September 11, 2025 • 49 mins
The search for Travis Decker began when he failed to return his three daughters to their mother after court ordered visitation. It took less than 72 hours to find the girls bodies, suffocated with bags over their heads in the campground area their homeless father called 'home'. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack update the story as bones have been discovered "in the area" where Decker allegedly killed his daughters.
Transcribe Highlights
00:01.57 Introduction
05:05.93 Travis Decker is homeless living in a camp he made in the woods
09:30.35 The Decker girls bodies are found where there father was living
15:03.03 Bones found near Decker campsite
20:20.68 Why were bones found after three months of searching?
25:32.15 Suzanne Morphew bones were bleached white when found
30:42.68 Fractured, small parts of bone can be carried off my animals
35:22.50 Animal bones will be more robust than human bones
40:19.62 Decker used grocery bags around campsite, used to suffocate girls
45:21.88 Bones from big animals possible
49:12.12 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality Bus with Joseph Scott more. One of the more
frustrating aspects in forensics is sometimes you're left wanting you
don't necessarily have all of the answers that you might
wish to have. I'm sorry to inform you, but sometimes
(00:22):
not all of the answers rest in science. Now, we
can back up things, we can give you not just
qualitative results, but also quantitative results. But it still leaves
us frustrated because we don't have that solid foundation many
times to rest upon that we can go back and
(00:43):
definitively say something is concluded. Some things are never concluded. Today,
we're going to talk about an update that we have
in regards to the Travis Decker case, more specifically Travis
(01:09):
Decker's murder allegedly of his three daughters. Coming to you
from the beautiful campus of Jacksonville State University, I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags, Dave. I have so
(01:31):
many people that will approach me. We're just have gotten
back from crime con and again we're faced many times
with the why question. People want to know why something
has not been solved, why the data that comes out
doesn't necessarily marry up with what they were perhaps predisposed
(01:57):
in their thinking to. You know, the beauty of science
is that there's an elegance to it where it lays
out and you just have to accept the results for
what they are. Sometimes things just don't go down the
way you wish that they would, And with Travis Decker
in particular, this case has been an absolute nightmare. There
(02:22):
are people that want answers, and I think primarily where
is he. It's very frustrating, I think, for many folks
because in his wake, he has allegedly into the lives
of his three children and is not being held to
(02:42):
account for it because no one has put their hands
on him at this point.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
You know, this case began, as many cases do with
a divorced couple having children. There is always something, it seems, surrounding,
whether it's child supporter or visitation or a combination of
the two. And in this case, Travis Decker is former military.
He is trained in every aspect of survival and he's
(03:13):
good at it, and he hasn't had a lot of
He has not adapted well to life after military service,
and it's partly due to some of what he brought
back from his military service.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Now.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
It began the search for Travis Decker. He's thirty two
years old. By the way, it began when he did
not return his daughters from a planned visitation. There are
very strict rules for how he could have his children
with him alone, you know, not having to go where
somebody's watching him all the time with the kids, something
(03:51):
he had really fought for. But his ex wife was
very concerned because she knows Travis. She knows Travis from before,
during and after, and she has seen some real changes
in his personality and not happy with the direction his
life was headed.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
He ended up being homeless.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
Joe.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
And if you're a guy and you're going through a
transition period in life and you like the outdoors, you know,
pitching a tent and camping out and doing those things,
that's that's fine if it's a lifestyle choice and you're
the only person you have to.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
To deal with.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
But when you have children, you get them for the weekend,
you have to have a nice place for them to go,
a comfortable place. Hey, you can go on a camp out,
that's fine, you know, for the weekend, But when children
are in a home with their mom on a regular schedule,
living with dad in the woods for his visitation is
(04:49):
not it's not fun. It's not camping. You know, Camping
is not homelessness. Camping is a trip into the woods.
Camping is something that if the weather g it's bad
or something else, you can go back home. Yeah, when
you're living in the woods and you're homeless, it's not
a place where. In this case, the mom wanted her
three daughters to be so Travis Decker doesn't return with
(05:13):
the children as expected, and they kept very close eye
on this. This is not one of those times show
where somebody was a day later, two days later, even
a week late before they were reported. We're talking hours hours.
That's how concerned everyone from the attorneys to the judge
to mom, they were that concerned.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
You know. One of the interesting aspects to this case, Dave,
as it applies to to Whitney Decker, the wife former wife,
is that she had actually identified Travis as as a
good dad, right that you know, down I guess you know,
(05:56):
she has more insight than anybody else does down into
the of his being that you know, he genuinely loved
his daughters and wanted to spend time with them. Listen,
there's a whole ton of daddies out there that never
ever take the opportunity to see their kids period. In
(06:16):
a paragraph, Travis Decker doesn't strike me as that person.
You know, he wants to be with his kids, and
he has experienced trouble in his life, particularly between the years,
relative to what he has gone through based upon his
military experience. And when I say military experience, I'm not
(06:37):
talking about training. I'm talking about you know, the horrors
of war, and so you know, you plug in that formula.
But I got to go back to something because it
really reminded me. It kind of flipped a switch with me.
You were saying this a second ago about that the
wilderness or camping is certainly there's no permanence to that,
(07:00):
and you talked about how if you're an individual, it's cool.
And you know, this guy, this guy is not Ted Kaczinski,
the inn obomber, you know, who had the the you know,
the handbuilt cabin up there in Montana and he had
flown under the radar for years and years. We're talking
about a guy that's, yeah, he has a tent, but
(07:22):
he's primarily living out of his truck. He's traveling with
his fateful dog. And uh, you know, I think that
pretty much everybody knows knows my story and your story.
We're you know, we're products. We have had divorces in
our life, and it's it's one of the toughest things
you have to go through. How much more so if
(07:43):
you're homeless and you're mentally troubled and you've got these
three beautiful children that you still want to be part
of their life. I can I'm not making excuses for
him on any level. I am indicating I think that
this can be a very frustrating situation for him, and
if he's already got issues that he has to deal with,
(08:06):
I would imagine there's a lot of shame and regret
and everything else comes along with it.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
You know you mentioned Whitney Decker, the ex wife. Well,
when Whitney Decker filed for divorce last year, she actually
sought a protection order. She and this is what I mentioned.
She actually saw the deterioration of her husband, of Travis Decker,
from the man she knows he is at his core
and the man he has become and they were not
(08:33):
the same guy. And she actually felt some serious concern
over his mental health and the fact that he wasn't
consistently taking his medication, and some other things like that.
She filed for divorce citing Travis's instability. She wrote in
that divorce paperwork that Decker had a borderline personality disorder
(08:55):
and narcissism. Now, the reason we tell you all of
these things is background, because by now, for those of
you who have followed along, this is a follow up update.
Show you know that when Travis Decker did not come
back with the children, that they did immediately. They being
police and everybody else, began looking immediately, and they found
(09:17):
the girls. They found the girl's bodies. They found them
at the campsite that appeared to be more than just
a campsite. It appeared to be where Travis Decker had
been living for some time. There were signs of living
there not for a weekend, but four months possibly. And
(09:38):
what they found Joe at that campsite, in these three
precious little girls, is shocking to the heart and soul.
And the fact that a guy who is considered a
good dad at his core, that he is the only
suspect in what took place in the mountains at that campsite.
(09:59):
And now the reason for the update is we are
weaving those of us who watch crime, we're following the
story of the search for Travis Decker, who has been
charged in the deaths of his daughters, and we had
something come up.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
The FBI was involved. They found bones.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
We're talking months now, it's already passed that one hundred
day mark since Travis Decker went missing. He left the
girls of the campsite, and we'll go over how that
what he left behind, because that has a lot to
do with where we're headed now. But finding bones in
the woods, Joe, my first thought to you in doing
this update is, first of all, when we saw the update,
(10:43):
bones found in the woods. And while they're looking for
Travis Decker, and they find the bones and they start
calling in extra I mean two hundred and fifty agents,
special agents pulled from everywhere everywhere to do a shoulder
to soldier, shoulder to shoulders serch for more bones of
Travis Decker. So they thought, now, Joe, you know what
(11:06):
it's like in the woods when you're trying to find
forensic evidence. I'm wondering how much of it gets trampled on,
how much evidence gets lost while you're looking.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yeah, a lot of it does, and being out in
the out in the wilderness, the wilderness area is particularly frustrating.
I spent quite a number of years tramping through swampland
and you had mentioned shouldered shoulder. I'm glad you brought
that up. For those that have served in the military,
at any point in time, you do a thing in
(11:39):
the military called policing, and policing has nothing to do
with law enforcement. Has Policing the grounds is what they
refer to a particular the army, and you stand shouldered
shoulder and you walk along very methodically and you pick
up any trash that's on the ground. It's kind of
like busy work for these officers are agents that would
(12:01):
have been summoned out there along with local constabulary members
if they're working an area and you have to do it.
There's it's actually a grid search that you're doing. So
if you have an overlay, an aerial overlay of this
wild area, which I think is the park where this
(12:23):
went down, is like over two hundred and fifty six
acres or something like that, some big number like that,
you have to break it down into manageable spaces. That's
part of searching an area. So you know, if you're
you know, you might go out there and search a grid.
We use grids for all kinds of things in forensics,
(12:44):
but the grid search is when you're doing a search,
is much broader than say an evidence search, where you
have a concentration of evidence and you break an area
into We might have grid squares in a crime scene
that might be I don't know, maybe a foot by foot.
(13:05):
That's the size of the grid that you're in when
you're down your hands and knees and you're kind of
sweeping things away and collecting evidence. When you're doing a search,
those grids are much larger, and you will sign specific
people and you will methodically walk through there. What are
you looking for, Well, you're looking for any kind of
sign of life, and you're also in a broad sense,
(13:28):
looking for any bits of material that might be out
there that could be associated with K. So you spend
most of your time in these grids walking shoulder to shoulder,
and you are marching this off essentially, so that you
go from let's say let's say a grid is set up,
(13:50):
you know, in both in the north south plane and
also in the east west plain, so you kind of
crisscross you walk forward from say, for instance, from south
to north, you know, maybe five abreast, and then you're
looking and scanning the soil beneath your feet. And here's
(14:12):
something interesting. People might not know if you If you
come across something, everybody says halt or pause and they
will come out with a have you, davey, have you
ever seen the.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Little the little wire.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Wire flags that are orange or yellow, and they're generally
used for utility lines and are plugged into the ground.
We use the same thing out there. So what you
do is you take one of the and it's very
non invasive because it's wire, it's very tiny, the caliber
of the thing is very small. You stick it in
the ground right there and pause, and so you don't
(14:48):
remove it from that space immediately. You continue on with
the search because you don't and I use the term
context a lot on body backs. You don't want to
take away the context of that piece of evidence at
that site. It could be a ring, it could be
a button, it could be a bone, or what you
(15:08):
think might be a bone. And one of the reasons
that you think that it might be a bone is
that you're not a forensic anthropologist. There are very few
forensic anthropologists go along or go around. So one of
the things you do is you mark it right there.
And then if you've got, like maybe at True Disposal,
(15:28):
one or two forensic anthropologists out there they're having to
manage and a huge swath of land, you will summon
them over because they're looking at other things. And I've
had this happen. I've had them literally I'm standing still
and I've had them come over and kneel beside me
without me moving my feet because I don't want to
destroy anything. You were talking about stomping on evidence. And
(15:51):
you pause and they will get down their hands and
knees and they will very carefully look at that. Okay,
now if they say that, they'll give you a heads
up if it's a bone or not. You're still going
to move on looking to mark other things. Then you
step out of that grid and you've got all these
(16:12):
markers that are in place, and you're going to break
that down bit by bit, kind of reducing the scope
of your size of it, because now it's gone from
merely searching to now processing relative to a grid square,
So that grid square is like reduced so that it's manageable.
You don't want You don't want, say, a fifty by
(16:36):
fifty grid as your crime scene area. You want to
reduce that grid down now within the grid so that
it's it's smaller, more manageable, and you can excavate that
area kind of a long way around the barn. But
most people have never done this, and so it's ultimately
(16:56):
it's one of the most tedious things that you can
do at a crime saying how it's also one of
the most rewarding, and it sharpens your skills. I got
to tell you, every time I had ever worked a
crime scene involving scattered human remains, you know, Dave, it
would sharpen my skills for future cases I was going
to work. I'd hit these little benchmarks of these skeletal
(17:19):
recovery things, because by virtue of working with a forensic anthropologist,
they know that the devil is in the details, and
because of their scientific mind, you learn a lot sitting
at their feet because they work in a very granular level,
and so I could translate that into even even like
(17:40):
a dry by shooting case, where you might just look
at it very broadly. It's at night, you've got blood everywhere,
you don't think about the fine detail, you know, most
of the time, and when you do these these searches
for skeleter remains, it kind of snaps you back to
where you need to be as a practitioner. So I
kind of welcome the pain those associated with this because
(18:02):
it's it can be brutal. Uh, you know, the elements
are are horrible, you know. You you think about like
the brine laundry search that was out in the swamps.
I still have questions, by the way, because parents, you know,
walked up air quotes, walked up on the on the
body very quickly. And these people have been searching out
(18:25):
in that very hostile environment for his remains, you know,
trying to find them. But you know, as you had
mentioned earlier, they have come across, they have come across
skeletal remains. And I think a lot of that has
to do with the fact that they went to this
very isolated area and and kind of flooded the zone
(18:51):
to use a basketball terminology, flooded the zone in order
to get as many eyes on this. And I'm corrected
that the actual area is two hundred and forty seven acres,
which you know, by our standards. Dave if you and
I had a plot of land here in Alabama two
and forty seven acres, we'd have a lot of land.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
Dude.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
When you get to Washington state, two hundred and forty
seven acres is well, it's two hundred forty seven acres,
but it ain't like it is in other areas. You know,
You've got a whole lot of other wilderness surrounding this area.
It's not just as one little park. So where could
he have gone? Well, they found skeletal remains out there,
and of course the alarms went up, And didn't you
(19:31):
say that they found these these skelt remains kind of
approximating where the girls were.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
And I kind of wonder about that, But yes, that
the report's coming in that they were. The two hundred
and forty seven acres that they were searching was around
the area where the girls were found, in that camp area,
and that's I guess they went out from there based
on the terrain, which this is supposedly just horrific terrain
(20:00):
to walk into, you know, their hiking paths. Once you
get off path, you have a lot of fight in you.
So yeah, it was in the area near where the
baby That's why I think I even reached out to
you because it seemed odd that they would find it
so much later. You're talking from the first week of June,
and they find bones the third week of August, and
(20:22):
I would have thought that area near where the children
were found would have been searched out by now. They
wouldn't be finding new bones, you know. And by the way,
in the ninety to one hundred days out in the woods.
I know it's in the woods. I know it's August
and all that. I mean, I know it's summertime. But Joe,
would we be expecting to see skeleton or would we
(20:42):
body parts?
Speaker 1 (20:43):
What will?
Speaker 3 (20:43):
What would we be finding right now?
Speaker 1 (20:46):
Well, at this point, you know, the girls think were
last seen like May thirtieth, If I'm not mistaken, I
think that's when.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
They were found. June second was when their body found.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
June second, we're several weeks down range now, a couple
of months downrange from when they were found deceased. But
yet Travis Decker has kind of up and vanished. The
big question is with the remains that are found, there
(21:18):
is there anything anything at all that could say, first off,
if it's him, and secondly, if it is him.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
How did he die?
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Dave? You know, one of the things about skeletal recovery
is that most of us be included, particularly early on
in my career, believe that believe that skeletal remains would
be quite striking when you saw them. One of the
(22:03):
problems is is that after remains have been out in
the open, it is quite striking how many times they'll blend.
They'll blend into the environment around you, even with surface remains.
I don't know if it's a matter that you don't
get your eyesight tuned into it, or if there's some
(22:27):
kind of natural blending that goes along, because many times
they'll be Let's say, for instance, you have skelter remains
that are laying out on a dirt surface or grass surface,
you have series of rainstorms that come through there, Well,
everything around that area is going to be splashed with mud.
(22:48):
So the bones, even if skelter remains are there, sometimes
they can be concurrently splashed with mud as well, and
they're almost camouflaged many times because they'll they'll get this
layer of dirt on them. Not to mention the changes
in the color of skeletal remains after they've been exposed
(23:09):
to the air for a period of time, and there's
other factors as well, So it's not like it's not
like some movie, you know, where you step out there
and you've got these these kind of bleached bones. You know,
like we have this image of like out in the
desert where you've got bleached bones that are laying out there.
There'll always be a skull or something like that, And
(23:32):
it's not like that at all, you know, Joe. It
just it doesn't happen.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
The Susanne Morphew case, it was actually brought up when
they found him that these bones were bleached, meaning they
hadn't they hadn't been out there the whole time. I
thought that was remarkable, you know, in that case, and
that's something we will be covering again too. In those cases,
when you're finding bones in the wilderness while you're searching
(23:57):
for a man wanted for killing his three dogs, I
would think that you would find enough evidence around the
bone that you would know immediately it's human. I know
that's not the case, but that's what I would That's
what I thought before. And I thought, you got bones,
don't you have clothes nearby or on the bones? I
mean they don't that. Those are some things that I
(24:20):
don't quite understand. How long it takes for a body
to totally become bones and only bones and what happens.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
It takes a lot longer than than two months. Okay,
you're still going to have some You're still going to
have some soft tissue. Now it might it really desicated. Yeah,
it might be desicated. Which if you know what a
desicant is, desication, it's it's literally kind of a drying out.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
I only know because I've had to look that word
up when we've done this show, and I've said it before.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Well, I'm looking it up, going, what does that mean?
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Well, listen, let me tell you something of Americans. When
they would they would skin, you know, skin animals. They
would use a uh and I'm talking years and years ago,
you know, when they're kind of still living tribally. You know,
you can there's great documentation of how they would create
(25:21):
their own leather and it's it's kind of a natural
natural vent andy. You can collect salt and put on
it and that sort of thing. And of course they
would scrape hides, they would hang them out and most
of the time when this is going on, this is
they try, you try to get things into direct sunlight,
you know, in order to facilitate that. Uh. That's kind
of natural tanning that goes on. So uh as we know,
(25:46):
if you've ever been to you know, if anybody's ever
been to the Pacific Northwest, you can get in a
lot of sunshine homes. So you're not going to have
the same level of desiccation. It's this very moist environment
as well. Now there will be rotting flesh, a rotting tissue.
(26:08):
You can two months, Yeah, you'd still be able to
smell something. Another thing that we look for as well,
and this is rather disgusting, but it's really a big
tell for us, is that you look for a big
surrounding greasy area in the ground. And what that is
is all the bodily fluids and particularly the fat that
(26:32):
is kind of naturally rendering down. It gets into the
soil and even after you know, eight weeks or whatever
it is, you're still going to have that odor. You
still might have insect insect activity around because you know,
with flies in particular, it's like ringing the dinner bell.
They're going to keep coming back and coming back and
(26:52):
coming back, and that you know, and that's only one
species of insect, you know that we're talking about with flies.
You know, you have things that are out there. You've
got things like refer to as dung beetles. There's there's
a whole progression of these things, you know that kind
of show up at the scene. We use that as
an indication many times, try to come up with a
post more and amnerable for the dead. And then you
(27:16):
have animals that kind of come in and out and
off of you know, they enter, you know from stage
left or whatever, eggsit sage right, make an appearance, and
then they leave. But most of the time when they
make an appearance, if there is if there are remains
(27:36):
there that still have tissues tissue attached to them, They're
not always going to just sit there and feast. Okay,
what do animals want to do? Well, they want to eat.
They need that source of protein. They will take an
element from the body and go back to a burrow.
And even you know, if you've got a fox or something,
(27:59):
fox are kind of solitary. Foxes are kind of solitary animals.
Raccoons or solitary animals or possums. They grab, they grab
an element, then they go back to the burrow, so
you can, you know, if you're really good at this.
There are people that are out there that look for
animal sign that you can bring onto the scene and
(28:21):
they'll say, yeah, this is this is a burrow where
you know, some type of animal lives. And there are
documented cases of investigators going into animal burrows and finding
human bones in there. If you think that's wild birds,
birds will actually take human hair off the dead and
(28:44):
literally pad their nest with human hair. Wow, that has happened, yeah, wow,
and it's been documented. You know, it's kind of mind blowing.
You don't think that all of this this that this
kind of environment is this dynamic, but it is. And
the problem is is that for every skeletal element that
you take away, you're taking away a biological indicator of
(29:07):
what may have happened. So if there's some kind of trauma,
all right, let's just say, let's just say you've got
a long bone. The longest bone in your body is
are femur, which is the upper bone in your leg. Well,
if somebody's shot in the leg, okay, and they're left
out there to bleed, or they've been beaten up, and
(29:28):
you had a compound fracture, and their body has, you know,
begun to decompose, and some fox or something like this
walks up takes that long bone away. Well, all of
a sudden, you've got evidence of injury that just walked away.
This can even happen with bits of the skull. If
(29:48):
you have somebody that has self inflicted a gunshot wound
into their skull, it'll blow apart the skull. Now many
times when I say blow apart, let me refrain, is
that wrong phrasing? Okay, you will fracture the skull, and
the only thing that's still kind of holding the skull
together are those bits of soft tissue from the scalp.
(30:13):
But as the soft tissue degrades, you've got fractured bits
of bone from the skull they're lying about. Well, if
a raccoon takes it upon themselves to say, you know,
this looks like a tasting morsel, they'll take that bit
of bone that the external table of skull. You know,
they're examining it, thinking about they can eat it. They
(30:36):
walk off with it. Well, that piece of bone that
they're walking off with might hold evidence of a gunshot wound.
All right, And not only that it might be evidence
of not just a gunshot wound, but an entrance wound,
and you're suddenly losing that big piece of information. But
(30:57):
for these bones, in particular, Dave, that they're talking about,
there were found in proximity to where these precious little
babies were, you would have a forensic anthropologist out there
now off the record, an anthropologist might look at you
(31:20):
and say, if I'm hedging my bets here, I'm saying
this is not human, but I want to verify. Okay,
And you hear that that conversation happens a lot, so
they're not going to put that necessarily in an official report.
So the forensic anthropologist has to be at the scene.
Speaker 4 (31:38):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Now you'll call on FBI agents and people that are
medical legal death investigators to help you recover the remains,
but we are not the people that are actually doing
the anthropological exam. That exam is literally going to take
place back at their laboratory where if you get all
this like this goal for instance, that's why you have
(32:02):
to be very thorough. You're going to grab every little
bit of that skull and you're going to put it
in a paper bag. Okay, And they will take it
back to the lab and they will actually begin to
reconstruct the skull from that. If you and you can
see these skulls have been reconstructed and huge. Many times
you've got big missing gaps out of right, you know,
(32:24):
they're all all of the elements won't be there necessarily.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Let me ask you this show because you know you
mentioned that if a bone is found in the woods
and you've got somebody there that won't stay well it's human.
They won't come out and just boom it is this
or that. Based on their knowledge and experience, They're going
to take it back, going to examine it in the
lab to make sure what they're saying is anchored. I
(32:49):
get that, but it just seems to me that at
a certain level of experience expertise would lead you to say,
well this is probably you know, but it seems like
that to me. But do they all look the same
when you see pieces of bones out in the woods?
(33:10):
I mean, does my foot bone different? I mean, I
was there one hundred and fifty seven bones in your
foot or however many. But if you see a bone
from a human foot, does it resemble bones from a
pig or from a wild animal a bore.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
No, the Yeah. When you're talking about the structure of
the human footeah, and you happen to land on an
element of the human human anatomy that's probably skelt From
a skeletal standpoint, it's one of the most complex structures
your ankle, feet, and your wrist hand are probably if
(33:45):
you're looking at it from an engineering perspective. There are
so many elements that are attached to this, and it's
very specific to humans. I would imagine that some and
I've never spent time examining this at all, but I
would imagine and maybe the closest you're going to come
it's probably you know, maybe the ape family, where you've
(34:06):
got opposable thumbs and that sort of thing, and the
feet might kind of resemble. But with the trained eye
they can spot it like that and say no. So
one of the big things that you find that you
recover a lot, particularly in cities, not there's kind of
it's kind of it's not really complex. But let me
just kind of break it down to you this way.
(34:28):
If you're in a city, most of the time, bone
elements that you find, they're going to come up one
or two ways. Either somebody's digging in their backyard or
their dog walks up with the bone. Most of time
in cities and my experience at least in the South,
they're hogbones and hogbones themselves. When you look at say,
(34:50):
the long bone features like you know, just like you
know animals like you know, like dogs and pigs and cattle,
they have fore legs and hind legs. So the structure
of those bones, they're long bones in particular, are not
(35:11):
going to appear the same as ours as humans. They
many times, particularly with hogs and bovine or cow bones,
they are going to be more robust. They'll be shorter, perhaps,
but they're going to be more robust. They're gonna be
have their circumference will be larger. They're having to bear
(35:34):
a lot of weight and in kind of a low
posture as opposed to us that you know, we stand upright, well,
most of us stand upright, you know, dependent upon how
many you know chevies as somebody has had. But all
jokes aside, you're you know, you're we're are structurally we're
just different. And so when you're at a scene, when
(35:56):
you're at a scene, you begin to think about, well,
is there any other evidence of human activity out here?
Is this so isolated? You want a factor in that circumstance.
And then you have to have as a forensic anthropologist,
you have to have an understanding of all the local
flora and fauna, particularly the fauna. You want to know
(36:18):
what animals might kind of migrate through this area, or
it's a hunting area for them, or maybe they have burrows.
When you understand the very species, it's not simply understanding
as an anthropologist understanding humans. You have to understand you
(36:39):
have to understand the animal activities too. I'll give you
a great story real quick up at ut it has
at the University of Tennessee where the body Farm is
one of the kind of gates you have to pass
through in your training, all right, and is doctor bass
allegedly used to have a doctor Bill Bassett that founded
(37:01):
the body farm used to have a box that he
would place skeletal remains in. And one graduate graduate student
would sit on one end of the box and there be
hole in a box and doctor bass would sit on
the other end of it with a whole on his side.
And you're doing this blindly. You have to shake hands
with him in the box and there's little skelter remains
(37:24):
all in there, and doctor Bass would grab that skeletal
element and hold it in just by feel alone, you
had to identify the species. That's how intense that training
is up there.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
People.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
You know they hear about the body farm and all this.
This is not for the faint of heart. You really
have to engage all of your senses when you're trying
to assess skelter remains. But Dave, I got to tell you,
I know people are going to be disappointed in what
I'm about to say. Whoever the anthropologist was that got
their hands on this collection, you know, this collection of
(38:01):
skalf remains. Do they they determined that not only were
they not Travis Decker, but they're not even human. We
(38:25):
know that they had access to DNA out there because
of the what they have discovered. You know, I think
that they released information that and just so that folks
understand and remember, these precious little babies. They were essentially suffocated.
They were suffocated with plastic bags, and these.
Speaker 3 (38:47):
They actually find in those bags and on those ways.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Yeah, that's that's the key thing here. It's not just
an external finding. And this this really chilled me. Dave,
I got to tell you we did. We done a
previous episode, right, and we had the stata then, but
I think that we need to revisit this. They found
allegedly found deckers DNA not just on the outside of
(39:14):
the bag, but from within the back. So these bags,
and there were multiple acts. One child had two children
had two bags over their head. It's almost like a
redundancy thing. Another child had three over their head. And
this kind of redundancy or backup plan relative to these murders,
(39:38):
that's evidence of somebody wanting to, you know, have fail
safes with this to guarantee that no oxygen was going
to get in there, you know. And I guess you
could say that if you had taken a single bag
and put off a child's head and kind of squeeze
around the neck and deprived them of oxygen. But it
goes to another level here when you've got this layering
of bags that goes in because we all, I know
(40:00):
the grocery plastic grocery bags are fragile, so and they tear.
I mean, how many times, Dave have you had a
bag tear when you're walking in the house. These things
they give you a check out and whatnot. It's happened
to me on countless occasions. I mean, they're crappy and
so they're not meant for long term use. So the
(40:24):
idea that if he is in fact guilty of killing
his children, he had an abundance of these bags. He
said that he had been living out there in the wilderness. Well,
he's probably living out of grocery bags. Because they talked
and that really stood out. I've never heard anybody mention
this before in a case where they talked about the
(40:45):
abundance of these bags that are out there. There's a
lot of them. And you know, it's not like he's
got garbage pickup that could come by and pick up
your garbage, like you can push it to the street,
waste pick up, you know, all that stuff. So if
you have a collection these bags, every time you go
into town or where it is you go to go
get more supplies, you bring these bags back with you
(41:07):
and you retain them because they have other utility. And unfortunately,
it would seem that they were literally weaponized. People use
that term a lot, but weaponized to facilitate a triple homicide.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Dave, Now, Joe, when when we went over this and
we talked about his DNA being found on the inside
of those bags. And you know, you and I both
have have a tough time dealing with children that are murdered,
especially by a parent by And I think of what
happened out in Colorado, you know where we actually had
(41:45):
Chris Watts talking about how he killed his children and
what he did with their bodies. And I know that
there is evil on planet Earth. With regard to Travis Decker,
we only know, oh, we we found at that site.
But at that camps he left his GMC truck. He
(42:08):
said he abandoned it. But on the tailgate there was blood.
Speaker 4 (42:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
How I know that they can figure out whose blood
it is. Yeah, but I have to wonder, since he
suffocated the girls, where did the blood come from.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
That's a good question because apparently, if memory serves me,
that was his blood that was there. I think that
they identified it genetically.
Speaker 3 (42:34):
I hope one of those girls kick the crap out
of him.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
Well, yeah, one would hope that, but he was And again,
to try to frame this thing out, we don't have
a lot of data relative to the status of the blood. Yeah,
like you know, you can have Okay, you and I
can sit here and say all day long we found blood. Okay, well,
(42:58):
how fresh was the blood was it? Because you can
have blood in a uh for folks that don't know.
As blood gets older, when you see it you come
across it, many times it'll it flakes like paint, Like
old paint, it'll kind of roll up, it'll fracture, you
know how paint will fracture if it dries out, and
(43:19):
it'll kind of curl up in these little fractured areas.
That's the way blood is. Only it happens quicker obviously
than paint does. Was it like that or was it
was it fresher where you know, maybe it had clotted up,
was it smeared? Was it a single contact you know,
had he drug his hand across an area?
Speaker 4 (43:40):
Was it.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Dynamic deposition you know where you're talking about things like
cast off and all of that. Or was it passively dripping?
You know, So there's there's a whole lot to kind
of unpack with With a blood stain, you can say
you have a blood stain, but you don't know what
form it's taking. You don't know what status of that is.
(44:04):
And you know, going back to DNA, when they found
these bones that were out there. I'm sure that because
anthropologists look at something, it's called morphology, and so the
morphology of a bone pretty quickly you can ascertain that,
particularly once you get them cleaned up in there, back
and back in the lab, you can say, okay, these
(44:28):
are non human remains. So for people wondering if they
did DNA testing on the bone, maybe they did as
maybe a stopgap or just to because this is very
high profile cast. And but you know, an anthropologist worth
their salt could look at these bones. My suspicion is
(44:49):
in a wilderness area like this, you're going to look
at maybe mule deer out in that area. There's a
lot of mule deer. You've got, you've got elk, very
specific species of elk. I don't know if I'd be
inclined to bear necessarily, but you have to understand that this,
(45:13):
this triple homicide has taken place in the environment, in
literally the home of wild animals.
Speaker 4 (45:23):
You know, if you.
Speaker 1 (45:24):
Come to a civilized area, a developed area, you find
our remains. You know, they're in graveyards all over the place. Well, animals,
you know, don't bury their dead. They're surface depositions. Of remains,
and so it's not it's not beyond the pale that
you would walk up on, you know, a skeletonized animal
(45:46):
and find it there. It's compelling because it's so close
to the bodies. Right, we don't know anything about the
age of these remains either.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
So now I will tell you one thing I thought of,
Joe is when the bones were found, I reached out
to you and I thought of all those and met
so many of you at Crime Con. Thank you for
coming by the booth or watching Joe on stage is phenomenal,
But so many people don't have the ability to go, hey, Joe,
what is this?
Speaker 3 (46:12):
You know, what did they find?
Speaker 2 (46:13):
And you were laying you know, you pretty much told
me that you know that they already know what it is.
They have to confirm that's It's like the blood, it
looks like something that may be blood, but I'm not
saying that's blood. And same thing with these bones. It
doesn't look to be human. But we're not even going
to say that because and I'm not knocking this. I
think the reason that they let the bone, I think
(46:35):
they could have ended the bone issue early on, saying
we don't believe they're human but we're testing. But instead
of saying that, they were able to redraw attention back
into the case Travis Decker's face, because if he has
escaped and is out, you know somewhere, they got another
week of attention on his face, they still don't have him.
They still don't have his body. And all I was thinking,
(46:56):
somebody asked me if I thought he had committed suicide,
You really that when you commit suicide, unless you plan
it out when you're you know, you don't want to
be found. You're going into a cave or whatever to
hydrac Once you're dead, you don't get to move your body,
you know. So that's why we don't have too many
people that commit suicide that we don't find, because, yeah,
(47:19):
they are.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
Right, and there's all kinds of haunts and hollers he
can go into out there in that wilderness and you know,
places that would greatly you know, impede of finding someone.
First off, i'd I think that at this point, because
this is compared to other cases, this is still rather recent, right,
(47:43):
I think that you would still find some sembilance of
of him.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
You mentioned earlier, with the smell, you would smell his
decompoliity dogs.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
Cadaver dogs would too. And I understand that they've been
kind of pumping them through there, they had been. I
think they're kind of backed off. And to your point,
you know, having so much experience with media, Dave, you
understand that cycling through this thing and getting him back
out there, the fact that they found these bones and
(48:15):
they could write articles about it, it does cycle him
back into the media. Because look, I do know this.
I know that Travis Decker he's not there, He's not
in that space. He is somewhere. But the thing about
it is this, they have to continue to look. They
(48:38):
need to confirm that he's no longer with us, or
that he's present bouncing around that upper tier of the
American States Idaho, Montana one of those locations, or he
slipped across the border into Canada. In order to have
(48:58):
a resolution, they've got to get their hands on either
him or his remains. I can assure you of this, brother, Dave,
and I will keep you in the loop. Any further
information that comes out about this case, We're going to
talk about it. You know why we're going to talk
about it. It's not because of this man. It's because
(49:21):
of these three precious little saults that are no longer
with us. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks.
Quality Bus with Joseph Scott more. One of the more
frustrating aspects in forensics is sometimes you're left wanting you
don't necessarily have all of the answers that you might
wish to have. I'm sorry to inform you, but sometimes
(00:22):
not all of the answers rest in science. Now, we
can back up things, we can give you not just
qualitative results, but also quantitative results. But it still leaves
us frustrated because we don't have that solid foundation many
times to rest upon that we can go back and
(00:43):
definitively say something is concluded. Some things are never concluded. Today,
we're going to talk about an update that we have
in regards to the Travis Decker case, more specifically Travis
(01:09):
Decker's murder allegedly of his three daughters. Coming to you
from the beautiful campus of Jacksonville State University, I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags, Dave. I have so
(01:31):
many people that will approach me. We're just have gotten
back from crime con and again we're faced many times
with the why question. People want to know why something
has not been solved, why the data that comes out
doesn't necessarily marry up with what they were perhaps predisposed
(01:57):
in their thinking to. You know, the beauty of science
is that there's an elegance to it where it lays
out and you just have to accept the results for
what they are. Sometimes things just don't go down the
way you wish that they would, And with Travis Decker
in particular, this case has been an absolute nightmare. There
(02:22):
are people that want answers, and I think primarily where
is he. It's very frustrating, I think, for many folks
because in his wake, he has allegedly into the lives
of his three children and is not being held to
(02:42):
account for it because no one has put their hands
on him at this point.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
You know, this case began, as many cases do with
a divorced couple having children. There is always something, it seems, surrounding,
whether it's child supporter or visitation or a combination of
the two. And in this case, Travis Decker is former military.
He is trained in every aspect of survival and he's
(03:13):
good at it, and he hasn't had a lot of
He has not adapted well to life after military service,
and it's partly due to some of what he brought
back from his military service.
Speaker 3 (03:29):
Now.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
It began the search for Travis Decker. He's thirty two
years old. By the way, it began when he did
not return his daughters from a planned visitation. There are
very strict rules for how he could have his children
with him alone, you know, not having to go where
somebody's watching him all the time with the kids, something
(03:51):
he had really fought for. But his ex wife was
very concerned because she knows Travis. She knows Travis from before,
during and after, and she has seen some real changes
in his personality and not happy with the direction his
life was headed.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
He ended up being homeless.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
Joe.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
And if you're a guy and you're going through a
transition period in life and you like the outdoors, you know,
pitching a tent and camping out and doing those things,
that's that's fine if it's a lifestyle choice and you're
the only person you have to.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
To deal with.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
But when you have children, you get them for the weekend,
you have to have a nice place for them to go,
a comfortable place. Hey, you can go on a camp out,
that's fine, you know, for the weekend, But when children
are in a home with their mom on a regular schedule,
living with dad in the woods for his visitation is
(04:49):
not it's not fun. It's not camping. You know, Camping
is not homelessness. Camping is a trip into the woods.
Camping is something that if the weather g it's bad
or something else, you can go back home. Yeah, when
you're living in the woods and you're homeless, it's not
a place where. In this case, the mom wanted her
three daughters to be so Travis Decker doesn't return with
(05:13):
the children as expected, and they kept very close eye
on this. This is not one of those times show
where somebody was a day later, two days later, even
a week late before they were reported. We're talking hours hours.
That's how concerned everyone from the attorneys to the judge
to mom, they were that concerned.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
You know. One of the interesting aspects to this case, Dave,
as it applies to to Whitney Decker, the wife former wife,
is that she had actually identified Travis as as a
good dad, right that you know, down I guess you know,
(05:56):
she has more insight than anybody else does down into
the of his being that you know, he genuinely loved
his daughters and wanted to spend time with them. Listen,
there's a whole ton of daddies out there that never
ever take the opportunity to see their kids period. In
(06:16):
a paragraph, Travis Decker doesn't strike me as that person.
You know, he wants to be with his kids, and
he has experienced trouble in his life, particularly between the years,
relative to what he has gone through based upon his
military experience. And when I say military experience, I'm not
(06:37):
talking about training. I'm talking about you know, the horrors
of war, and so you know, you plug in that formula.
But I got to go back to something because it
really reminded me. It kind of flipped a switch with me.
You were saying this a second ago about that the
wilderness or camping is certainly there's no permanence to that,
(07:00):
and you talked about how if you're an individual, it's cool.
And you know, this guy, this guy is not Ted Kaczinski,
the inn obomber, you know, who had the the you know,
the handbuilt cabin up there in Montana and he had
flown under the radar for years and years. We're talking
about a guy that's, yeah, he has a tent, but
(07:22):
he's primarily living out of his truck. He's traveling with
his fateful dog. And uh, you know, I think that
pretty much everybody knows knows my story and your story.
We're you know, we're products. We have had divorces in
our life, and it's it's one of the toughest things
you have to go through. How much more so if
(07:43):
you're homeless and you're mentally troubled and you've got these
three beautiful children that you still want to be part
of their life. I can I'm not making excuses for
him on any level. I am indicating I think that
this can be a very frustrating situation for him, and
if he's already got issues that he has to deal with,
(08:06):
I would imagine there's a lot of shame and regret
and everything else comes along with it.
Speaker 2 (08:10):
You know you mentioned Whitney Decker, the ex wife. Well,
when Whitney Decker filed for divorce last year, she actually
sought a protection order. She and this is what I mentioned.
She actually saw the deterioration of her husband, of Travis Decker,
from the man she knows he is at his core
and the man he has become and they were not
(08:33):
the same guy. And she actually felt some serious concern
over his mental health and the fact that he wasn't
consistently taking his medication, and some other things like that.
She filed for divorce citing Travis's instability. She wrote in
that divorce paperwork that Decker had a borderline personality disorder
(08:55):
and narcissism. Now, the reason we tell you all of
these things is background, because by now, for those of
you who have followed along, this is a follow up update.
Show you know that when Travis Decker did not come
back with the children, that they did immediately. They being
police and everybody else, began looking immediately, and they found
(09:17):
the girls. They found the girl's bodies. They found them
at the campsite that appeared to be more than just
a campsite. It appeared to be where Travis Decker had
been living for some time. There were signs of living
there not for a weekend, but four months possibly. And
(09:38):
what they found Joe at that campsite, in these three
precious little girls, is shocking to the heart and soul.
And the fact that a guy who is considered a
good dad at his core, that he is the only
suspect in what took place in the mountains at that campsite.
(09:59):
And now the reason for the update is we are
weaving those of us who watch crime, we're following the
story of the search for Travis Decker, who has been
charged in the deaths of his daughters, and we had
something come up.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
The FBI was involved. They found bones.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
We're talking months now, it's already passed that one hundred
day mark since Travis Decker went missing. He left the
girls of the campsite, and we'll go over how that
what he left behind, because that has a lot to
do with where we're headed now. But finding bones in
the woods, Joe, my first thought to you in doing
this update is, first of all, when we saw the update,
(10:43):
bones found in the woods. And while they're looking for
Travis Decker, and they find the bones and they start
calling in extra I mean two hundred and fifty agents,
special agents pulled from everywhere everywhere to do a shoulder
to soldier, shoulder to shoulders serch for more bones of
Travis Decker. So they thought, now, Joe, you know what
(11:06):
it's like in the woods when you're trying to find
forensic evidence. I'm wondering how much of it gets trampled on,
how much evidence gets lost while you're looking.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yeah, a lot of it does, and being out in
the out in the wilderness, the wilderness area is particularly frustrating.
I spent quite a number of years tramping through swampland
and you had mentioned shouldered shoulder. I'm glad you brought
that up. For those that have served in the military,
at any point in time, you do a thing in
(11:39):
the military called policing, and policing has nothing to do
with law enforcement. Has Policing the grounds is what they
refer to a particular the army, and you stand shouldered
shoulder and you walk along very methodically and you pick
up any trash that's on the ground. It's kind of
like busy work for these officers are agents that would
(12:01):
have been summoned out there along with local constabulary members
if they're working an area and you have to do it.
There's it's actually a grid search that you're doing. So
if you have an overlay, an aerial overlay of this
wild area, which I think is the park where this
(12:23):
went down, is like over two hundred and fifty six
acres or something like that, some big number like that,
you have to break it down into manageable spaces. That's
part of searching an area. So you know, if you're
you know, you might go out there and search a grid.
We use grids for all kinds of things in forensics,
(12:44):
but the grid search is when you're doing a search,
is much broader than say an evidence search, where you
have a concentration of evidence and you break an area
into We might have grid squares in a crime scene
that might be I don't know, maybe a foot by foot.
(13:05):
That's the size of the grid that you're in when
you're down your hands and knees and you're kind of
sweeping things away and collecting evidence. When you're doing a search,
those grids are much larger, and you will sign specific
people and you will methodically walk through there. What are
you looking for, Well, you're looking for any kind of
sign of life, and you're also in a broad sense,
(13:28):
looking for any bits of material that might be out
there that could be associated with K. So you spend
most of your time in these grids walking shoulder to shoulder,
and you are marching this off essentially, so that you
go from let's say let's say a grid is set up,
(13:50):
you know, in both in the north south plane and
also in the east west plain, so you kind of
crisscross you walk forward from say, for instance, from south
to north, you know, maybe five abreast, and then you're
looking and scanning the soil beneath your feet. And here's
(14:12):
something interesting. People might not know if you If you
come across something, everybody says halt or pause and they
will come out with a have you, davey, have you
ever seen the.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
Little the little wire.
Speaker 1 (14:27):
Wire flags that are orange or yellow, and they're generally
used for utility lines and are plugged into the ground.
We use the same thing out there. So what you
do is you take one of the and it's very
non invasive because it's wire, it's very tiny, the caliber
of the thing is very small. You stick it in
the ground right there and pause, and so you don't
(14:48):
remove it from that space immediately. You continue on with
the search because you don't and I use the term
context a lot on body backs. You don't want to
take away the context of that piece of evidence at
that site. It could be a ring, it could be
a button, it could be a bone, or what you
(15:08):
think might be a bone. And one of the reasons
that you think that it might be a bone is
that you're not a forensic anthropologist. There are very few
forensic anthropologists go along or go around. So one of
the things you do is you mark it right there.
And then if you've got, like maybe at True Disposal,
(15:28):
one or two forensic anthropologists out there they're having to
manage and a huge swath of land, you will summon
them over because they're looking at other things. And I've
had this happen. I've had them literally I'm standing still
and I've had them come over and kneel beside me
without me moving my feet because I don't want to
destroy anything. You were talking about stomping on evidence. And
(15:51):
you pause and they will get down their hands and
knees and they will very carefully look at that. Okay,
now if they say that, they'll give you a heads
up if it's a bone or not. You're still going
to move on looking to mark other things. Then you
step out of that grid and you've got all these
(16:12):
markers that are in place, and you're going to break
that down bit by bit, kind of reducing the scope
of your size of it, because now it's gone from
merely searching to now processing relative to a grid square,
So that grid square is like reduced so that it's manageable.
You don't want You don't want, say, a fifty by
(16:36):
fifty grid as your crime scene area. You want to
reduce that grid down now within the grid so that
it's it's smaller, more manageable, and you can excavate that
area kind of a long way around the barn. But
most people have never done this, and so it's ultimately
(16:56):
it's one of the most tedious things that you can
do at a crime saying how it's also one of
the most rewarding, and it sharpens your skills. I got
to tell you, every time I had ever worked a
crime scene involving scattered human remains, you know, Dave, it
would sharpen my skills for future cases I was going
to work. I'd hit these little benchmarks of these skeletal
(17:19):
recovery things, because by virtue of working with a forensic anthropologist,
they know that the devil is in the details, and
because of their scientific mind, you learn a lot sitting
at their feet because they work in a very granular level,
and so I could translate that into even even like
(17:40):
a dry by shooting case, where you might just look
at it very broadly. It's at night, you've got blood everywhere,
you don't think about the fine detail, you know, most
of the time, and when you do these these searches
for skeleter remains, it kind of snaps you back to
where you need to be as a practitioner. So I
kind of welcome the pain those associated with this because
(18:02):
it's it can be brutal. Uh, you know, the elements
are are horrible, you know. You you think about like
the brine laundry search that was out in the swamps.
I still have questions, by the way, because parents, you know,
walked up air quotes, walked up on the on the
body very quickly. And these people have been searching out
(18:25):
in that very hostile environment for his remains, you know,
trying to find them. But you know, as you had
mentioned earlier, they have come across, they have come across
skeletal remains. And I think a lot of that has
to do with the fact that they went to this
very isolated area and and kind of flooded the zone
(18:51):
to use a basketball terminology, flooded the zone in order
to get as many eyes on this. And I'm corrected
that the actual area is two hundred and forty seven acres,
which you know, by our standards. Dave if you and
I had a plot of land here in Alabama two
and forty seven acres, we'd have a lot of land.
Speaker 4 (19:10):
Dude.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
When you get to Washington state, two hundred and forty
seven acres is well, it's two hundred forty seven acres,
but it ain't like it is in other areas. You know,
You've got a whole lot of other wilderness surrounding this area.
It's not just as one little park. So where could
he have gone? Well, they found skeletal remains out there,
and of course the alarms went up, And didn't you
(19:31):
say that they found these these skelt remains kind of
approximating where the girls were.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
And I kind of wonder about that, But yes, that
the report's coming in that they were. The two hundred
and forty seven acres that they were searching was around
the area where the girls were found, in that camp area,
and that's I guess they went out from there based
on the terrain, which this is supposedly just horrific terrain
(20:00):
to walk into, you know, their hiking paths. Once you
get off path, you have a lot of fight in you.
So yeah, it was in the area near where the
baby That's why I think I even reached out to
you because it seemed odd that they would find it
so much later. You're talking from the first week of June,
and they find bones the third week of August, and
(20:22):
I would have thought that area near where the children
were found would have been searched out by now. They
wouldn't be finding new bones, you know. And by the way,
in the ninety to one hundred days out in the woods.
I know it's in the woods. I know it's August
and all that. I mean, I know it's summertime. But Joe,
would we be expecting to see skeleton or would we
(20:42):
body parts?
Speaker 1 (20:43):
What will?
Speaker 3 (20:43):
What would we be finding right now?
Speaker 1 (20:46):
Well, at this point, you know, the girls think were
last seen like May thirtieth, If I'm not mistaken, I
think that's when.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
They were found. June second was when their body found.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
June second, we're several weeks down range now, a couple
of months downrange from when they were found deceased. But
yet Travis Decker has kind of up and vanished. The
big question is with the remains that are found, there
(21:18):
is there anything anything at all that could say, first off,
if it's him, and secondly, if it is him.
Speaker 4 (21:27):
How did he die?
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Dave? You know, one of the things about skeletal recovery
is that most of us be included, particularly early on
in my career, believe that believe that skeletal remains would
be quite striking when you saw them. One of the
(22:03):
problems is is that after remains have been out in
the open, it is quite striking how many times they'll blend.
They'll blend into the environment around you, even with surface remains.
I don't know if it's a matter that you don't
get your eyesight tuned into it, or if there's some
(22:27):
kind of natural blending that goes along, because many times
they'll be Let's say, for instance, you have skelter remains
that are laying out on a dirt surface or grass surface,
you have series of rainstorms that come through there, Well,
everything around that area is going to be splashed with mud.
(22:48):
So the bones, even if skelter remains are there, sometimes
they can be concurrently splashed with mud as well, and
they're almost camouflaged many times because they'll they'll get this
layer of dirt on them. Not to mention the changes
in the color of skeletal remains after they've been exposed
(23:09):
to the air for a period of time, and there's
other factors as well, So it's not like it's not
like some movie, you know, where you step out there
and you've got these these kind of bleached bones. You know,
like we have this image of like out in the
desert where you've got bleached bones that are laying out there.
There'll always be a skull or something like that, And
(23:32):
it's not like that at all, you know, Joe. It
just it doesn't happen.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
The Susanne Morphew case, it was actually brought up when
they found him that these bones were bleached, meaning they
hadn't they hadn't been out there the whole time. I
thought that was remarkable, you know, in that case, and
that's something we will be covering again too. In those cases,
when you're finding bones in the wilderness while you're searching
(23:57):
for a man wanted for killing his three dogs, I
would think that you would find enough evidence around the
bone that you would know immediately it's human. I know
that's not the case, but that's what I would That's
what I thought before. And I thought, you got bones,
don't you have clothes nearby or on the bones? I
mean they don't that. Those are some things that I
(24:20):
don't quite understand. How long it takes for a body
to totally become bones and only bones and what happens.
Speaker 1 (24:28):
It takes a lot longer than than two months. Okay,
you're still going to have some You're still going to
have some soft tissue. Now it might it really desicated. Yeah,
it might be desicated. Which if you know what a
desicant is, desication, it's it's literally kind of a drying out.
Speaker 2 (24:49):
I only know because I've had to look that word
up when we've done this show, and I've said it before.
Speaker 3 (24:54):
Well, I'm looking it up, going, what does that mean?
Speaker 1 (24:57):
Well, listen, let me tell you something of Americans. When
they would they would skin, you know, skin animals. They
would use a uh and I'm talking years and years ago,
you know, when they're kind of still living tribally. You know,
you can there's great documentation of how they would create
(25:21):
their own leather and it's it's kind of a natural
natural vent andy. You can collect salt and put on
it and that sort of thing. And of course they
would scrape hides, they would hang them out and most
of the time when this is going on, this is
they try, you try to get things into direct sunlight,
you know, in order to facilitate that. Uh. That's kind
of natural tanning that goes on. So uh as we know,
(25:46):
if you've ever been to you know, if anybody's ever
been to the Pacific Northwest, you can get in a
lot of sunshine homes. So you're not going to have
the same level of desiccation. It's this very moist environment
as well. Now there will be rotting flesh, a rotting tissue.
(26:08):
You can two months, Yeah, you'd still be able to
smell something. Another thing that we look for as well,
and this is rather disgusting, but it's really a big
tell for us, is that you look for a big
surrounding greasy area in the ground. And what that is
is all the bodily fluids and particularly the fat that
(26:32):
is kind of naturally rendering down. It gets into the
soil and even after you know, eight weeks or whatever
it is, you're still going to have that odor. You
still might have insect insect activity around because you know,
with flies in particular, it's like ringing the dinner bell.
They're going to keep coming back and coming back and
(26:52):
coming back, and that you know, and that's only one
species of insect, you know that we're talking about with flies.
You know, you have things that are out there. You've
got things like refer to as dung beetles. There's there's
a whole progression of these things, you know that kind
of show up at the scene. We use that as
an indication many times, try to come up with a
post more and amnerable for the dead. And then you
(27:16):
have animals that kind of come in and out and
off of you know, they enter, you know from stage
left or whatever, eggsit sage right, make an appearance, and
then they leave. But most of the time when they
make an appearance, if there is if there are remains
(27:36):
there that still have tissues tissue attached to them, They're
not always going to just sit there and feast. Okay,
what do animals want to do? Well, they want to eat.
They need that source of protein. They will take an
element from the body and go back to a burrow.
And even you know, if you've got a fox or something,
(27:59):
fox are kind of solitary. Foxes are kind of solitary animals.
Raccoons or solitary animals or possums. They grab, they grab
an element, then they go back to the burrow, so
you can, you know, if you're really good at this.
There are people that are out there that look for
animal sign that you can bring onto the scene and
(28:21):
they'll say, yeah, this is this is a burrow where
you know, some type of animal lives. And there are
documented cases of investigators going into animal burrows and finding
human bones in there. If you think that's wild birds,
birds will actually take human hair off the dead and
(28:44):
literally pad their nest with human hair. Wow, that has happened, yeah, wow,
and it's been documented. You know, it's kind of mind blowing.
You don't think that all of this this that this
kind of environment is this dynamic, but it is. And
the problem is is that for every skeletal element that
you take away, you're taking away a biological indicator of
(29:07):
what may have happened. So if there's some kind of trauma,
all right, let's just say, let's just say you've got
a long bone. The longest bone in your body is
are femur, which is the upper bone in your leg. Well,
if somebody's shot in the leg, okay, and they're left
out there to bleed, or they've been beaten up, and
(29:28):
you had a compound fracture, and their body has, you know,
begun to decompose, and some fox or something like this
walks up takes that long bone away. Well, all of
a sudden, you've got evidence of injury that just walked away.
This can even happen with bits of the skull. If
(29:48):
you have somebody that has self inflicted a gunshot wound
into their skull, it'll blow apart the skull. Now many
times when I say blow apart, let me refrain, is
that wrong phrasing? Okay, you will fracture the skull, and
the only thing that's still kind of holding the skull
together are those bits of soft tissue from the scalp.
(30:13):
But as the soft tissue degrades, you've got fractured bits
of bone from the skull they're lying about. Well, if
a raccoon takes it upon themselves to say, you know,
this looks like a tasting morsel, they'll take that bit
of bone that the external table of skull. You know,
they're examining it, thinking about they can eat it. They
(30:36):
walk off with it. Well, that piece of bone that
they're walking off with might hold evidence of a gunshot wound.
All right, And not only that it might be evidence
of not just a gunshot wound, but an entrance wound,
and you're suddenly losing that big piece of information. But
(30:57):
for these bones, in particular, Dave, that they're talking about,
there were found in proximity to where these precious little
babies were, you would have a forensic anthropologist out there
now off the record, an anthropologist might look at you
(31:20):
and say, if I'm hedging my bets here, I'm saying
this is not human, but I want to verify. Okay,
And you hear that that conversation happens a lot, so
they're not going to put that necessarily in an official report.
So the forensic anthropologist has to be at the scene.
Speaker 4 (31:38):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
Now you'll call on FBI agents and people that are
medical legal death investigators to help you recover the remains,
but we are not the people that are actually doing
the anthropological exam. That exam is literally going to take
place back at their laboratory where if you get all
this like this goal for instance, that's why you have
(32:02):
to be very thorough. You're going to grab every little
bit of that skull and you're going to put it
in a paper bag. Okay, And they will take it
back to the lab and they will actually begin to
reconstruct the skull from that. If you and you can
see these skulls have been reconstructed and huge. Many times
you've got big missing gaps out of right, you know,
(32:24):
they're all all of the elements won't be there necessarily.
Speaker 2 (32:27):
Let me ask you this show because you know you
mentioned that if a bone is found in the woods
and you've got somebody there that won't stay well it's human.
They won't come out and just boom it is this
or that. Based on their knowledge and experience, They're going
to take it back, going to examine it in the
lab to make sure what they're saying is anchored. I
(32:49):
get that, but it just seems to me that at
a certain level of experience expertise would lead you to say,
well this is probably you know, but it seems like
that to me. But do they all look the same
when you see pieces of bones out in the woods?
(33:10):
I mean, does my foot bone different? I mean, I
was there one hundred and fifty seven bones in your
foot or however many. But if you see a bone
from a human foot, does it resemble bones from a
pig or from a wild animal a bore.
Speaker 1 (33:21):
No, the Yeah. When you're talking about the structure of
the human footeah, and you happen to land on an
element of the human human anatomy that's probably skelt From
a skeletal standpoint, it's one of the most complex structures
your ankle, feet, and your wrist hand are probably if
(33:45):
you're looking at it from an engineering perspective. There are
so many elements that are attached to this, and it's
very specific to humans. I would imagine that some and
I've never spent time examining this at all, but I
would imagine and maybe the closest you're going to come
it's probably you know, maybe the ape family, where you've
(34:06):
got opposable thumbs and that sort of thing, and the
feet might kind of resemble. But with the trained eye
they can spot it like that and say no. So
one of the big things that you find that you
recover a lot, particularly in cities, not there's kind of
it's kind of it's not really complex. But let me
just kind of break it down to you this way.
(34:28):
If you're in a city, most of the time, bone
elements that you find, they're going to come up one
or two ways. Either somebody's digging in their backyard or
their dog walks up with the bone. Most of time
in cities and my experience at least in the South,
they're hogbones and hogbones themselves. When you look at say,
(34:50):
the long bone features like you know, just like you
know animals like you know, like dogs and pigs and cattle,
they have fore legs and hind legs. So the structure
of those bones, they're long bones in particular, are not
(35:11):
going to appear the same as ours as humans. They
many times, particularly with hogs and bovine or cow bones,
they are going to be more robust. They'll be shorter, perhaps,
but they're going to be more robust. They're gonna be
have their circumference will be larger. They're having to bear
(35:34):
a lot of weight and in kind of a low
posture as opposed to us that you know, we stand upright, well,
most of us stand upright, you know, dependent upon how
many you know chevies as somebody has had. But all
jokes aside, you're you know, you're we're are structurally we're
just different. And so when you're at a scene, when
(35:56):
you're at a scene, you begin to think about, well,
is there any other evidence of human activity out here?
Is this so isolated? You want a factor in that circumstance.
And then you have to have as a forensic anthropologist,
you have to have an understanding of all the local
flora and fauna, particularly the fauna. You want to know
(36:18):
what animals might kind of migrate through this area, or
it's a hunting area for them, or maybe they have burrows.
When you understand the very species, it's not simply understanding
as an anthropologist understanding humans. You have to understand you
(36:39):
have to understand the animal activities too. I'll give you
a great story real quick up at ut it has
at the University of Tennessee where the body Farm is
one of the kind of gates you have to pass
through in your training, all right, and is doctor bass
allegedly used to have a doctor Bill Bassett that founded
(37:01):
the body farm used to have a box that he
would place skeletal remains in. And one graduate graduate student
would sit on one end of the box and there be
hole in a box and doctor bass would sit on
the other end of it with a whole on his side.
And you're doing this blindly. You have to shake hands
with him in the box and there's little skelter remains
(37:24):
all in there, and doctor Bass would grab that skeletal
element and hold it in just by feel alone, you
had to identify the species. That's how intense that training
is up there.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
People.
Speaker 1 (37:37):
You know they hear about the body farm and all this.
This is not for the faint of heart. You really
have to engage all of your senses when you're trying
to assess skelter remains. But Dave, I got to tell you,
I know people are going to be disappointed in what
I'm about to say. Whoever the anthropologist was that got
their hands on this collection, you know, this collection of
(38:01):
skalf remains. Do they they determined that not only were
they not Travis Decker, but they're not even human. We
(38:25):
know that they had access to DNA out there because
of the what they have discovered. You know, I think
that they released information that and just so that folks
understand and remember, these precious little babies. They were essentially suffocated.
They were suffocated with plastic bags, and these.
Speaker 3 (38:47):
They actually find in those bags and on those ways.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Yeah, that's that's the key thing here. It's not just
an external finding. And this this really chilled me. Dave,
I got to tell you we did. We done a
previous episode, right, and we had the stata then, but
I think that we need to revisit this. They found
allegedly found deckers DNA not just on the outside of
(39:14):
the bag, but from within the back. So these bags,
and there were multiple acts. One child had two children
had two bags over their head. It's almost like a
redundancy thing. Another child had three over their head. And
this kind of redundancy or backup plan relative to these murders,
(39:38):
that's evidence of somebody wanting to, you know, have fail
safes with this to guarantee that no oxygen was going
to get in there, you know. And I guess you
could say that if you had taken a single bag
and put off a child's head and kind of squeeze
around the neck and deprived them of oxygen. But it
goes to another level here when you've got this layering
of bags that goes in because we all, I know
(40:00):
the grocery plastic grocery bags are fragile, so and they tear.
I mean, how many times, Dave have you had a
bag tear when you're walking in the house. These things
they give you a check out and whatnot. It's happened
to me on countless occasions. I mean, they're crappy and
so they're not meant for long term use. So the
(40:24):
idea that if he is in fact guilty of killing
his children, he had an abundance of these bags. He
said that he had been living out there in the wilderness. Well,
he's probably living out of grocery bags. Because they talked
and that really stood out. I've never heard anybody mention
this before in a case where they talked about the
(40:45):
abundance of these bags that are out there. There's a
lot of them. And you know, it's not like he's
got garbage pickup that could come by and pick up
your garbage, like you can push it to the street,
waste pick up, you know, all that stuff. So if
you have a collection these bags, every time you go
into town or where it is you go to go
get more supplies, you bring these bags back with you
(41:07):
and you retain them because they have other utility. And unfortunately,
it would seem that they were literally weaponized. People use
that term a lot, but weaponized to facilitate a triple homicide.
Speaker 2 (41:19):
Dave, Now, Joe, when when we went over this and
we talked about his DNA being found on the inside
of those bags. And you know, you and I both
have have a tough time dealing with children that are murdered,
especially by a parent by And I think of what
happened out in Colorado, you know where we actually had
(41:45):
Chris Watts talking about how he killed his children and
what he did with their bodies. And I know that
there is evil on planet Earth. With regard to Travis Decker,
we only know, oh, we we found at that site.
But at that camps he left his GMC truck. He
(42:08):
said he abandoned it. But on the tailgate there was blood.
Speaker 4 (42:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
How I know that they can figure out whose blood
it is. Yeah, but I have to wonder, since he
suffocated the girls, where did the blood come from.
Speaker 1 (42:24):
That's a good question because apparently, if memory serves me,
that was his blood that was there. I think that
they identified it genetically.
Speaker 3 (42:34):
I hope one of those girls kick the crap out
of him.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
Well, yeah, one would hope that, but he was And again,
to try to frame this thing out, we don't have
a lot of data relative to the status of the blood. Yeah,
like you know, you can have Okay, you and I
can sit here and say all day long we found blood. Okay, well,
(42:58):
how fresh was the blood was it? Because you can
have blood in a uh for folks that don't know.
As blood gets older, when you see it you come
across it, many times it'll it flakes like paint, Like
old paint, it'll kind of roll up, it'll fracture, you
know how paint will fracture if it dries out, and
(43:19):
it'll kind of curl up in these little fractured areas.
That's the way blood is. Only it happens quicker obviously
than paint does. Was it like that or was it
was it fresher where you know, maybe it had clotted up,
was it smeared? Was it a single contact you know,
had he drug his hand across an area?
Speaker 4 (43:40):
Was it.
Speaker 1 (43:42):
Dynamic deposition you know where you're talking about things like
cast off and all of that. Or was it passively dripping?
You know, So there's there's a whole lot to kind
of unpack with With a blood stain, you can say
you have a blood stain, but you don't know what
form it's taking. You don't know what status of that is.
(44:04):
And you know, going back to DNA, when they found
these bones that were out there. I'm sure that because
anthropologists look at something, it's called morphology, and so the
morphology of a bone pretty quickly you can ascertain that,
particularly once you get them cleaned up in there, back
and back in the lab, you can say, okay, these
(44:28):
are non human remains. So for people wondering if they
did DNA testing on the bone, maybe they did as
maybe a stopgap or just to because this is very
high profile cast. And but you know, an anthropologist worth
their salt could look at these bones. My suspicion is
(44:49):
in a wilderness area like this, you're going to look
at maybe mule deer out in that area. There's a
lot of mule deer. You've got, you've got elk, very
specific species of elk. I don't know if I'd be
inclined to bear necessarily, but you have to understand that this,
(45:13):
this triple homicide has taken place in the environment, in
literally the home of wild animals.
Speaker 4 (45:23):
You know, if you.
Speaker 1 (45:24):
Come to a civilized area, a developed area, you find
our remains. You know, they're in graveyards all over the place. Well, animals,
you know, don't bury their dead. They're surface depositions. Of remains,
and so it's not it's not beyond the pale that
you would walk up on, you know, a skeletonized animal
(45:46):
and find it there. It's compelling because it's so close
to the bodies. Right, we don't know anything about the
age of these remains either.
Speaker 2 (45:55):
So now I will tell you one thing I thought of,
Joe is when the bones were found, I reached out
to you and I thought of all those and met
so many of you at Crime Con. Thank you for
coming by the booth or watching Joe on stage is phenomenal,
But so many people don't have the ability to go, hey, Joe,
what is this?
Speaker 3 (46:12):
You know, what did they find?
Speaker 2 (46:13):
And you were laying you know, you pretty much told
me that you know that they already know what it is.
They have to confirm that's It's like the blood, it
looks like something that may be blood, but I'm not
saying that's blood. And same thing with these bones. It
doesn't look to be human. But we're not even going
to say that because and I'm not knocking this. I
think the reason that they let the bone, I think
(46:35):
they could have ended the bone issue early on, saying
we don't believe they're human but we're testing. But instead
of saying that, they were able to redraw attention back
into the case Travis Decker's face, because if he has
escaped and is out, you know somewhere, they got another
week of attention on his face, they still don't have him.
They still don't have his body. And all I was thinking,
(46:56):
somebody asked me if I thought he had committed suicide,
You really that when you commit suicide, unless you plan
it out when you're you know, you don't want to
be found. You're going into a cave or whatever to
hydrac Once you're dead, you don't get to move your body,
you know. So that's why we don't have too many
people that commit suicide that we don't find, because, yeah,
(47:19):
they are.
Speaker 1 (47:20):
Right, and there's all kinds of haunts and hollers he
can go into out there in that wilderness and you know,
places that would greatly you know, impede of finding someone.
First off, i'd I think that at this point, because
this is compared to other cases, this is still rather recent, right,
(47:43):
I think that you would still find some sembilance of
of him.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
You mentioned earlier, with the smell, you would smell his
decompoliity dogs.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
Cadaver dogs would too. And I understand that they've been
kind of pumping them through there, they had been. I
think they're kind of backed off. And to your point,
you know, having so much experience with media, Dave, you
understand that cycling through this thing and getting him back
out there, the fact that they found these bones and
(48:15):
they could write articles about it, it does cycle him
back into the media. Because look, I do know this.
I know that Travis Decker he's not there, He's not
in that space. He is somewhere. But the thing about
it is this, they have to continue to look. They
(48:38):
need to confirm that he's no longer with us, or
that he's present bouncing around that upper tier of the
American States Idaho, Montana one of those locations, or he
slipped across the border into Canada. In order to have
(48:58):
a resolution, they've got to get their hands on either
him or his remains. I can assure you of this, brother, Dave,
and I will keep you in the loop. Any further
information that comes out about this case, We're going to
talk about it. You know why we're going to talk
about it. It's not because of this man. It's because
(49:21):
of these three precious little saults that are no longer
with us. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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