she believed I guess this is after she's beginning
to you know, the high is resolving in her that
she thinks that it was laced with floka or PCP,
(25:41):
And it turns out I think that it probably was PCP.
But back to back to floka floca. People get it
confused sometimes with PCP because it's actually called PvP. It's
actually alpha PvP, and it it puts the individual into
(26:04):
a hallucinogenic state. And you know, we've seen all kinds
of things. Certainly, you know, back in the day, we
had people that were they would smoke marijuana joints that
were laced with PCP. In New Orleans for a period
of time when I first started my career down there,
(26:26):
you could buy those on the street and they were
actually referred to as here's a weird name. I've never
heard it anywhere else either, that would refer to them
on the street as click thems. And there were people
that were lacing things with PCP. Actually knew of cases
where they were lacing them with famaldehyde and smoking them
and they're trying to they were trying to arrive at
(26:49):
this kind of hypnotic or hallucinogenic state that marijuana does
not afford, and it drives them to another level. When
you're talking about Flokka, which by the way, is created
in a laboratory. It is a designer drug. There were
actually cases, you know, you mentioned that there were people.
(27:12):
I remember one case. I think it was from twenty
twelve where you did. In fact, I think it was
a young woman that actually began to gnaw the face
off of some homeless guy, you know when all this happened.
But here's the real interesting from a relationship point of view,
and kind of gives you an id idea how it
was viewed on the street. Flaka was actually referred to
(27:35):
as cannibal dust and PCP referred to as angel dust,
which is is quite fascinating. PCP had been around and
it's actually an equine drug. It's used with horses, and
it had been around forever and ever. So somehow, you know,
you think about, well, okay, if that's the case, was
(27:56):
she and such and here's our word that you used
just a moment ago our words? Was she such an
altered state that you know, I don't know, maybe she
thought that her mother was a monster or whatever the
case might be. But I find it very interesting that
the authorities first charged her with they hung premeditated first degree,
(28:18):
and now they reduced this thing to a manslaughter charge.
That's kind of telling.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Premeditated first degree is needle in the arm.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Yeah, yeah, you're in that's a capital offense, particularly in Florida,
you know, where they you know, more so than any
other state, you know, well maybe other than Texas and
maybe Oklahoma. Those three are you know, they're going to
use death panel they've got in place, and they use.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
It, taking it from the harshest possible sentence. The death
sentence is so severe, so final that it is automatically
immediately appealed. Yet they negotiate.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
This down to manslaughter.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
It doesn't make sense, No.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
It doesn't. It really doesn't. And so to me, from
a clinical standpoint, you have to think that she was
probably assessed and they felt as though that drugs had
so much of an effect on her relative to what
had occurred that they could justify in their minds of
reducing this. Because Dave, this is this is so incredibly
over the top. And this goes along with one of
(29:24):
my hypotheses. You know, all these cases I cover, not
just body bagsmall on television, it seems like the more
egregious the crime is many times there is a higher
likelihood that some kind of psychopathy or drug related you know,
drug induced psychosis is going to come into play. Because
I think that people in the legal world they look
(29:46):
at it and say, well, what are the reasonable conclusion
could you arrive at other than she was impacted by
this in some way, But this is quite fascinating. In
addition to addition to her mother being found in this state,
she had also written these religious notes that were found
(30:09):
lying about and it had to do with purification through
death and these sorts of things. And I can only
imagine when you look at look at these items of
evidence at the scene, one of the things that's going
to stand out to you is that, depend upon when
(30:30):
she wrote them, these things are going to be blood
saturated as well. And any kind of instrument that she used,
whether it's a crayon or a pen or a pencil.
And here's one more little tidbit. There's broken glass throughout
the house, which is believed to have been the source
(30:51):
for these cuts that the perpetrator had on her. So
to make matters more complicated, looking at this from a
forensic standpoint, you're gonna have co mingling of the daughter's
blood with the mother's blood at the scene. It's quite
the fascinating case. But you know, at the end of
the day, I think that she's not going to spend
(31:15):
that much time in jail.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
No, she was sentenced to ten years, but actually, Joe,
we mentioned this earlier. She spent five years in county jail.
And as I mentioned, I'm not saying anybody should feel
sorry for her about this, but county jail is an
uncomfortable situation for an extended period of time. If you're
there for a few days awaiting something. That's one thing.
(31:40):
But they don't put people in county jail to spend years.
You do that at the prison level. And that's why
I mean, she's spent five years in actually five and
a half years. Happened in March of twenty eighteen, and
she has not since she got out of the hospital
with the wounds on her hands fixed. She's been in
county jail since then. And now that they have done
(32:01):
the seny she pleaded guilty. Ultimately, she pleaded guilty to
the manslaughter charge. It was negotiatively. Circuit Judge Jeffrey Gillen
sentenced her to fifteen years in prison, followed by fifteen
years of probation. But she's getting credit for the two
thousand and eighty three days that she's spent in county
jail since her arrest, so she will be out of
(32:22):
prison in less than ten years.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
You take the measure of that, and you think about
what she had done to her mother, the trauma that
she subjected her mother too. I guess the one thing
I wonder and the one thing that I will always
be curious about in this case, is did her mother
suffer I think that I would look back at that
and say, yeah, she would have had to have suffered.
(32:47):
I just hope that her death was quick. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is Bodyback
Bodybags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Historically, when we think of
the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, it kind of begins and
ends with the shooting and subsequent death of Abraham Lincoln
(00:29):
at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. But you know
there were other people involved in this plot to kill
the president other than John Wilkes Booth. One in particular
was a fellow who was named Lewis Powell, and Louis Powell,
on the same night that Lincoln was assassinated for its theater,
(00:54):
was given the assignment. He was part of the conspirators
to kill the Secretary of State, William Sewart. William Seward
was in his home in Washington. He had neck brace on.
He had been involved in a carriage accident some days earlier,
and he was bedridden. And Lewis Powell made his way
(01:16):
into Seward's bedroom with a knife after he had pushed
past the matre d in the house had attacked and
when he made his way to William Sewart's bed, he
begins stabbing him over and over again. The only thing
that saved Seward's life was the fact that he had
(01:38):
this neck brace in and he was trying to stab
him in the neck. Lewis Powell eventually fled from Sewart's
home and ran into the streets and I quote screaming,
I'm mad. I'm mad, and I don't mean mad like angry,
I mean like he's saying that he's crazy. On today's case,
(02:01):
on Bodybags, we're going to talk about a woman who
was actually saying something very similar to what Lewis Powell
said all those years ago. She said, I'm a murderer.
I'm a murderer. And you know what, that was confirmed
(02:22):
when the police entered into the home of her mother
and found not just the greatly traumatized body of her mother,
but they were staring at something, something that was staring
back at them, her mother's eyes that had been removed
and placed on a cardboard box adjacent to her remains.
(02:45):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body bags. There's
something about anything affecting my sight. I've always had to
wear glasses. I say always, I guess since I was
about eleven, I've worn glasses. I've always wanted to be
freed from this prison of eyewear, and anything that has
(03:11):
to do with eyes always unnerves me, and this case
caught my attention because it's recently been adjudicated, and I
was just fascinated by it. I think, not just the trauma,
but the anatomy of this. How is this even possible
for someone to do it? How is it possible for
(03:32):
somebody to actually have the will to do this to
your own mother. It's not like she shot her to death.
This is the stuff of horror movies, Dave.
Speaker 2 (03:43):
This story begins with a phone call from Camille Bala
actually calls a coworker and says, Hey, you need to
come over here. I need help. I think I've just
killed my mother.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Yeah, that's the thing I think, Yeah, I think I
think I've just killed my mother. It's not a definitive statement, yea,
I have killed my mother. It's like you pause for
a second and talk about madness. You begin to consider
what's being implied there. Okay, I'm calling my coworker to
(04:15):
come over and okay, here's my statement to you. I
think I've killed my mother. Please come over here and
give me a confirmation. Can you confirm that I have
either killed my mother or haven't killed my mother? And
you ask you know, what could be the driver? Behind this,
that your perception of reality is something that is altered. Yeah,
(04:41):
it is altered, an altered state. If you will, I
love that, I submit to you that. The reason that
not many people have heard of this case is because
the perpetrator has been cooling her heels in jail since
twenty eighteen in county jail. County Jail's not not even prison,
(05:02):
she's in a county jail.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
County jail is different than being in prison. Being in prison,
you have certain boy, you have access to so many
different things. It's prison is a life. You have a
prison life.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
You have.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Access to TV and things that you don't have in
a county jail library. Right, Yeah, just everything is different
because it's made at prison. Is you've gone through the system,
you've been sentenced, You're going to be here for a
couple of years. This is your life, whereas county jail
could be anything from somebody who got a dui last
night to somebody who got into a bar fight to
(05:40):
somebody who didn't pay enough tickets, and they're all lumped together.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
All lumped together, and you never know. It's it's a
mixed bag. You never know what's what's going to be
in there, and just so folks know, I you know,
I've I've over the course of my career as a professor,
I've had students that have started out right out of
college working in jails because they're trying to get on
(06:03):
with whatever police department or sheriff's office. And it's amazing
the stories I've heard about their time spent working at
a county correctional facility. Some of the individuals that would
be in jail being and this is what it generally
spends out. They're either being held for a number of
(06:25):
medical reasons perhaps, or they're there. I know, in one
set of circumstances, I had a student that was working
at a county jail that had been reserved part of
been reserved by the Feds because they were keeping people
there for protective custody. And so you've got this gamut,
(06:46):
you know, this population when you look at this thing
and you're thinking, oh my god. And here's the really
interesting thing, Dave. When Camille Bala was initially arrested for
this brutal homicide of her mother, she was charged with
(07:10):
first degree premeditated murder day and in Florida, that's that's
a ticket that's that's a one way ticket to the
death house. You know, that's that's a capital offense. And
so that's a it's interesting that she's been You've got
this person that has at least the authority thought at
(07:32):
the time that this is so egregious, that it's so
over the top that we're going to hook her up
on charges for first degree premeditated and we're going to
keep her in the county jail since twenty eighteen. That's
a that's that's kind of a hard thing to digest.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
There's kind of a Paul Harvey here. Now you know
the rest of the story. There's got to be more.
I don't know what it is, but anyway you look
at it, anyway you look at somebody sitting in county
jail for five years is a long stretch. Now, not
that she doesn't deserve it or anything else, it's just weird.
It's just an odd amount of time to spend in
a county lock up when you're not dealing with a conspiracy,
(08:11):
you're not dealing with any other people that are part
of this. You're the sole person responsible for the crime
you're accused of. And again, they can't move it along
to get you to trial. There just has to be more.
But they're not letting us know. They're not letting us
know a lot of things, even right now, Joe, when
(08:31):
we started off by saying she doesn't, she calls a
co worker and says, I think I might have just
killed my mother. The co worker then calls nine one
one and says, meet me over here. Because or that's
actually one story says she called on the way. Another
story says she called when she got there. But either
way you look at it, it was the co worker
that called nine one one and made the claim that
(08:53):
her friend believes she has killed her mother.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
I can't imagine being the co worker and showing up.
And when the worker arrived, Camille was actually perched on
the front steps of her mama's house, covered in blood.
Can you imagine rolling up to that disaster. And it's
(09:16):
at that point in time that I think the coworker
called nine one one and when the cops rolled up.
When the cops rolled up, she looked at the cops,
handed them a bloody set of keys, and started screaming,
I'm a murderer, I'm a murderer. When the first deputy
(09:54):
rolls up to this scene that he's been summoned to.
And by the way, this is this is the home
of Francesco Monteiro Bala, who is the mother of Camille Bala.
This is her home. It's a nice, very nice home.
You know, when this deputy rolls up, not only is
(10:16):
she screaming that she's a murderer, she's a murderer. She
looks at the deputy and then says, and this is
what we actually call a spontaneous admission. Investigators will and
whatever you do, you don't stop anybody. When in the
midst of this she says, I killed my mother and
I need help. And that's when you know, she hands
(10:37):
over the keys and she points to the garage. I
cannot imagine being the deputy and making entry into this
home because you know, at this point, just so folks
understand the deputy, because this is at this point in time,
this is still a welfare check because the deputy has
to confirm that they have someone de ceased. Now you
(11:00):
have somebody that's saying I killed my mother. I killed
my mother, but they still have to go in and
confirm that this is what happens. This doesn't mean that
they're going into actually search or conduct a detailed investigation.
When when this deputy walks in and he goes into
that garage, he just absolutely is witnessed to a blood bath.
(11:23):
And there was literally a dynamic blood distribution on the
walls all over the place, in the garage and within
the house itself. And there's a you know, there's a
box not too far away from the body, cardboard box,
and he sees something on it. That's when he calls
CID and they roll the home side detectives out there.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
When the deputy gets there, and you've got this person
who is uttering, by the way, she was also talking
out of her mind and saying things under her breath
that didn't make sense. They knew something obviously was a miss.
She's covered in blood. She is also wounded, by the way,
and I'm talking about Camille Bala. When the deputies are
(12:05):
walking through their house, there was blood spatter everywhere. What's
the difference between splatter and spatter.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah, with both of these terms, one is an action
word and one is a deposition word. Traditionally, what the
deposition of blood, how it is defined, and how it's
defined linguistically. When you talk about the spattering of blood
SPA T t R. You're talking about small particulate bits
(12:38):
of blood or tissue that are deposited in a wide
range of area. But when you think about the word splatter,
that's a combination of and spatter came before splatter, all right.
Linguistically historically it did, and so when you think about
splatter that it's a combination. You're ready for this of
(13:02):
the words spatter and splash, and splatter has always had
the connotation that you're talking about. If I took a
bucket of paint or you know, a container of blood
and just kind of tossed it everywhere, that would be splatter,
(13:23):
all right. Whereas if you have, like spatter, and you
have have a dynamic event like a gunshot wound where
they're adjacent to a wall, and you get these kind
of fine particulate bits of blood that are kind of
satellited out all over the place because you know, the
high velocity nature of it it causes it to be smaller,
(13:45):
then that would be spatter. Now, some people have interpreted
these two words differently, as one is an action word
and one is actually a definitive word that's used as
a noun, you know, like that is in fact splatter
there as opposed to spatter or conversely. So people get
(14:07):
these confused all the time. The news media in particular
get them confused. But they do traditionally have two distinct meanings.
And in a case like this, where you're not necessarily
talking about a high velocity event because we do know
that an edged weapon is involved in this case, so
(14:27):
you're not going to have that huge dynamic event where
you have this big bolt spray unless you clip an
artery and it's still not going to look like a
high velocity spray. You're going to be seeing these big
swaths of blood all over the place. You'll have because
(14:49):
I can only imagine that Camille, since she's done this
d to her mother, where she's got the mother has
got multiple injuries and they're some of these. Again, this
is very confusing because they're using the term laceration in
Francesca's description of Francesca's injuries. They're saying that some of
(15:13):
these are lacerations. Well, what if we what have we
talked about on body bags for multiple episodes? Now, relative
to lacerations, lacerations are not commonly termed as sharp force injuries.
Those come about as a result of blunt force injuries.
So it's very interesting the language that's involved in here.
(15:36):
But suffice it to say this, there was an effuse
amount of blood at the scene, as you can expect
because the mother has been has been cut at least
we know the skin has been opened on her face,
her neck, her chest, her abdomen, and oh, by the way,
her eyes are no longer in dwelling in their sockets.
(16:17):
You examine this case, look at it very carefully, and
you begin to understand that there has to be some
kind of motivating impetus behind a daughter's desire to absolutely
wreck her mother, and could it? And yeah, I have
(16:41):
worked cases, Dave where you have a lot of rage
on the part of a child, where you have a
what's it called a parricide, where you have the child
that kills the parent. And I've had some that were
absolutely brutal. I tell you I, to the best of
my recollection, I've never worked a case involving a child
(17:03):
where they did this kind of disfigurement to a loved
one or specifically to a parent. There's got to be
more at work here.
Speaker 2 (17:15):
Well. When the deputy finds his way in the garage.
He has to go through the house and he talks
about the blood spladder everywhere, lots of blood in this house,
and traces it all the way to the garage. There's
like a trail of blood all the way through the
house leading to the garage where we find the victim,
(17:35):
Francesca Montero Bala. She's fifty seven years old at the
time of her death. She has been cut up. It
has been it has to have been a monstrous fight.
Her daughter is screaming, I'm a murderer, and she's got
cuts on her hands, so much so that even for
her first court appearance, the daughter's hand was totally wrapped
(17:58):
up in gauze from a trip to the hospital. And yet,
the one thing that you or I and anybody else
I know is going to take away from this is
that as the deputy is looking at the deceased victim,
he looks up because there's trauma to her eyes, and
(18:21):
he looks up and on a box several feet away
are two eyeballs. Yeah, I can only imagine this is
going to be a shocking thing to see. I don't
know how an eyeball can even come out of the socket,
how big it is. I know. All I know is
I can't figure it out sitting here looking at you.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
How is it?
Speaker 2 (18:44):
How does it come out? How can you take an eyeball.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Out from this perspective? It's very difficult. And I have
removed eyes, but I have done them in the morgue,
and I'd never go in anteriorly and take them out
of the socket. Okay, really wait.
Speaker 2 (18:59):
A minute, so you wouldn't wait, You wouldn't get you
got the head land there, you would not just pull
it out.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
No no, no, no, no, no no, no, no, no way. Uh.
I would go in first off, if in the cases
of a homicide where we're doing an autopsy, we're going
to take off the skull cap. And when you take
off the skull cap, which is actually referred to as
the calvarium, when you pop that thing off after you've
used the agitating saw the striker saw, you've taken out
(19:28):
the brain. When you're looking at the floor of the skull,
there is almost a shelf that is right behind the
frontal bone, and it's very thin, and doctors will describe
it the thickness of it, and this is how fragile.
Just point of order here, So people understand how fragile
your skull is. It is the floor of the skull
(19:52):
right there has a translucence that is equivocal to an
extra If that doesn't terrify you, you would, yeah, well yeah,
and it's it's in a socket. Okay, don't get me wrong.
It's actually you know this this socket that you have.
You hear about your eye sockets where you have super
(20:15):
and suborbital ridges, you know, above and below, and it
makes up the socket. But behind you know, you've got
a major optic nerve, which is you know, people think
of nerves and they think that you can't see them,
but you have the optic nerves that run into the
back of the eye. They look like the only way
I could really describe it's kind of interesting. They look
(20:37):
like little white cables like you would think that are
going into the back of the eye. So those have
to be trimmed away. And then there's muscle and ligament
attachments for the eyeball itself. And so we would cut
through the floor of that shelf that's right above the
eye and we can take it out more gently and
you can appreciate you say, well, Morgan, why would you
(20:59):
need to do that. Well, if we're tracking gunshot wounds
many times that are passing through the head, you want
to be able to appreciate the eye. And there's any
number of other reasons. Also if the floor of the
skull is fractured beneath that level. Have you seen people
that have been either had like nose jobs. You've seen
(21:19):
somebody that has been in a fight where they've had
a broken nose. I've broken my nose multiple times. You
get bilateral raccoon eyes, and what happens. It's the floor.
It is so fragile in there that you get this
build up of blood and hemorrhage is in there and
it takes a while for it to recede, you know.
But we would go in posterily and interiorly and posteriorly
(21:43):
to remove the eye. That way, the fact that this
daughter obviously she didn't open up the skull, right, she
actually goes in and tierarily and rips the eye out.
You hear about eye gains agaen and this sort of thing. Well,
it's one thing to gouge an eye, because an eye,
(22:04):
if you're in a fight and you kind of and
you can blind somebody by doing it, don't get me wrong,
and police, I'd say, nobody try this. But if you know,
you see in movies and whatnot, will people are trying
to defend themselves where their eyes striking or sticking their
thumbs in people's eyes. Yes, that can be a catastrophic event,
but you don't think of the eye actually being removed.
(22:27):
It would take work, and it would take a significant
amount of trauma because the eye is anchored in the rear.
They're actually and on the sides and on the top
with these little muscular attachments. There's ligament attachments that are
there and it's holding the eye in place. And it
is so complex that if everybody listening to me right now,
(22:47):
will just think about keeping your head static and not
moving your head, but looking the left or right or
up or down with your eyes. That's controlled by these
muscles that are in dwelling in the eyes. A fascinating thing.
The fact that the daughter went in and probably used
an instrument. I can't imagine that she would use her
(23:08):
finger to do this. I guess she could have, but
we do believe that she had some type of knife
because they allude to this and essentially kind of cut around. Well,
how would you get it out because you have to
get passed, not just these muscular attachments. You got to
get past the eyelids. There's two of them, right, upper
and the lower. You've got to manipulate all of this.
And here's the other thing. How can you be so
(23:31):
very numb to all of this in the midst of
this and you look down and you're doing you're perpetrating.
Let me say that this act upon the mother, who
we can only assume at some point in tom gazed
upon her daughter with these same eyes, maybe in a
(23:54):
loving manner, I don't know, and now you're taking them out.
How could she be that numb to it?
Speaker 2 (24:02):
Dave Well, what we've been told is that Camille Bala
claims to have smoked marijuana prior to this incident and
believes that it had been laced with floka or something
along those lines. For those who don't know what floka is,
(24:25):
it has If you've heard a PCP, which you know,
angel dust, where somebody would have superhuman strength and be
totally out of control and didn't resemble the person, you
know that type of behavior that is consistent with PCP
is also consistent with floka. And at the time this
happened in twenty eighteen. The state of Florida was dealing
(24:50):
with a huge rise in Floka and bath Salt's related
events like this, where people were eating the faces off
of other people. I'm not saying that as a joke.
That's not a term. I mean physically eating faces off
of human beings that are alive. So when you take
(25:10):
it to this level, I didn't know what all it
took to get an eyeball out Joe. I really didn't
even have a clue.
Speaker 1 (25:16):
Yeah, and she freely admits to the police that she
has smoked marijuana. They did find rolling papers there and
that she believed I guess this is after she's beginning
to you know, the high is resolving in her that
she thinks that it was laced with floka or PCP,
(25:41):
And it turns out I think that it probably was PCP.
But back to back to floka floca. People get it
confused sometimes with PCP because it's actually called PvP. It's
actually alpha PvP, and it it puts the individual into
(26:04):
a hallucinogenic state. And you know, we've seen all kinds
of things. Certainly, you know, back in the day, we
had people that were they would smoke marijuana joints that
were laced with PCP. In New Orleans for a period
of time when I first started my career down there,
(26:26):
you could buy those on the street and they were
actually referred to as here's a weird name. I've never
heard it anywhere else either, that would refer to them
on the street as click thems. And there were people
that were lacing things with PCP. Actually knew of cases
where they were lacing them with famaldehyde and smoking them
and they're trying to they were trying to arrive at
(26:49):
this kind of hypnotic or hallucinogenic state that marijuana does
not afford, and it drives them to another level. When
you're talking about Flokka, which by the way, is created
in a laboratory. It is a designer drug. There were
actually cases, you know, you mentioned that there were people.
(27:12):
I remember one case. I think it was from twenty
twelve where you did. In fact, I think it was
a young woman that actually began to gnaw the face
off of some homeless guy, you know when all this happened.
But here's the real interesting from a relationship point of view,
and kind of gives you an id idea how it
was viewed on the street. Flaka was actually referred to
(27:35):
as cannibal dust and PCP referred to as angel dust,
which is is quite fascinating. PCP had been around and
it's actually an equine drug. It's used with horses, and
it had been around forever and ever. So somehow, you know,
you think about, well, okay, if that's the case, was
(27:56):
she and such and here's our word that you used
just a moment ago our words? Was she such an
altered state that you know, I don't know, maybe she
thought that her mother was a monster or whatever the
case might be. But I find it very interesting that
the authorities first charged her with they hung premeditated first degree,
(28:18):
and now they reduced this thing to a manslaughter charge.
That's kind of telling.
Speaker 2 (28:23):
Premeditated first degree is needle in the arm.
Speaker 1 (28:26):
Yeah, yeah, you're in that's a capital offense, particularly in Florida,
you know, where they you know, more so than any
other state, you know, well maybe other than Texas and
maybe Oklahoma. Those three are you know, they're going to
use death panel they've got in place, and they use.
Speaker 2 (28:43):
It, taking it from the harshest possible sentence. The death
sentence is so severe, so final that it is automatically
immediately appealed. Yet they negotiate.
Speaker 1 (28:56):
This down to manslaughter.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
It doesn't make sense, No.
Speaker 1 (29:02):
It doesn't. It really doesn't. And so to me, from
a clinical standpoint, you have to think that she was
probably assessed and they felt as though that drugs had
so much of an effect on her relative to what
had occurred that they could justify in their minds of
reducing this. Because Dave, this is this is so incredibly
over the top. And this goes along with one of
(29:24):
my hypotheses. You know, all these cases I cover, not
just body bagsmall on television, it seems like the more
egregious the crime is many times there is a higher
likelihood that some kind of psychopathy or drug related you know,
drug induced psychosis is going to come into play. Because
I think that people in the legal world they look
(29:46):
at it and say, well, what are the reasonable conclusion
could you arrive at other than she was impacted by
this in some way, But this is quite fascinating. In
addition to addition to her mother being found in this state,
she had also written these religious notes that were found
(30:09):
lying about and it had to do with purification through
death and these sorts of things. And I can only
imagine when you look at look at these items of
evidence at the scene, one of the things that's going
to stand out to you is that, depend upon when
(30:30):
she wrote them, these things are going to be blood
saturated as well. And any kind of instrument that she used,
whether it's a crayon or a pen or a pencil.
And here's one more little tidbit. There's broken glass throughout
the house, which is believed to have been the source
(30:51):
for these cuts that the perpetrator had on her. So
to make matters more complicated, looking at this from a
forensic standpoint, you're gonna have co mingling of the daughter's
blood with the mother's blood at the scene. It's quite
the fascinating case. But you know, at the end of
the day, I think that she's not going to spend
(31:15):
that much time in jail.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
No, she was sentenced to ten years, but actually, Joe,
we mentioned this earlier. She spent five years in county jail.
And as I mentioned, I'm not saying anybody should feel
sorry for her about this, but county jail is an
uncomfortable situation for an extended period of time. If you're
there for a few days awaiting something. That's one thing.
(31:40):
But they don't put people in county jail to spend years.
You do that at the prison level. And that's why
I mean, she's spent five years in actually five and
a half years. Happened in March of twenty eighteen, and
she has not since she got out of the hospital
with the wounds on her hands fixed. She's been in
county jail since then. And now that they have done
(32:01):
the seny she pleaded guilty. Ultimately, she pleaded guilty to
the manslaughter charge. It was negotiatively. Circuit Judge Jeffrey Gillen
sentenced her to fifteen years in prison, followed by fifteen
years of probation. But she's getting credit for the two
thousand and eighty three days that she's spent in county
jail since her arrest, so she will be out of
(32:22):
prison in less than ten years.
Speaker 1 (32:24):
You take the measure of that, and you think about
what she had done to her mother, the trauma that
she subjected her mother too. I guess the one thing
I wonder and the one thing that I will always
be curious about in this case, is did her mother
suffer I think that I would look back at that
and say, yeah, she would have had to have suffered.
(32:47):
I just hope that her death was quick. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is Bodyback
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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