In this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack explore the harrowing case of J.J. Vallow and Tylee Ryan. They reveal the disturbing details of J.J.'s death, the challenges faced by forensic pathologists in examining J.J.'s remains, the presence of GHB in his system, the crucial role of preserving evidence, and the potential for uncovering latent or plastic prints on surfaces involved in the case.
The look at tragic and unsettling death of 17-year-old Tylee Ryan discusses her tumultuous family life, her struggle with pancreatitis, the discovery of her remains, the challenges forensic experts faced in determining the cause of death, and they provide insight into the methods and findings of the forensic anthropologist and pathologist.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan fending for yourself. How
many kids does that apply to in this world we
live in now? I know one that it did, in fact,
applied to Tylie Ryan. Tally was a young lady. She
(00:33):
had seen the life that her mother had lived. Five husbands,
multiple moves to settlement. Tillie had essentially become the anchor
in her family, certainly as that applied to her little brother.
To ju Valo always envisioned them clinging to one another.
(00:55):
There's that image where they're hugging each other very tightly,
and I would think that in their world that's really
all they had to hold on to for stability was
one another. But just like with JJ, we found out
a lot of disturbing news about how Tyley met her
end because we've heard from the forensic pathologists that did
(01:16):
her examination. In this episode, we're going to break it down,
We're going to discuss it, the horror of Tyley's death.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. There
is no satisfaction. And my listeners know how much I
(01:40):
hate the word closure because it doesn't exist, particularly when
it comes to death. You get answers, and some answers
are just wanting their unsatisfying, I think because you haven't
quite filled in all of the blanks, and unfortunately, with
Tyler Ryan's death, that's that's kind of the situation we
(02:01):
find ourselves in right now. But what I can say
is that her death was horrific. Dave Mac, would you
agree with that assessment?
Speaker 2 (02:13):
On what we know about Tyler Ryan and her passing
is it's frustrating and sad, I say that not lightly frustrating,
because we don't still to this moment, know all the
things you would normally know about somebody who died when
you have remains to examine. I say remains, because there
(02:38):
was not a body to examine as one would expect
when you say body. What happened to Tyler Ryan? And
we don't even know exactly when. What we do know
is that Tyler Ryan was last seen September eighth in
Yellowstone Park in a picture with her mother, her little
brother JJ, and her uncle Alex Cox, who was Lori
(02:58):
Valo's brother. We have that picture and we have some
other information that we know she was alive with the
family September the eighth, and then we know she's missing
until June ninth of twenty twenty. What took place in
the infram is where people like you come in. How
did they find Tyler Ryan.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
I think that to say buried is inaccurate. I prefer
the term discarded with an attempt to cover up burial.
To me, when you say that, it goes to honoring,
you know what I'm saying, Dave. When we honor someone,
we bury them. She was not this young woman. She's
(03:41):
in that weird space in time. She's seventeen.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Actually she died too. She died two weeks before her
seventeenth birthday.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Yeah, I mean, right on the cusp, and you know,
the world's about to open up to her, and unfortunately,
I think in a very bad way, it had already
opened up to her. She had seen things that I
think that by virtue the way that her mother chose
to live her life, she had been exposed to just
the dissettlement in and of itself that she had had
(04:11):
to endure for all those years.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
It's very important to note two things really quickly. One,
when we did a program about JJ Vallo and how
his body was recovered, and his body was recovered and
if you haven't listened to it. I encourage you to
do so. But what happened with Tyler Ryan totally different.
It was like two totally separate things, not connected by anything.
(04:34):
And you mentioned that Tyler had been through a lot
with her mother, Well, her mother was married five times.
When you watch the interview of Tyler Ryan with police
after Joe, after Charles Vallo was murdered by Alex Cox,
watched that interview and in the times after, she seems unaffected.
Tyler Ryan seemed totally unaffected. She actually was emulating what
(04:55):
her mother was doing. They were joking, talking like it
was just another day. She's copying her mother and no emotion, giggling, laughing,
moving on. So, Tylie Ryan was so impacted by the
lifestyle that her mother led that her demise and the
way she was discarded shows something a total disconnect from
(05:16):
life and love.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
That's rooted I think in something else, that touch of reality,
that dose of reality in her short life. It was
read into the record and trial, by the way, Laurie
Valo's trial is actually going on right now as we're
laying this down. It came out in testimony on the
part of the forensic pathologist that he had had a
(05:38):
chance to review Tillie's medical records, and I was kind
of surprised by this. She had lived a very short life,
but in that time she had been diagnosed with anxiety,
she had gone through having OVERI insist, and get this,
(05:59):
she had actually suffered pancreatitis in that short life. Pancreatitis
is a miserable condition and over insists or certainly unpleasant
as well. And then you have this anxiety. You know what,
seventeen years old? Wash she have anxiety? I'm a firm believer.
You know that many times illnesses manifest themself as a
(06:20):
result of stressors in your life and that sort of thing.
And you take its measure by thinking that this person
that she's attached to at the hip, her mother has
literally drugged this child through a keyhole her entire life,
through all these various relationships and situations that they've been in.
You'll never convince me, you know, you're not going to
(06:41):
have things manifest manifest in your life physically.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
What is pancreatitis exactly, Joe, I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Well, it's an inflammation of the pancreas and it's deadly actually,
I mean it is it's super deadly and many times
it's associated with things like elevated cholesterol. Not the she was,
but you know, you'll have people that have problems with
chronic alcoholism develop pancreatitis. There's any number of reasons why
(07:08):
you can develop it, but it is an infection of
the pancreas, very painful. I mean, it comes along with
like horrible abnominal pain, high fever, It can give systemic as,
It impacts your the totality of your system, the way
your pancreas functions. Remember the pancreas, you know, controls insulin
in your body. Just a horrible set of circumstances. And
(07:29):
you couple that with everything that she was having to endure,
you know, right right before she was murdered. She's not
yet seventeen, and she's dealing with the homicide of her
stepfather at the hand of her uncle.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
And please add in there, Joe, that Tyler Ryan was
at home and knew the truth of what had transpired.
You mentioned stress and worry, and that can lead to
some of these things that she experiencing.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Yeah, and here's another little nugget kind of picked up
on friends of mind that are in the media. That
have been following kind of the family dynamic of this
more so than I have try to stick more with
the forensics, even though in this case is really hard,
as you can see, to kind of hide my feelings
relative to it. But in this particular case, from what
(08:21):
I'm hearing, she would not stand for some of the
stuff that her mother would engage in. She would be
combative with her, She would make comments to her. She
was not just going to go along with the mom
because mom said that this is what she could do.
You know, She's not another man coming into her mother's
life that her mother can manipulate with her beauty and
(08:43):
sex appeal and whatever else that she's you know, trying
to sell to whomever it's coming down the track. Kyleie
has seen behind the curtain, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
And you know what she showed that to people that
came into Laurie's life. For instance, that Lorie Valo's best
friend was Melanie Gibb and Melanie Gibb, it was brought
up in trial that Tyler Ryan didn't particularly care for
Melanie Gibb. So I think that while she has a
mother that is dragging her that you mentioned dragging through
a keyhole. I think that's a great that's a great
identifier there, but that maybe Tilly didn't overreact with her mother,
(09:17):
but it manifested itself in the way that Tyley looked
at Lourie's friends that were also part of this crazy
world that Titley wasn't buying into, which is why Tyler
had to go. Tilli wasn't on board.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
They had made an assessment that she's one of these
dark spirits, or however they were framing it, you know,
as a justification for these things. But what we do
know this new space that her mother had chosen to
occupy or was planning on occupying, this place that's out
in this beautiful area of the country out there in
(09:51):
the Eastern I hope it ended in sheer horror and
it actually wound up being Tyler's resting place after she
apparently murdered. If you're spending time out in rural America,
(10:24):
if you're out on a farm, I don't know of
any farm that doesn't have a place where you burn
brush down. Here in South they called a burn pile
where you can take limbs and things that break off
of trees and whatnot, and you can you save it
up and kind of gather it and maybe you'll have
a pondfire, and maybe you'll just stand out there and
burn it and make sure it doesn't spread, and then
(10:46):
you walk away and everything is said and done. They
had a place like this. There was this location that
Chad Dave Bell had, you know, on the backside of
his property, adjacent to this big building which I've always
suspected had something to do with the deaths of these children.
That was just out back of it where it looked
(11:08):
more like a fir ring actually, but it was also
known as a location where Chad da Bell and his
wife Tammy would bear pets. And as it turned out,
this is where Tyler Ryan's body was found.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Duar, and you mentioned that it was a burn pile,
you know, a burn pile you burned trash and rubbish.
But also in that same ring, as you mentioned, there
were benches around there where that family roasted in marshmallows,
having moores, and they chose that location, the pet cemetery location,
to actually dispose discard the body of Tiller Ryan. I
(11:46):
don't know how that impacted the investigation, but I'm really curious, Joe,
when you start digging around something like this, and you
have what you know is the pet cemetery area, and
you have obviously fire. What are you finding as an
investigator as you start looking for remains.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Throw a word out to you, stratification. I don't mean
that in a sociological standpoint. I'm talking about from a
geological standpoint. We have STRATAI relative to the ground where
you have various layers of earth, and this would have
been stratification in the sense of recent. When I say recent,
I'm not talking at one hundreds and thousands of years.
(12:27):
I'm talking about in the recent history where you do
this layering, if you will, of things. So for every
bit of wood that you burned, are other items that
you're trying to dispose of by fire. It burns down,
it settles, right, and then just imagine that progressively becomes
more compressed over period times. You burn more items, you
(12:49):
throw more stuff in. You're getting this strata of all
of these elements that have been burned down and rendered
down over the years, and where they found highly these remains.
This earth would have been probably a bit more loose,
if you will, you know it had been. The earth
(13:10):
was probably turned more regularly with JJ's remains. When they
went out to that retention pond or dried up pond
or whatever that area is, whatever they're calling it where
his remains were found, that earth had not been turned
beautiful green grass all around except for that one area.
But when you get to an area where you've got
(13:31):
a lot of debris that's just been settling there for
a while, and you might add to it, the soil
is going to look disrupted as well. So when you
show up as an investigator, you're going to have to
take a long, hard look. And it might not just
be your sight that you're relying on when you're looking around.
It might be smell. It very well might be smell
(13:53):
because you're sitting there and you're thinking, I'm smelling something
that is obviously organic, it is decomposed, and you catch
wind of it. And the reason that you might catch
wind of it, and this is absolutely horrible. But the
forensic anthropologist in this case, her assessment of Tiley's remains,
(14:16):
she said that there had been animal activity in her remains,
So she's referring to a small mammal. She doesn't know
what type of small mammal, but you know, you've got possums. Famously,
Chad Dave Bell had mentioned a large raccoon part of
this alibi he had put forward when he was socking
to his wife Tammy. Raccoons will feast as well. You
(14:37):
have any number of rodents that will do this. If
in fact, rodents or some small mammal hadn't made their
way to all the remain of tiling, that means that
they would have disrupted the soil. And when they disrupt
the soil, they open it up. They're not going to
go back and recover it, okay. So if you get
close enough, you begin to detect an odor, okay, and
(15:01):
if you look very carefully. That's why it's always very
important with the case like this to not just simply
have a forensic anthropologist consult on a case where they're
back at a laboratory. You physically need them out there.
They're amazing people. I've got a couple of friends that
are forensic anthropologists, and they are I'm not going to
(15:22):
say they're ocd by nature. They're the type of people
that can look at ground and they see things that
I might just regard as a rock and an't rock.
They have the ability to read ground the way that
nobody else can. And so if you physically have the
forensic anthropologist out there, which they actually did, they actually
(15:45):
at the scene, they can take a look at a
space of ground, even in a burn area, and they
can see lines of demarcation that might indicate where a
burial has taken place, kind of the margins or the borders,
if you will, of where the soil has been disrupted,
where they actually detect a pattern. And I've had this
happen a couple of times over my career where I
(16:07):
would be staring at something and I was staring at
what I should stare at, but I don't recognize it.
And then it takes the forensic anthropologists to say, okay,
do you see this deviation right here? This delineates the
borders and you start to stare at it, and it's
like you remember those old three D paintings that you
would look at, and they say you got to stare
at it long enough, and that it's kind of like that.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
All of a sudden, you see the old woman.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Yeah, the image just kind of pops for you all
of a sudden, and it's revelatory at that moment. And
once you identify it. The tough part really begins in
because you have to begin to lay your grid out.
And of course with Tyly, our body's not intact, So
you've got deposition of human remains that are spread out
over an area. I can't give you the exact dimensions,
(16:53):
but I know that they're spread out. They were not
recovered in one piece. And if this helps it all, Warring,
the forensic pathologist, actually made a statement. I'm kind of
paraphrasing right now, but you know he did make this
kind of offhanded remark in his testimony under direct when
he was being asked about the receipt of Tyler's remains
(17:15):
at the Ada County Corner's office. How do you receive remains?
He said, Well, normally I receive remains in a body bag,
So how did you receive these in multiple backs? Tyler
arrived at the Corner's office in Ada County, Idaho in pieces,
(17:36):
not one intact body. It's a partner when you work
(18:02):
together in forensics. There's multiple practices that forensic pathologists can
align themselves with in their forensic practice. First thing I
think that probably comes to mind is traditionally, like forensic
pathologist and forensic odentologists, a forensic dentist. Toxicology. Certainly, you're
always trying to decide what was going on with the
(18:24):
chemistry of the body, you know, what was going on inside.
There's some peripheral people sometimes will consult to radiologists, a
certainly neurologists that will examine brains. But I don't know
if any other marriage that exists in forensic practice that
is so kind of conjoined as that between the forensic
(18:47):
pathologist and the forensic anthropologist. They're kind of doing the
same thing, only the forensic anthropologist is really focused on
human skeletal remains and what they can learn from the bone.
Icians can point you in the right direction with it,
but these people, they spend years and years going through
their doctoral programs out there to learn how to read
(19:10):
bones and tell the story that's left behind, because sometimes
that's all that remains.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
The autopsy for JJ took about four hours. The autopsy
for Tylee Ryan took him about a week. The body
was burned. Was there an odor that would be recognizable
as that of a decomposed individual even after being in
the elements buried in the dirt burned? What kind of
(19:39):
condition are we expecting out of this. Are you going
to smell it when you start digging? Are you going
to smell it when you're standing on top of the ground.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
In the state in which they have mentioned that Tyley's
remains were in. Probably once you start, once you break
the earth, I mean really substantially break the earth. You know,
a cadaver dog would hit immediately, But for kind of
our spectrum our all factory spectrum as humans, it would
take turning the earth to really smell it. The decomposition
that you smell relative to a decaying or remain has
(20:08):
to do with soft tissue. Bones will have an odor
to them, but it's not as profound as is associated
with with soft tissue. And Tyley she still had and
this is horrible to say, but it's body bags. We're
going to talk about this. But she still had her
bowel was still present. Her heart, though compromise and kind
(20:30):
of shrunken I think probably as related to heat, was
still there. Her lungs were still there, so not everything
had been eradicated. In total. The forensic anthropologists doctor Christensen,
had stated that she had one hundred bones that were found,
and of course human bodies got over two hundred, so
(20:53):
some had been rendered down or just impossible to have recovered.
She had also mentioned that there was some type of
animal is out there, and animals will take away bones
as well. You begin to think about the bones of
the fingers and toes and the feet and all those
sorts of things. But they found a goodly portion of
the remains that were left behind, but they had been burned.
(21:14):
That makes this kind of a daunting challenge. The forensic
anthropologists will do their assessment on the body, but it's
at the end of the day that the forensic pathologist
is the one that actually signs a death certificate. In
the list what the cause and manner of death is,
they classified Tiley's manner of death. Remember we have five.
(21:37):
We've talked about this before, but we have five and
they classified her manner of death as homicide. But the
cause is very interesting. Her cause of death is non
specific homicidal trauma. And you hear that many times when
you have these kind of fragmented bodies like this, you
know the cause of death was something that was at
the hand of another, and that's what defines a homicide
(21:59):
death at the hand of another, that's what you're saying,
when you actually use that term, it's going to be
violent traumatic. But beyond that, they can't say. It's like
saying gunshot wound, or strangulation or bludgeoning or stabbing or
some kind of blunt force trauma. The forensic pathologist said
he couldn't go any further than that. So this becomes
(22:22):
at that point in time in our world, in the
medical leal world, that this becomes a kind of a
circumstantial event, right, and you're assessing what you have remaining
from the physical remains, and then you're coupling that with
the circumstance in which the body is found. You've got
a body that there has been great effort that has
been put forth to render the body down by fire
(22:45):
and then cover it to obscure it from view. So
that in and of itself gives us an indication that
you've got something very very nefarious at work here, and
that's what the forensic pathologists had to work with and
that was their ruling.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
But there was one part of this that kind of
stood out to me, and that is the identified heart,
both lungs, one kidney. You mentioned portions of bowel and liver,
but they found small fragments of brain matter. I know
obviously that they've got multiple bags. Her body didn't come
(23:22):
in intact, But are we talking about the total destruction
of a human being beyond It's enough that she's dead,
but now we're smashing her head. Is that what had
to happen for there to be brain matter?
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Hard to say, And let me tell you why you've
got a real feel for this, Dave. When you have
thermal injuries, okay, and thermal injuries can it's not just
an anti mortem event. You can have thermal injuries to
a body post mortem. Many things happen dynamically. You can
get heat related fractures of the body, okay, of the
(23:57):
bone itself, so the bone will actually crack as a
result of exposure to heat as it's beginning to break down.
If you have the skull and they don't, they didn't
have the intact skull they talked about, Like the area
around the superorbal ridges, there's a few focal areas that remain.
You have to wonder did Tiley's skull fracture as a
(24:23):
result of a heat fracture being exposed to intense flame?
And then you've got brain matter that's leaching out, or
is this something that was maybe part of the causation
of her death and you had brain matter that was
extruding in some way at the time of death and
then they find it there. So that again is one
(24:44):
of these things that's very difficult to assess. And heat fractures,
anything that occurs in death, those fractures are going to
appear differently, particularly to the trained eye of a forensic anthropologist.
You know, where you have some kind of anti mortal
event where you'll have associated hemorrhage surrounding the points of
fracture and all that stuff. You don't have a lot
to go on here because a lot of the soft
(25:05):
tissue has been rendered down. And that's one of the
big things that we look to in forensic pathology is
if we have soft tissue that's going to give us
an indication of things like bruises or contusions and scratches, marks,
literature marks, you know, even gunshot ones. We've talked about
a range of fire on the show before. You know,
deposition of sood. Somebody's been cracked in the head with
(25:27):
a hammer, Perhaps you'll have markings on the outer soft
tissue to give me an indication of laceration and you
don't have that to deal with. And that's very non specific.
But my eye in this case is drawn to something
that the forensic anthropologists mentioned on the stand, and that
(25:50):
is that she, given her extensive training and background, she
saw striking evidence found on the pelvis. She opined from
the stand that what she saw was an attempt at dismemberment.
And we had heard this, we had heard this before,
(26:10):
but they were very non specific about this dismemberment. This
whole issue with dismemberment. My thought was, where are they
getting it from? Did you see saw marks on the bone.
That's not what she see, you know, according to doctor Christiansen,
she had seen great external force that was exerted to
(26:31):
the bones of the pelvis. It's very non specific, but
it's I hesitate to say crushing, but there's kind of
these like linear marks that gives you an idea of
a downward strike of something. So I mean, are we
talking about an axe? Are we talking about a pick axe?
Which I think has been mentioned before. In order to
break the body apart to try to render it down,
(26:54):
because you have to make a body manageable if you're
going to try to render it down and sometimes just
as it happened, she did the forends against pologist did
mention that this is not typical of a traditional quote
unquote dismemberment, where you would go to a joint perhaps
and saw through a joint break down the elements of
(27:14):
the body. That's not what was happening. That's not what
they were seeing. This is an odd place day. It's
very odd that you would have fractures in the pelvic
region of Tilly's body that are associated with some kind
of strike downward force that's occurring. It sounds almost half hearted,
just like the burning, because her body was not totally
(27:35):
rendered down. You know, it takes eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit
in a crematory well of like constant fire. They're not
doing that here. They're using wood apparently in order to
fuel this. They did a very shoddy job because they
left behind all of these remnants of bone and organs
as well. They did not finish the job. It seems
(27:56):
like it was something that was done quite hastily.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
In reality. I mean, could they determine that the markings
that showed they were trying to dismember occurred before or
after fire?
Speaker 1 (28:06):
These are going to be post mortem injuries. And the
direct quote from doctor Christians is that there were five
areas of sharp force trauma to the left hip bone
and they were not the result of a disease process.
You know, this is kind of speculative, but you're thinking
about someone that's going to go to the trouble of
conducting a dismemberment. You have to have the right tools
(28:28):
for the job. And if you're talking about strikes with
some kind of weapon that's being swung downward, that sounds
like bad preparation. You're not thinking this process through. It's
certainly not somebody that would have had experience with butchering, say,
for instance, an animal like a deer. You know what
(28:49):
you need. You're going to have to have a hacksaw,
you're going to have to have sharp knife, all these
things that come along with that kind of experience. You're
using some type of item that's just a weapon or
tool of convenience. I'll be very interested to see what
the trace evidence people have to say about this case.
What did they find. All signs from me point to
(29:10):
that red barn out there. I've always thought that something
had happened, because if you're going to purpose yourself to
dismember or render down human remains. You have to have
a sequestered area to do that. Do you have to
have a location where you can do this under cover,
where nobody is going to take notice of it. You
have to have a certain amount of privacy. This is
(29:32):
not something that you're just going to do out in
the open in your backyard. This is something where you're
going to need cover for it.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
Tylie was sixteen years old, two weeks away from her
seventeenth birthday. JJ just a little fella seven years old,
and they went missing. When we first started covering this case,
it was a missing child case. There are two children
missing and we don't know where they are. But her mom,
(30:00):
Tilly's mom, JJ's is in Hawaii and has married some guy.
So we were backpedaling trying to put these pieces together.
We already know that JJ and Tylei are both gone.
They're both passed away, which is what we're going to
actually talk about today. But the reality is it started
as a missing person's case with some very religious adults involved.
(30:24):
I've got a grandchild Jjy's age. It has been very
emotional to think of what happened to this boy. And
his older sister, and it was done at the hands
of people who were supposed to love and care for them.
I have so many questions, and I'm praying that you're
going to be able to give us the answers that
will at least help us understand the mechanics of what
(30:45):
took place.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
I've been scratching my head over David. Let me say
this going into this conversation, I've been talking with some
of my friends that are on the ground in the courtroom,
who are physically there, in the news media, and to
a person, they described the reaction of people in the
courtroom and even members of the jury. There were people
(31:11):
they were so disgusted by what they saw that they
turned away. There were people wiping tears away. They couldn't
bear to look at it. As a matter of fact,
the judge at one point in time had to step
in and say, Okay, that's going to be the limit
of what we're going to be showing here, because it
was so so horrible what they were bearing witness to.
(31:34):
And I always have to go back to what is
expected of a jury member, maybe one of the most
honorable things you can do in this country. I know
people group about it and complain that they got called
away from work. But when you think about the privilege
that it is to sit on a jury and you're
common everyday folk, people like me, Dave. I haven't seen everything,
(31:55):
but I've seen a lot of stuff. It's tough, and
a case like this is even tougher, but just all
the more so for these jury members that are having
to take all of this in and view it in
balance and try to understand and try to take the
measure of it. I mean, really try to take the
measure of it. You mentioned your grand baby. I got
grand babies too. You sit there and you think about it,
(32:18):
and you think, oh my god. We can try to
understand precisely what happened. In leading us along this journey.
We had the benefit of having a man named doctor
Garth Warren who is actually with the Ada County Corner's
office in over in Boise. And just so folks know,
(32:40):
JJ and Tyley's remains were not examined in that location,
that remote location over in eastern Idaho. They were transported
to Aida County to that Corner's facility there. Folks might
not understand, but if you don't have a facility particularly
that is manned by a forensic pathologist. You most of
(33:03):
these little counties will contract with a bigger county that does.
That's what happened here, So their remains had to be
transported literally all the way across the state. It's a
painstaking process.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
To back up a minute, I mentioned early on, this
was at first a missing childcase. Two children were missing.
Their mom was not sharing information about their whereabouts. She
was telling all kinds of different stories to people who
knew her that they were with a friend, they were
with a relative, I'm keeping them safe. And what ended
up happening through the investigation of law enforcement and the FBI,
(33:36):
everybody being involved. That's how they were led to on
June ninth, twenty twenty finding two separate burial sites at
Chad day Bell's house. So we actually started the looking
for JJ and Tyley in November of twenty nineteen, when
their grandmother asked for a welfare check on JJ. Hadn't
(33:57):
talked to him in a couple of months, very concerned,
and that's where this story began for many of us.
So I said, we were backing up right at the beginning.
The bodies are recovered on June ninth of twenty twenty.
For you, Joseph Scott Morgan, what are some things you're
thinking about? What do you need to find as a
(34:17):
forensic person to determine how these people were killed and
why are they where they are.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
It's not just what's beneath the surface day, it's what
the ground is going to tell you in that area,
particularly when you have a clandestine grave, and that's what
both of these cases would be considered. That's the way
we termine a clandestine grave. That means a location where
remains have been purposely buried in order to hide them.
(34:45):
There are certain changes that you look for externally on
the surface, for turned soil, all those sorts of things
that don't quite match up. And these are two distinct
locations where these children were found. You know, when we
think about highly, you know, a lot has been made
of the fact that her remains were found immediately adjacent
to what they referred to as a pet cemetery. Animals
(35:07):
were buried there that were associated with this familial group,
which we could go down that rabbit hole all day long.
When you begin to assess how the remains of your
precious daughter are treated and that you discard them amongst
the carcasses of dead animals, and of course there's a
burn pit there too. And what was really striking to
(35:28):
me when I first initially saw the aerial photography in
this case is I could see, before the ert the
evidence responsing from the FBI showed up, there was like
a ring around this area where they had. You know,
you could tell that the family had at one point
time pulled up large wooden benches. They were like fell
(35:50):
trees that were kind of sliced down. You could sit
on them, and they'd created a ring. Eventually all those
are moved, but you can see the initial image of
this and it conjured up, you know, sitting around a
bonfire with your family playing the guitar, singing, making schmores
and all of these sorts of things. You know, that
kind of joyous environment, and then you marry that up
(36:12):
with this horrific finding when they began to try to
discern where she was, and her grave was not that
deep below the initial surface. As a matter of fact,
we find out that there's spent some animal activity around there.
But just to kind of frame this, when you see
(36:32):
her location, you know that it's adjacent to where things
were burned, all right, maybe bonfires, maybe just trash off
of this farming area. You walk a distance over, there's
what appears to be a dried pond. It's like a
big defect in the ground. It almost looks like a crater,
but it's real green. It was real green in lush.
(36:54):
But there was one area where soil had been turned
and it's right on the edge, and that's where JJ's
remains were found. So he's in a completely different area.
It looks kind of very peaceful compared to where Tiley was,
where there was a lot of traffic. There was no
traffic in that area where JJ was found. Soil had
(37:15):
not been turned around the surrounding area. You could tell
there was not a lot of foot traffic excepting that
one location where he was deposited. And these two children
were treated completely different day, completely different, And you're really
learning a lot about how their bodies were handled, and
I think going along with that, you begin to learn
(37:37):
a lot about the people. And when it comes down
to JJ Valo, his body was I don't know, there's
really no other term to use other than cocooned. He
was cocooned. He was protected to a certain degree. He
certainly protected from the elements. You know, when you compare
(38:01):
how his mortal remains were treated compared to his sister,
you've got a big difference here, huge difference for him.
His body, his little body, his little broken body was able,
I think, in this particular case to begin to tell
a tale because it was so very intactive.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
When you get to the scene and police have done
their investigation, they have gotten the search warrants, and they've
laid out how they came about to search this property.
The police don't know the exact place. I mean, they
have a really good idea. In this particular case, police
were watching Chad day Bell. He was on the property.
It was his property, and they were watching Chad as
(38:45):
they began working in that backyard. And the detective noticed
that Chad day Bell kept watching where they were looking
and kept following with his eyes looking at the same
spot like they haven't found him yet. They haven't found
him yet. They noticed where he was looking, and that
sent the detectives on where we need to dig right
(39:06):
here for JJ. They didn't know JJ versus highly at
that point, but that's how they actually figured out where
to start. What is the process that they go into.
I can't imagine them pulling out big shovels and just
digging in deep.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
No. No, First off, you have to document everything you
can with photography and videography before you ever put what
we call spade to dirt and turn any bit of
soil whatsoever. And even before the tools come out, you're
going to do what's referred to as gridding off an area.
And if you just imagine a grid coordinates only on
(39:40):
a smaller scale, and you make each one of the
little squares maybe a foot by a foot, and you
have several of these along the way, and you label these,
you're going into a specific grid, and that way you
can document everything that's contained within that grid, because you
don't know what you're going to find. So as you
take the soil out and place it into a bucket,
(40:02):
which is where it would have gone, and those buckets
are labeled, they sift through everything until you get down
to the body as it is. And in JJ's case,
I had mentioned the word cocooning, and he is wrapped.
He's wrapped in plastic bags. He certainly got a white
(40:23):
bag over his head. I can specifically imagine because I've
been in circumstances like this, you look down and you
begin to take the measure of what you have before you,
and you have a body what appears to be a
body that is covered in plastic. I've had them in
shower curtains, tarps, this queen those sorts of things where
(40:44):
bodies are wrapped up like that and you don't know
what is inside. And so it was at that moment
when they got down to that point where they had
recovered all of the surrounding dirt. Because you don't know
what you're going to find in there, you have to
save all this stuff and sift through it. The investigator
then opened up the plastic bag, the outer black plastic
(41:04):
bag that JJ was wrapped in total, and determined that
he did, in fact have remains here.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
When they made that slit in the bag. In the testimony,
they described brown hair and a crowning. I can't imagine
the feeling that comes over you when you see hair.
You know this is who you've been looking for. What
is that like? Does that not really impact these individuals
(41:32):
for the rest of their life with that trauma?
Speaker 1 (41:34):
That doesn't right at the moment, because you're if you've
got your clinical hat on which you should to protect
you while you're there. There's certain things you just can't escape.
But there's a bit of relief too in a case
like this, because you know that you've been looking for
him and all those those sweet pictures that we see
of JJ all over the place. You know his hair
is like swept to one side, I mean, and it's
(41:55):
like parted on one side and kind of swept. He's
got long bangs, and you can get an ideas to
the color of his hair. And they knew that this
is they're getting into. You know, they're getting into the
arena where they're going to begin to narrow down at
least visual identification at this point in time. It's one
of the boxes that'll be ticked at that moment time.
(42:16):
But you listen, there's a real temptation that comes upon you.
You have to restrain yourself at a scene like this
day because you want to just go in and just
rip the bag open, right and just dig in and
see what. That's the worst thing you can do. That
is the absolutely worst thing that you can do, because
you're not in a controlled environment. First off, you've got
(42:36):
a dozen hands around you, You've got everybody peeking over
and wanting to see, and at just the baseline, you're
going to destroy it. For every cut that you make
in that bag, every compromise of a structural integrity of
that bag, you begin to potentially ruin any evidence that's
there because all this stuff is very fragile. Oh my god,
it's so fragile. So when you remove this body, you
(42:59):
have to live lifted up. And then what we generally
do is take a clean white sheet and that clean
white sheet is placed into an open body back. The
sheet is then folded around the body, which in Jaja's
case is contained is cocoon like we mentioned, and then
you zip the bag up and then you seal it
(43:21):
with a lock. That's where your chain of custody actually begins. Remember,
the body is the biggest piece of evidence you have.
So there are these little red locks and they actually
talked about them in court, little red locks that you
use that have numbers on them. And that thing is
not broken until it gets to the morgue and the forendsic.
Pathologists will look at it and they'll annotate it in
(43:42):
their notes. They say, I observed a red body bag
lock with a number. And then they take a pair
of scissors, and they say, and they'll including their report.
I cut this away myself, so they confirm this chain
of custody all along the way. You have to because
you know you've got a body, Dave, that's traveling over
one hundred miles, it's going to be in a vehicle
(44:03):
traveling down and people don't think about the logistics of this.
Does the driver stop along the way? Is the driver
with the body the entire time? Did they stop off
and get something to eat? Did they stop off at
a gas station? People think, oh, my god, they wouldn't
do that. Yes they do. I've actually known people that
have gone through drive through restaurants with bodies and cars.
And because of that, we've taken steps to document the
(44:26):
time that they leave, the mileage that's on the odometer,
What time did you arrive at the final destination? What
was your mileage there? Because everything has to be accounted
for and you want that, and it's a daunting task
just to remove the body from the scene and get
it downrange to where it has to be depositive, which
is going to be ad to County, Idaho.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
We all have heard the stories of the odor these
bodies have been in the ground for a considerable amount
of time. Is there still after all these months? Is
there still an odor? Is it something that you can
smell once you start uncovering.
Speaker 1 (45:03):
Yes, and yes. The deeper you dig down, the more
profound the odor is. So in JJ's case, what I
am understanding from testimony and from my colleagues that have
seen the images, he was actually appreciable. His face was appreciable.
You could look at that image that they showed on
(45:23):
the screen and you could say that's JJ. He was intact. Now,
the color changes that come along with decomposition had been
occurring in death. Our bodies go from kind of a
modeled color to kind of a red, then kind of
a greenish color than to black, and you could still
appreciate his features. His body was intact to the point
(45:46):
where you could look at his body and at least
visually get a general confirmation of identification. That's not valid
in my world. I like to have scientific confirmation, and
I just like to eyeball the body and say that is,
in fact this person. I don't even like families to
do that, because you never know what's going to happen.
There's always something along the way. So I like to
get scientific confirmation with this fingerprints or dental or certainly DNA.
(46:10):
The process is just beginning. Now. What happened, you know
when you got the remains soon more? Well, one of
the things that was so glaring, you know, those pajamas
that JJ was last seen in as he's being born
by Alex Cox on his shoulder, he's wearing those pajamas day,
he's wearing those pajamas.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
That was part of the testimony that came up with
David Worwick, the boyfriend at the time of Lorie VALA's
best friend Melanie Gibb. He was there that weekend of
September twenty second, twenty third, and he's gave a description
of Alex Cox carrying JJ into the Valo apartment and
it was a very beautiful thing that he described JJ
(46:50):
with his head resting on Alex's shoulder and Alex taking
his nephew upstairs to the bedroom. He described the clothes,
even though he said I don't know exactly, I can't
remember one hundred percent, but I think he actually by
saying I think he was wearing, you know, And he
described the clothing that JJ was found in and that
if you were watching the trial, you're going or listening
(47:11):
to it, You're wondering, why is he saying this, Well,
that's why they knew the answer.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
Yeah, they knew the answer. And I think that many
people had and there have been people that have suspected
that JJ may have been deceased when Alex was carrying
along that night. I don't believe that was the case.
I'll go ahead and reveal this right now because one
of the things that came up in testimony was that
when they were able to do toxicology, and remember they
(47:37):
didn't really have blood or urine to do talks with JJ.
So that means that you at autopsy, what you have
to do is you have to take organ samples. These
are going to be prefixed orgon samples, so you can't
like expose them to formulae, which is a type of formaldehyde.
You have to get them in the current state in
(47:58):
which you find them. And we've talked about this before,
but they're spun down at that moment in time to
liquefy them. Liver in particular, because liver is it's like
a gigantic filter in our body and it holds onto
a lot of the toxins and whatnot. But what they
did find in JJ's system was actually gama hydroxy butyrate
which GHB, which is a rape drug. Now people will say, ah,
(48:21):
that's like an aha moment, you know, light bulb goes off,
and people have thought that maybe he had been poisoned.
That's probably not the case because let me kind of
throw this out to you, Dave. In decomposition, GHB is
actually produced and it's very in the process of decomposition,
just like people don't realize, like chloroform is actually produced
(48:42):
in the decomposition process. The problem that doctor Warren had
in a case, and any physician has when you begin
to talk about talks and trying to understand what's on board,
is that when you're out down your timeline like this
from the sense of decomposition, you can't get a quantified
(49:07):
amount of something. You can qualify it. The machinery will
tell you that yet this is present, but to what
degree is at present? It's not really measurable. Because one
of the things any drug you can think of, cocaine,
for instance, cocaine actually if you look at it for
folks that are not familiar with lab results, is you know,
that cocaine actually has a therapeutic level because cocaine has
(49:30):
been used for medical purposes, so it has a therapeutic range.
So everything, all these numbers are variable. You can't put
that kind of fine point on a body that's decomposing.
So I think that it's significant that GHB was in
his system to a certain degree, but based on the
fact that there was so much decomposition, or that he
(49:53):
was downranged that far, you just can't quantify it, and
so I think some folks are probably they were hoping
that you would have that definitively there as a cause
of death for him. There have been many times in
(50:26):
my career where I was assisting with an autopsy and
I would look down at the remains that we were examining,
and you have kind of this moment where you begin
to understand what you're in the middle of. You have
this appreciation for how fragile this person's remains are that
(50:49):
are before you, and all of the evidence contained within
and without. I've hesitated before. I actually had my FORENDSIP
mythologist look at me. One time. We were doing it
autopsy on a lady that had been bound and gagged,
and I kind of froze for a moment, and he
looked at him and said, were you waiting for it?
Let's get on with this. I was trying to understand
(51:11):
or process in my mind what I needed to do
to remove these bindings from this lady's hands. She had
been tied with the rope because I didn't want to
screw anything up. I can imagine there's a hesitancy on
the part of the pro sector. The pathologist that's there
and his assistants, his team. They want to make sure
that they have everything done and documented, X rays, photography, measurements,
(51:34):
all of that stuff has to be done before they
go in and begin to remove all these layers that
JJ's packaged in.
Speaker 2 (51:43):
When it comes right down to it, you have taken
care of all of the business necessary to get JJ's
remains up out of the ground. He has been transported,
it's been documented, and now he's on the table and
so far they cut a small slit and that's it
right then put in the body bag with the white sheet.
He's now on the table in a clinical setting. And
(52:07):
what happens now and what can you expect to find?
Speaker 1 (52:11):
I can tell you what they've done. They've done full
body X rays on them because they don't know what
they're going to find when they open that bag. You
don't know what a cause of death is at this point.
Remember you you know I was talking about toxicology and whatnot.
That's weeks away. At this point, you have no idea
what you're looking at here, and so they'll do head
to two X rays. Before they do that, they'll turn
that around really quickly. They'll develop them and throw them
(52:32):
up on the lightboard, and they'll look for any kind
of what we refer to as radio opaque items that
are in there, like broken knife blades are certainly projectiles
from a firearm. You want to avoid as you're removing
this tape. You don't want to go ripping and roaring.
Here's a couple of reasons why. First off, with the tape,
(52:53):
if you begin to kind of cut it, then you're
compromising the integrity of that tape to dislodge it, okay,
just to facilitate opening the bag. So you don't know
what's going to be contained on either aspect of that tape,
like on the smooth surface that's on the backside, the
non tacky surface, and then on the underside which I
(53:16):
can get into that certainly, but then you think about
the bag itself. Well, these bags are non to a
certain degree. They're a non poorous surface. They're not exactly
like glass, but it's you're not dealing with wood like
rough wood either. There are any number of times when
you can actually get fingerprints off of bags. Certainly the
(53:37):
interior heat and humidity play a role in this, but
you have to work from the perspective that anything that
is on the surface of that bag has the potential
of leaving something behind. And that could be a latent
print that's left behind, an oil or here's something, Dave
that not many people have heard of before. We have
(53:58):
something to refer to as plastic prints, and a plastic
print is all of our listeners just imagine. And this
is something I do with my granddaughter. She loves Plato.
She loves Plato in hadn't got the silly putty yet,
but she loves Plato. Harper and I will be playing
with Plato. You know, if you press your finger into
(54:19):
the Plato and remove it, you can actually appreciate your fingerprint.
It's the same principle with duct tape, with that tacky
the glue the adhesive that's on there. Did you know
that you can actually press your finger and I urge anybody. Look,
if you've ever wrapped Christmas presents and you're in a
frenzy on Christmas Eve, you know how kind of wadded
(54:41):
that the tape gets and it'll get stuck to your
hand you're trying to get it off. Well, you're leaving
a plastic print. It's not oil dependent, okay, because that's
on smooth surfaces. You leave a print behind because and
it transfers from these fatty lipids that are on the
surface of your fingers. Okay, it's easily compromised. But when
(55:01):
you talk about leaving it behind in this adhesive that's resilient, dude,
it really is. And so you can actually image that.
There's any number of sprays that you can apply to
this that'll kind of capture it, and you can get
beautiful photographs of this stuff and they can be matched
up with people. So it's akin to almost like walking
(55:24):
through a minefield because you don't because you can't see
anything when you're doing it. So you have to assume
that every place you put your hand in order to
remove tape or whatever the case might be that could
lead to a compromise.
Speaker 2 (55:40):
Joe, let me ask you. You're observing the body or
you're observed you know the bag, okay, And you see tape,
you see bags, you see all of this overall, and
you're making not just mental notes but physical notes as
you begin to unravel this, whether it's duct tape or bags.
What is that process for doc documenting and how do
(56:01):
you get to because your goal here is to find
out how this person died.
Speaker 1 (56:05):
Correct in the case of JJ Valow, if they've already
done X rays and they don't see any obvious signs
of bullets or knife blades that are broken off, or
fractures that might result from blunt force trauma like he
had his skull crushed. As horrible as that is, then
you begin to think, well, is it strugg related or
(56:27):
is it something else? And you begin to exclude things,
and you know, doctor Warren's conclusion relative to JJ was
that his remains demonstrated to them based upon how that
white bag, remember I mentioned a white bag earlier in
this episode was wrapped around his head with multiple links
(56:51):
of this tape, that his death resulted from suffocation. That's
a diagnosis of exclusion is What that means is that
you have gotten to this point you don't have any
other answers to what may have brought about his death.
Speaker 2 (57:08):
Are you suggesting that he was alive when they put
the bag on his head?
Speaker 1 (57:12):
Yes, yeah, I am. And you know how I know
that day I tell you I know it. He actually
had marks on his little fingers that would be consistent
with a struggle. These are anti mortem, which means, of course,
all my listeners you know, know this prior to death.
That's where these insults came from. He's got these marks
(57:34):
that are on his wrist. His hands were actually bound
with duct tape. They were overlapped on top of one another,
and multiple twists of this tape were facilitated like that.
So imagine, if you want to get a sense of
how horrific this is, if you have ever been in
a position where you've had to struggle to breathe, that's
(57:56):
what this child's face with his brain is screaming, I
need oxygen, and it's at that point in time. Let
me paint this picture for you a little bit more
in depth. This is a child that had to wear
a diaper at his age. This child was totally dependent
upon the adults in his life to take care of it.
(58:18):
He had physical issues, he had developmental issues, and whoever
did this put a plastic bag over this baby's head
and turned that tape over and over and over again
and blocked his airway. He could not uptake oxygen at all,
and he's struggling. That primal brain is kicking in and
(58:41):
he's fighting. He's fighting. However, he could in order to
try to break the surface of the proverbial water just
to get a breath, and he couldn't. It wasn't there
any longer.
Speaker 2 (58:51):
The one thing that a lot of us can hold
on to when we cover these stories is that the
victim didn't suffer. But now you're telling me the exact opposite.
And you were able to determine this by the way
his body was found in the ground, that not only
was he murdered by probably a loved one, but that
(59:11):
he suffered and knew who did it and what they
were doing when it was happening.
Speaker 1 (59:16):
I'm saying that plainly. Yeah, he had an awareness, and
yes he did suffer. That conclusion is being drawn by
what doctor Warren had stated. There was evidence there that
he had struggled. He had fought for his life. People
use that term, they throw it around, to what degree
do you have the ability to fight for your life
if you're a small child and you've got the hands
(59:41):
of an adult or adults on you facilitating your death.
In order to honor both Tyler and JJ, we're going
to have two separate episodes detailing the information that we
(01:00:01):
have surrounding their deaths and the findings of the forensic
pathologists and the forensic anthropologists. Tune in Thursday for our
follow up episode where we will be discussing the death
of Tyler Ryan. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags.
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan fending for yourself. How
many kids does that apply to in this world we
live in now? I know one that it did, in fact,
applied to Tylie Ryan. Tally was a young lady. She
(00:33):
had seen the life that her mother had lived. Five husbands,
multiple moves to settlement. Tillie had essentially become the anchor
in her family, certainly as that applied to her little brother.
To ju Valo always envisioned them clinging to one another.
(00:55):
There's that image where they're hugging each other very tightly,
and I would think that in their world that's really
all they had to hold on to for stability was
one another. But just like with JJ, we found out
a lot of disturbing news about how Tyley met her
end because we've heard from the forensic pathologists that did
(01:16):
her examination. In this episode, we're going to break it down,
We're going to discuss it, the horror of Tyley's death.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bags. There
is no satisfaction. And my listeners know how much I
(01:40):
hate the word closure because it doesn't exist, particularly when
it comes to death. You get answers, and some answers
are just wanting their unsatisfying, I think because you haven't
quite filled in all of the blanks, and unfortunately, with
Tyler Ryan's death, that's that's kind of the situation we
(02:01):
find ourselves in right now. But what I can say
is that her death was horrific. Dave Mac, would you
agree with that assessment?
Speaker 2 (02:13):
On what we know about Tyler Ryan and her passing
is it's frustrating and sad, I say that not lightly frustrating,
because we don't still to this moment, know all the
things you would normally know about somebody who died when
you have remains to examine. I say remains, because there
(02:38):
was not a body to examine as one would expect
when you say body. What happened to Tyler Ryan? And
we don't even know exactly when. What we do know
is that Tyler Ryan was last seen September eighth in
Yellowstone Park in a picture with her mother, her little
brother JJ, and her uncle Alex Cox, who was Lori
(02:58):
Valo's brother. We have that picture and we have some
other information that we know she was alive with the
family September the eighth, and then we know she's missing
until June ninth of twenty twenty. What took place in
the infram is where people like you come in. How
did they find Tyler Ryan.
Speaker 1 (03:19):
I think that to say buried is inaccurate. I prefer
the term discarded with an attempt to cover up burial.
To me, when you say that, it goes to honoring,
you know what I'm saying, Dave. When we honor someone,
we bury them. She was not this young woman. She's
(03:41):
in that weird space in time. She's seventeen.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Actually she died too. She died two weeks before her
seventeenth birthday.
Speaker 1 (03:48):
Yeah, I mean, right on the cusp, and you know,
the world's about to open up to her, and unfortunately,
I think in a very bad way, it had already
opened up to her. She had seen things that I
think that by virtue the way that her mother chose
to live her life, she had been exposed to just
the dissettlement in and of itself that she had had
(04:11):
to endure for all those years.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
It's very important to note two things really quickly. One,
when we did a program about JJ Vallo and how
his body was recovered, and his body was recovered and
if you haven't listened to it. I encourage you to
do so. But what happened with Tyler Ryan totally different.
It was like two totally separate things, not connected by anything.
(04:34):
And you mentioned that Tyler had been through a lot
with her mother, Well, her mother was married five times.
When you watch the interview of Tyler Ryan with police
after Joe, after Charles Vallo was murdered by Alex Cox,
watched that interview and in the times after, she seems unaffected.
Tyler Ryan seemed totally unaffected. She actually was emulating what
(04:55):
her mother was doing. They were joking, talking like it
was just another day. She's copying her mother and no emotion, giggling, laughing,
moving on. So, Tylie Ryan was so impacted by the
lifestyle that her mother led that her demise and the
way she was discarded shows something a total disconnect from
(05:16):
life and love.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
That's rooted I think in something else, that touch of reality,
that dose of reality in her short life. It was
read into the record and trial, by the way, Laurie
Valo's trial is actually going on right now as we're
laying this down. It came out in testimony on the
part of the forensic pathologist that he had had a
(05:38):
chance to review Tillie's medical records, and I was kind
of surprised by this. She had lived a very short life,
but in that time she had been diagnosed with anxiety,
she had gone through having OVERI insist, and get this,
(05:59):
she had actually suffered pancreatitis in that short life. Pancreatitis
is a miserable condition and over insists or certainly unpleasant
as well. And then you have this anxiety. You know what,
seventeen years old? Wash she have anxiety? I'm a firm believer.
You know that many times illnesses manifest themself as a
(06:20):
result of stressors in your life and that sort of thing.
And you take its measure by thinking that this person
that she's attached to at the hip, her mother has
literally drugged this child through a keyhole her entire life,
through all these various relationships and situations that they've been in.
You'll never convince me, you know, you're not going to
(06:41):
have things manifest manifest in your life physically.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
What is pancreatitis exactly, Joe, I have no idea.
Speaker 1 (06:48):
Well, it's an inflammation of the pancreas and it's deadly actually,
I mean it is it's super deadly and many times
it's associated with things like elevated cholesterol. Not the she was,
but you know, you'll have people that have problems with
chronic alcoholism develop pancreatitis. There's any number of reasons why
(07:08):
you can develop it, but it is an infection of
the pancreas, very painful. I mean, it comes along with
like horrible abnominal pain, high fever, It can give systemic as,
It impacts your the totality of your system, the way
your pancreas functions. Remember the pancreas, you know, controls insulin
in your body. Just a horrible set of circumstances. And
(07:29):
you couple that with everything that she was having to endure,
you know, right right before she was murdered. She's not
yet seventeen, and she's dealing with the homicide of her
stepfather at the hand of her uncle.
Speaker 2 (07:46):
And please add in there, Joe, that Tyler Ryan was
at home and knew the truth of what had transpired.
You mentioned stress and worry, and that can lead to
some of these things that she experiencing.
Speaker 1 (08:00):
Yeah, and here's another little nugget kind of picked up
on friends of mind that are in the media. That
have been following kind of the family dynamic of this
more so than I have try to stick more with
the forensics, even though in this case is really hard,
as you can see, to kind of hide my feelings
relative to it. But in this particular case, from what
(08:21):
I'm hearing, she would not stand for some of the
stuff that her mother would engage in. She would be
combative with her, She would make comments to her. She
was not just going to go along with the mom
because mom said that this is what she could do.
You know, She's not another man coming into her mother's
life that her mother can manipulate with her beauty and
(08:43):
sex appeal and whatever else that she's you know, trying
to sell to whomever it's coming down the track. Kyleie
has seen behind the curtain, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
And you know what she showed that to people that
came into Laurie's life. For instance, that Lorie Valo's best
friend was Melanie Gibb and Melanie Gibb, it was brought
up in trial that Tyler Ryan didn't particularly care for
Melanie Gibb. So I think that while she has a
mother that is dragging her that you mentioned dragging through
a keyhole. I think that's a great that's a great
identifier there, but that maybe Tilly didn't overreact with her mother,
(09:17):
but it manifested itself in the way that Tyley looked
at Lourie's friends that were also part of this crazy
world that Titley wasn't buying into, which is why Tyler
had to go. Tilli wasn't on board.
Speaker 1 (09:29):
They had made an assessment that she's one of these
dark spirits, or however they were framing it, you know,
as a justification for these things. But what we do
know this new space that her mother had chosen to
occupy or was planning on occupying, this place that's out
in this beautiful area of the country out there in
(09:51):
the Eastern I hope it ended in sheer horror and
it actually wound up being Tyler's resting place after she
apparently murdered. If you're spending time out in rural America,
(10:24):
if you're out on a farm, I don't know of
any farm that doesn't have a place where you burn
brush down. Here in South they called a burn pile
where you can take limbs and things that break off
of trees and whatnot, and you can you save it
up and kind of gather it and maybe you'll have
a pondfire, and maybe you'll just stand out there and
burn it and make sure it doesn't spread, and then
(10:46):
you walk away and everything is said and done. They
had a place like this. There was this location that
Chad Dave Bell had, you know, on the backside of
his property, adjacent to this big building which I've always
suspected had something to do with the deaths of these children.
That was just out back of it where it looked
(11:08):
more like a fir ring actually, but it was also
known as a location where Chad da Bell and his
wife Tammy would bear pets. And as it turned out,
this is where Tyler Ryan's body was found.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
Duar, and you mentioned that it was a burn pile,
you know, a burn pile you burned trash and rubbish.
But also in that same ring, as you mentioned, there
were benches around there where that family roasted in marshmallows,
having moores, and they chose that location, the pet cemetery location,
to actually dispose discard the body of Tiller Ryan. I
(11:46):
don't know how that impacted the investigation, but I'm really curious, Joe,
when you start digging around something like this, and you
have what you know is the pet cemetery area, and
you have obviously fire. What are you finding as an
investigator as you start looking for remains.
Speaker 1 (12:05):
Throw a word out to you, stratification. I don't mean
that in a sociological standpoint. I'm talking about from a
geological standpoint. We have STRATAI relative to the ground where
you have various layers of earth, and this would have
been stratification in the sense of recent. When I say recent,
I'm not talking at one hundreds and thousands of years.
(12:27):
I'm talking about in the recent history where you do
this layering, if you will, of things. So for every
bit of wood that you burned, are other items that
you're trying to dispose of by fire. It burns down,
it settles, right, and then just imagine that progressively becomes
more compressed over period times. You burn more items, you
(12:49):
throw more stuff in. You're getting this strata of all
of these elements that have been burned down and rendered
down over the years, and where they found highly these remains.
This earth would have been probably a bit more loose,
if you will, you know it had been. The earth
(13:10):
was probably turned more regularly with JJ's remains. When they
went out to that retention pond or dried up pond
or whatever that area is, whatever they're calling it where
his remains were found, that earth had not been turned
beautiful green grass all around except for that one area.
But when you get to an area where you've got
(13:31):
a lot of debris that's just been settling there for
a while, and you might add to it, the soil
is going to look disrupted as well. So when you
show up as an investigator, you're going to have to
take a long, hard look. And it might not just
be your sight that you're relying on when you're looking around.
It might be smell. It very well might be smell
(13:53):
because you're sitting there and you're thinking, I'm smelling something
that is obviously organic, it is decomposed, and you catch
wind of it. And the reason that you might catch
wind of it, and this is absolutely horrible. But the
forensic anthropologist in this case, her assessment of Tiley's remains,
(14:16):
she said that there had been animal activity in her remains,
So she's referring to a small mammal. She doesn't know
what type of small mammal, but you know, you've got possums. Famously,
Chad Dave Bell had mentioned a large raccoon part of
this alibi he had put forward when he was socking
to his wife Tammy. Raccoons will feast as well. You
(14:37):
have any number of rodents that will do this. If
in fact, rodents or some small mammal hadn't made their
way to all the remain of tiling, that means that
they would have disrupted the soil. And when they disrupt
the soil, they open it up. They're not going to
go back and recover it, okay. So if you get
close enough, you begin to detect an odor, okay, and
(15:01):
if you look very carefully. That's why it's always very
important with the case like this to not just simply
have a forensic anthropologist consult on a case where they're
back at a laboratory. You physically need them out there.
They're amazing people. I've got a couple of friends that
are forensic anthropologists, and they are I'm not going to
(15:22):
say they're ocd by nature. They're the type of people
that can look at ground and they see things that
I might just regard as a rock and an't rock.
They have the ability to read ground the way that
nobody else can. And so if you physically have the
forensic anthropologist out there, which they actually did, they actually
(15:45):
at the scene, they can take a look at a
space of ground, even in a burn area, and they
can see lines of demarcation that might indicate where a
burial has taken place, kind of the margins or the borders,
if you will, of where the soil has been disrupted,
where they actually detect a pattern. And I've had this
happen a couple of times over my career where I
(16:07):
would be staring at something and I was staring at
what I should stare at, but I don't recognize it.
And then it takes the forensic anthropologists to say, okay,
do you see this deviation right here? This delineates the
borders and you start to stare at it, and it's
like you remember those old three D paintings that you
would look at, and they say you got to stare
at it long enough, and that it's kind of like that.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
All of a sudden, you see the old woman.
Speaker 1 (16:29):
Yeah, the image just kind of pops for you all
of a sudden, and it's revelatory at that moment. And
once you identify it. The tough part really begins in
because you have to begin to lay your grid out.
And of course with Tyly, our body's not intact, So
you've got deposition of human remains that are spread out
over an area. I can't give you the exact dimensions,
(16:53):
but I know that they're spread out. They were not
recovered in one piece. And if this helps it all, Warring,
the forensic pathologist, actually made a statement. I'm kind of
paraphrasing right now, but you know he did make this
kind of offhanded remark in his testimony under direct when
he was being asked about the receipt of Tyler's remains
(17:15):
at the Ada County Corner's office. How do you receive remains?
He said, Well, normally I receive remains in a body bag,
So how did you receive these in multiple backs? Tyler
arrived at the Corner's office in Ada County, Idaho in pieces,
(17:36):
not one intact body. It's a partner when you work
(18:02):
together in forensics. There's multiple practices that forensic pathologists can
align themselves with in their forensic practice. First thing I
think that probably comes to mind is traditionally, like forensic
pathologist and forensic odentologists, a forensic dentist. Toxicology. Certainly, you're
always trying to decide what was going on with the
(18:24):
chemistry of the body, you know, what was going on inside.
There's some peripheral people sometimes will consult to radiologists, a
certainly neurologists that will examine brains. But I don't know
if any other marriage that exists in forensic practice that
is so kind of conjoined as that between the forensic
(18:47):
pathologist and the forensic anthropologist. They're kind of doing the
same thing, only the forensic anthropologist is really focused on
human skeletal remains and what they can learn from the bone.
Icians can point you in the right direction with it,
but these people, they spend years and years going through
their doctoral programs out there to learn how to read
(19:10):
bones and tell the story that's left behind, because sometimes
that's all that remains.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
The autopsy for JJ took about four hours. The autopsy
for Tylee Ryan took him about a week. The body
was burned. Was there an odor that would be recognizable
as that of a decomposed individual even after being in
the elements buried in the dirt burned? What kind of
(19:39):
condition are we expecting out of this. Are you going
to smell it when you start digging? Are you going
to smell it when you're standing on top of the ground.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
In the state in which they have mentioned that Tyley's
remains were in. Probably once you start, once you break
the earth, I mean really substantially break the earth. You know,
a cadaver dog would hit immediately, But for kind of
our spectrum our all factory spectrum as humans, it would
take turning the earth to really smell it. The decomposition
that you smell relative to a decaying or remain has
(20:08):
to do with soft tissue. Bones will have an odor
to them, but it's not as profound as is associated
with with soft tissue. And Tyley she still had and
this is horrible to say, but it's body bags. We're
going to talk about this. But she still had her
bowel was still present. Her heart, though compromise and kind
(20:30):
of shrunken I think probably as related to heat, was
still there. Her lungs were still there, so not everything
had been eradicated. In total. The forensic anthropologists doctor Christensen,
had stated that she had one hundred bones that were found,
and of course human bodies got over two hundred, so
(20:53):
some had been rendered down or just impossible to have recovered.
She had also mentioned that there was some type of
animal is out there, and animals will take away bones
as well. You begin to think about the bones of
the fingers and toes and the feet and all those
sorts of things. But they found a goodly portion of
the remains that were left behind, but they had been burned.
(21:14):
That makes this kind of a daunting challenge. The forensic
anthropologists will do their assessment on the body, but it's
at the end of the day that the forensic pathologist
is the one that actually signs a death certificate. In
the list what the cause and manner of death is,
they classified Tiley's manner of death. Remember we have five.
(21:37):
We've talked about this before, but we have five and
they classified her manner of death as homicide. But the
cause is very interesting. Her cause of death is non
specific homicidal trauma. And you hear that many times when
you have these kind of fragmented bodies like this, you
know the cause of death was something that was at
the hand of another, and that's what defines a homicide
(21:59):
death at the hand of another, that's what you're saying,
when you actually use that term, it's going to be
violent traumatic. But beyond that, they can't say. It's like
saying gunshot wound, or strangulation or bludgeoning or stabbing or
some kind of blunt force trauma. The forensic pathologist said
he couldn't go any further than that. So this becomes
(22:22):
at that point in time in our world, in the
medical leal world, that this becomes a kind of a
circumstantial event, right, and you're assessing what you have remaining
from the physical remains, and then you're coupling that with
the circumstance in which the body is found. You've got
a body that there has been great effort that has
been put forth to render the body down by fire
(22:45):
and then cover it to obscure it from view. So
that in and of itself gives us an indication that
you've got something very very nefarious at work here, and
that's what the forensic pathologists had to work with and
that was their ruling.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
But there was one part of this that kind of
stood out to me, and that is the identified heart,
both lungs, one kidney. You mentioned portions of bowel and liver,
but they found small fragments of brain matter. I know
obviously that they've got multiple bags. Her body didn't come
(23:22):
in intact, But are we talking about the total destruction
of a human being beyond It's enough that she's dead,
but now we're smashing her head. Is that what had
to happen for there to be brain matter?
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Hard to say, And let me tell you why you've
got a real feel for this, Dave. When you have
thermal injuries, okay, and thermal injuries can it's not just
an anti mortem event. You can have thermal injuries to
a body post mortem. Many things happen dynamically. You can
get heat related fractures of the body, okay, of the
(23:57):
bone itself, so the bone will actually crack as a
result of exposure to heat as it's beginning to break down.
If you have the skull and they don't, they didn't
have the intact skull they talked about, Like the area
around the superorbal ridges, there's a few focal areas that remain.
You have to wonder did Tiley's skull fracture as a
(24:23):
result of a heat fracture being exposed to intense flame?
And then you've got brain matter that's leaching out, or
is this something that was maybe part of the causation
of her death and you had brain matter that was
extruding in some way at the time of death and
then they find it there. So that again is one
(24:44):
of these things that's very difficult to assess. And heat fractures,
anything that occurs in death, those fractures are going to
appear differently, particularly to the trained eye of a forensic anthropologist.
You know, where you have some kind of anti mortal
event where you'll have associated hemorrhage surrounding the points of
fracture and all that stuff. You don't have a lot
to go on here because a lot of the soft
(25:05):
tissue has been rendered down. And that's one of the
big things that we look to in forensic pathology is
if we have soft tissue that's going to give us
an indication of things like bruises or contusions and scratches, marks,
literature marks, you know, even gunshot ones. We've talked about
a range of fire on the show before. You know,
deposition of sood. Somebody's been cracked in the head with
(25:27):
a hammer, Perhaps you'll have markings on the outer soft
tissue to give me an indication of laceration and you
don't have that to deal with. And that's very non specific.
But my eye in this case is drawn to something
that the forensic anthropologists mentioned on the stand, and that
(25:50):
is that she, given her extensive training and background, she
saw striking evidence found on the pelvis. She opined from
the stand that what she saw was an attempt at dismemberment.
And we had heard this, we had heard this before,
(26:10):
but they were very non specific about this dismemberment. This
whole issue with dismemberment. My thought was, where are they
getting it from? Did you see saw marks on the bone.
That's not what she see, you know, according to doctor Christiansen,
she had seen great external force that was exerted to
(26:31):
the bones of the pelvis. It's very non specific, but
it's I hesitate to say crushing, but there's kind of
these like linear marks that gives you an idea of
a downward strike of something. So I mean, are we
talking about an axe? Are we talking about a pick axe?
Which I think has been mentioned before. In order to
break the body apart to try to render it down,
(26:54):
because you have to make a body manageable if you're
going to try to render it down and sometimes just
as it happened, she did the forends against pologist did
mention that this is not typical of a traditional quote
unquote dismemberment, where you would go to a joint perhaps
and saw through a joint break down the elements of
(27:14):
the body. That's not what was happening. That's not what
they were seeing. This is an odd place day. It's
very odd that you would have fractures in the pelvic
region of Tilly's body that are associated with some kind
of strike downward force that's occurring. It sounds almost half hearted,
just like the burning, because her body was not totally
(27:35):
rendered down. You know, it takes eighteen hundred degrees fahrenheit
in a crematory well of like constant fire. They're not
doing that here. They're using wood apparently in order to
fuel this. They did a very shoddy job because they
left behind all of these remnants of bone and organs
as well. They did not finish the job. It seems
(27:56):
like it was something that was done quite hastily.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
In reality. I mean, could they determine that the markings
that showed they were trying to dismember occurred before or
after fire?
Speaker 1 (28:06):
These are going to be post mortem injuries. And the
direct quote from doctor Christians is that there were five
areas of sharp force trauma to the left hip bone
and they were not the result of a disease process.
You know, this is kind of speculative, but you're thinking
about someone that's going to go to the trouble of
conducting a dismemberment. You have to have the right tools
(28:28):
for the job. And if you're talking about strikes with
some kind of weapon that's being swung downward, that sounds
like bad preparation. You're not thinking this process through. It's
certainly not somebody that would have had experience with butchering, say,
for instance, an animal like a deer. You know what
(28:49):
you need. You're going to have to have a hacksaw,
you're going to have to have sharp knife, all these
things that come along with that kind of experience. You're
using some type of item that's just a weapon or
tool of convenience. I'll be very interested to see what
the trace evidence people have to say about this case.
What did they find. All signs from me point to
(29:10):
that red barn out there. I've always thought that something
had happened, because if you're going to purpose yourself to
dismember or render down human remains. You have to have
a sequestered area to do that. Do you have to
have a location where you can do this under cover,
where nobody is going to take notice of it. You
have to have a certain amount of privacy. This is
(29:32):
not something that you're just going to do out in
the open in your backyard. This is something where you're
going to need cover for it.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
Tylie was sixteen years old, two weeks away from her
seventeenth birthday. JJ just a little fella seven years old,
and they went missing. When we first started covering this case,
it was a missing child case. There are two children
missing and we don't know where they are. But her mom,
(30:00):
Tilly's mom, JJ's is in Hawaii and has married some guy.
So we were backpedaling trying to put these pieces together.
We already know that JJ and Tylei are both gone.
They're both passed away, which is what we're going to
actually talk about today. But the reality is it started
as a missing person's case with some very religious adults involved.
(30:24):
I've got a grandchild Jjy's age. It has been very
emotional to think of what happened to this boy. And
his older sister, and it was done at the hands
of people who were supposed to love and care for them.
I have so many questions, and I'm praying that you're
going to be able to give us the answers that
will at least help us understand the mechanics of what
(30:45):
took place.
Speaker 1 (30:46):
I've been scratching my head over David. Let me say
this going into this conversation, I've been talking with some
of my friends that are on the ground in the courtroom,
who are physically there, in the news media, and to
a person, they described the reaction of people in the
courtroom and even members of the jury. There were people
(31:11):
they were so disgusted by what they saw that they
turned away. There were people wiping tears away. They couldn't
bear to look at it. As a matter of fact,
the judge at one point in time had to step
in and say, Okay, that's going to be the limit
of what we're going to be showing here, because it
was so so horrible what they were bearing witness to.
(31:34):
And I always have to go back to what is
expected of a jury member, maybe one of the most
honorable things you can do in this country. I know
people group about it and complain that they got called
away from work. But when you think about the privilege
that it is to sit on a jury and you're
common everyday folk, people like me, Dave. I haven't seen everything,
(31:55):
but I've seen a lot of stuff. It's tough, and
a case like this is even tougher, but just all
the more so for these jury members that are having
to take all of this in and view it in
balance and try to understand and try to take the
measure of it. I mean, really try to take the
measure of it. You mentioned your grand baby. I got
grand babies too. You sit there and you think about it,
(32:18):
and you think, oh my god. We can try to
understand precisely what happened. In leading us along this journey.
We had the benefit of having a man named doctor
Garth Warren who is actually with the Ada County Corner's
office in over in Boise. And just so folks know,
(32:40):
JJ and Tyley's remains were not examined in that location,
that remote location over in eastern Idaho. They were transported
to Aida County to that Corner's facility there. Folks might
not understand, but if you don't have a facility particularly
that is manned by a forensic pathologist. You most of
(33:03):
these little counties will contract with a bigger county that does.
That's what happened here, So their remains had to be
transported literally all the way across the state. It's a
painstaking process.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
To back up a minute, I mentioned early on, this
was at first a missing childcase. Two children were missing.
Their mom was not sharing information about their whereabouts. She
was telling all kinds of different stories to people who
knew her that they were with a friend, they were
with a relative, I'm keeping them safe. And what ended
up happening through the investigation of law enforcement and the FBI,
(33:36):
everybody being involved. That's how they were led to on
June ninth, twenty twenty finding two separate burial sites at
Chad day Bell's house. So we actually started the looking
for JJ and Tyley in November of twenty nineteen, when
their grandmother asked for a welfare check on JJ. Hadn't
(33:57):
talked to him in a couple of months, very concerned,
and that's where this story began for many of us.
So I said, we were backing up right at the beginning.
The bodies are recovered on June ninth of twenty twenty.
For you, Joseph Scott Morgan, what are some things you're
thinking about? What do you need to find as a
(34:17):
forensic person to determine how these people were killed and
why are they where they are.
Speaker 1 (34:23):
It's not just what's beneath the surface day, it's what
the ground is going to tell you in that area,
particularly when you have a clandestine grave, and that's what
both of these cases would be considered. That's the way
we termine a clandestine grave. That means a location where
remains have been purposely buried in order to hide them.
(34:45):
There are certain changes that you look for externally on
the surface, for turned soil, all those sorts of things
that don't quite match up. And these are two distinct
locations where these children were found. You know, when we
think about highly, you know, a lot has been made
of the fact that her remains were found immediately adjacent
to what they referred to as a pet cemetery. Animals
(35:07):
were buried there that were associated with this familial group,
which we could go down that rabbit hole all day long.
When you begin to assess how the remains of your
precious daughter are treated and that you discard them amongst
the carcasses of dead animals, and of course there's a
burn pit there too. And what was really striking to
(35:28):
me when I first initially saw the aerial photography in
this case is I could see, before the ert the
evidence responsing from the FBI showed up, there was like
a ring around this area where they had. You know,
you could tell that the family had at one point
time pulled up large wooden benches. They were like fell
(35:50):
trees that were kind of sliced down. You could sit
on them, and they'd created a ring. Eventually all those
are moved, but you can see the initial image of
this and it conjured up, you know, sitting around a
bonfire with your family playing the guitar, singing, making schmores
and all of these sorts of things. You know, that
kind of joyous environment, and then you marry that up
(36:12):
with this horrific finding when they began to try to
discern where she was, and her grave was not that
deep below the initial surface. As a matter of fact,
we find out that there's spent some animal activity around there.
But just to kind of frame this, when you see
(36:32):
her location, you know that it's adjacent to where things
were burned, all right, maybe bonfires, maybe just trash off
of this farming area. You walk a distance over, there's
what appears to be a dried pond. It's like a
big defect in the ground. It almost looks like a crater,
but it's real green. It was real green in lush.
(36:54):
But there was one area where soil had been turned
and it's right on the edge, and that's where JJ's
remains were found. So he's in a completely different area.
It looks kind of very peaceful compared to where Tiley was,
where there was a lot of traffic. There was no
traffic in that area where JJ was found. Soil had
(37:15):
not been turned around the surrounding area. You could tell
there was not a lot of foot traffic excepting that
one location where he was deposited. And these two children
were treated completely different day, completely different, And you're really
learning a lot about how their bodies were handled, and
I think going along with that, you begin to learn
(37:37):
a lot about the people. And when it comes down
to JJ Valo, his body was I don't know, there's
really no other term to use other than cocooned. He
was cocooned. He was protected to a certain degree. He
certainly protected from the elements. You know, when you compare
(38:01):
how his mortal remains were treated compared to his sister,
you've got a big difference here, huge difference for him.
His body, his little body, his little broken body was able,
I think, in this particular case to begin to tell
a tale because it was so very intactive.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
When you get to the scene and police have done
their investigation, they have gotten the search warrants, and they've
laid out how they came about to search this property.
The police don't know the exact place. I mean, they
have a really good idea. In this particular case, police
were watching Chad day Bell. He was on the property.
It was his property, and they were watching Chad as
(38:45):
they began working in that backyard. And the detective noticed
that Chad day Bell kept watching where they were looking
and kept following with his eyes looking at the same
spot like they haven't found him yet. They haven't found
him yet. They noticed where he was looking, and that
sent the detectives on where we need to dig right
(39:06):
here for JJ. They didn't know JJ versus highly at
that point, but that's how they actually figured out where
to start. What is the process that they go into.
I can't imagine them pulling out big shovels and just
digging in deep.
Speaker 1 (39:20):
No. No, First off, you have to document everything you
can with photography and videography before you ever put what
we call spade to dirt and turn any bit of
soil whatsoever. And even before the tools come out, you're
going to do what's referred to as gridding off an area.
And if you just imagine a grid coordinates only on
(39:40):
a smaller scale, and you make each one of the
little squares maybe a foot by a foot, and you
have several of these along the way, and you label these,
you're going into a specific grid, and that way you
can document everything that's contained within that grid, because you
don't know what you're going to find. So as you
take the soil out and place it into a bucket,
(40:02):
which is where it would have gone, and those buckets
are labeled, they sift through everything until you get down
to the body as it is. And in JJ's case,
I had mentioned the word cocooning, and he is wrapped.
He's wrapped in plastic bags. He certainly got a white
(40:23):
bag over his head. I can specifically imagine because I've
been in circumstances like this, you look down and you
begin to take the measure of what you have before you,
and you have a body what appears to be a
body that is covered in plastic. I've had them in
shower curtains, tarps, this queen those sorts of things where
(40:44):
bodies are wrapped up like that and you don't know
what is inside. And so it was at that moment
when they got down to that point where they had
recovered all of the surrounding dirt. Because you don't know
what you're going to find in there, you have to
save all this stuff and sift through it. The investigator
then opened up the plastic bag, the outer black plastic
(41:04):
bag that JJ was wrapped in total, and determined that
he did, in fact have remains here.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
When they made that slit in the bag. In the testimony,
they described brown hair and a crowning. I can't imagine
the feeling that comes over you when you see hair.
You know this is who you've been looking for. What
is that like? Does that not really impact these individuals
(41:32):
for the rest of their life with that trauma?
Speaker 1 (41:34):
That doesn't right at the moment, because you're if you've
got your clinical hat on which you should to protect
you while you're there. There's certain things you just can't escape.
But there's a bit of relief too in a case
like this, because you know that you've been looking for
him and all those those sweet pictures that we see
of JJ all over the place. You know his hair
is like swept to one side, I mean, and it's
(41:55):
like parted on one side and kind of swept. He's
got long bangs, and you can get an ideas to
the color of his hair. And they knew that this
is they're getting into. You know, they're getting into the
arena where they're going to begin to narrow down at
least visual identification at this point in time. It's one
of the boxes that'll be ticked at that moment time.
(42:16):
But you listen, there's a real temptation that comes upon you.
You have to restrain yourself at a scene like this
day because you want to just go in and just
rip the bag open, right and just dig in and
see what. That's the worst thing you can do. That
is the absolutely worst thing that you can do, because
you're not in a controlled environment. First off, you've got
(42:36):
a dozen hands around you, You've got everybody peeking over
and wanting to see, and at just the baseline, you're
going to destroy it. For every cut that you make
in that bag, every compromise of a structural integrity of
that bag, you begin to potentially ruin any evidence that's
there because all this stuff is very fragile. Oh my god,
it's so fragile. So when you remove this body, you
(42:59):
have to live lifted up. And then what we generally
do is take a clean white sheet and that clean
white sheet is placed into an open body back. The
sheet is then folded around the body, which in Jaja's
case is contained is cocoon like we mentioned, and then
you zip the bag up and then you seal it
(43:21):
with a lock. That's where your chain of custody actually begins. Remember,
the body is the biggest piece of evidence you have.
So there are these little red locks and they actually
talked about them in court, little red locks that you
use that have numbers on them. And that thing is
not broken until it gets to the morgue and the forendsic.
Pathologists will look at it and they'll annotate it in
(43:42):
their notes. They say, I observed a red body bag
lock with a number. And then they take a pair
of scissors, and they say, and they'll including their report.
I cut this away myself, so they confirm this chain
of custody all along the way. You have to because
you know you've got a body, Dave, that's traveling over
one hundred miles, it's going to be in a vehicle
(44:03):
traveling down and people don't think about the logistics of this.
Does the driver stop along the way? Is the driver
with the body the entire time? Did they stop off
and get something to eat? Did they stop off at
a gas station? People think, oh, my god, they wouldn't
do that. Yes they do. I've actually known people that
have gone through drive through restaurants with bodies and cars.
And because of that, we've taken steps to document the
(44:26):
time that they leave, the mileage that's on the odometer,
What time did you arrive at the final destination? What
was your mileage there? Because everything has to be accounted
for and you want that, and it's a daunting task
just to remove the body from the scene and get
it downrange to where it has to be depositive, which
is going to be ad to County, Idaho.
Speaker 2 (44:46):
We all have heard the stories of the odor these
bodies have been in the ground for a considerable amount
of time. Is there still after all these months? Is
there still an odor? Is it something that you can
smell once you start uncovering.
Speaker 1 (45:03):
Yes, and yes. The deeper you dig down, the more
profound the odor is. So in JJ's case, what I
am understanding from testimony and from my colleagues that have
seen the images, he was actually appreciable. His face was appreciable.
You could look at that image that they showed on
(45:23):
the screen and you could say that's JJ. He was intact. Now,
the color changes that come along with decomposition had been
occurring in death. Our bodies go from kind of a
modeled color to kind of a red, then kind of
a greenish color than to black, and you could still
appreciate his features. His body was intact to the point
(45:46):
where you could look at his body and at least
visually get a general confirmation of identification. That's not valid
in my world. I like to have scientific confirmation, and
I just like to eyeball the body and say that is,
in fact this person. I don't even like families to
do that, because you never know what's going to happen.
There's always something along the way. So I like to
get scientific confirmation with this fingerprints or dental or certainly DNA.
(46:10):
The process is just beginning. Now. What happened, you know
when you got the remains soon more? Well, one of
the things that was so glaring, you know, those pajamas
that JJ was last seen in as he's being born
by Alex Cox on his shoulder, he's wearing those pajamas day,
he's wearing those pajamas.
Speaker 2 (46:28):
That was part of the testimony that came up with
David Worwick, the boyfriend at the time of Lorie VALA's
best friend Melanie Gibb. He was there that weekend of
September twenty second, twenty third, and he's gave a description
of Alex Cox carrying JJ into the Valo apartment and
it was a very beautiful thing that he described JJ
(46:50):
with his head resting on Alex's shoulder and Alex taking
his nephew upstairs to the bedroom. He described the clothes,
even though he said I don't know exactly, I can't
remember one hundred percent, but I think he actually by
saying I think he was wearing, you know, And he
described the clothing that JJ was found in and that
if you were watching the trial, you're going or listening
(47:11):
to it, You're wondering, why is he saying this, Well,
that's why they knew the answer.
Speaker 1 (47:16):
Yeah, they knew the answer. And I think that many
people had and there have been people that have suspected
that JJ may have been deceased when Alex was carrying
along that night. I don't believe that was the case.
I'll go ahead and reveal this right now because one
of the things that came up in testimony was that
when they were able to do toxicology, and remember they
(47:37):
didn't really have blood or urine to do talks with JJ.
So that means that you at autopsy, what you have
to do is you have to take organ samples. These
are going to be prefixed orgon samples, so you can't
like expose them to formulae, which is a type of formaldehyde.
You have to get them in the current state in
(47:58):
which you find them. And we've talked about this before,
but they're spun down at that moment in time to
liquefy them. Liver in particular, because liver is it's like
a gigantic filter in our body and it holds onto
a lot of the toxins and whatnot. But what they
did find in JJ's system was actually gama hydroxy butyrate
which GHB, which is a rape drug. Now people will say, ah,
(48:21):
that's like an aha moment, you know, light bulb goes off,
and people have thought that maybe he had been poisoned.
That's probably not the case because let me kind of
throw this out to you, Dave. In decomposition, GHB is
actually produced and it's very in the process of decomposition,
just like people don't realize, like chloroform is actually produced
(48:42):
in the decomposition process. The problem that doctor Warren had
in a case, and any physician has when you begin
to talk about talks and trying to understand what's on board,
is that when you're out down your timeline like this
from the sense of decomposition, you can't get a quantified
(49:07):
amount of something. You can qualify it. The machinery will
tell you that yet this is present, but to what
degree is at present? It's not really measurable. Because one
of the things any drug you can think of, cocaine,
for instance, cocaine actually if you look at it for
folks that are not familiar with lab results, is you know,
that cocaine actually has a therapeutic level because cocaine has
(49:30):
been used for medical purposes, so it has a therapeutic range.
So everything, all these numbers are variable. You can't put
that kind of fine point on a body that's decomposing.
So I think that it's significant that GHB was in
his system to a certain degree, but based on the
fact that there was so much decomposition, or that he
(49:53):
was downranged that far, you just can't quantify it, and
so I think some folks are probably they were hoping
that you would have that definitively there as a cause
of death for him. There have been many times in
(50:26):
my career where I was assisting with an autopsy and
I would look down at the remains that we were examining,
and you have kind of this moment where you begin
to understand what you're in the middle of. You have
this appreciation for how fragile this person's remains are that
(50:49):
are before you, and all of the evidence contained within
and without. I've hesitated before. I actually had my FORENDSIP
mythologist look at me. One time. We were doing it
autopsy on a lady that had been bound and gagged,
and I kind of froze for a moment, and he
looked at him and said, were you waiting for it?
Let's get on with this. I was trying to understand
(51:11):
or process in my mind what I needed to do
to remove these bindings from this lady's hands. She had
been tied with the rope because I didn't want to
screw anything up. I can imagine there's a hesitancy on
the part of the pro sector. The pathologist that's there
and his assistants, his team. They want to make sure
that they have everything done and documented, X rays, photography, measurements,
(51:34):
all of that stuff has to be done before they
go in and begin to remove all these layers that
JJ's packaged in.
Speaker 2 (51:43):
When it comes right down to it, you have taken
care of all of the business necessary to get JJ's
remains up out of the ground. He has been transported,
it's been documented, and now he's on the table and
so far they cut a small slit and that's it
right then put in the body bag with the white sheet.
He's now on the table in a clinical setting. And
(52:07):
what happens now and what can you expect to find?
Speaker 1 (52:11):
I can tell you what they've done. They've done full
body X rays on them because they don't know what
they're going to find when they open that bag. You
don't know what a cause of death is at this point.
Remember you you know I was talking about toxicology and whatnot.
That's weeks away. At this point, you have no idea
what you're looking at here, and so they'll do head
to two X rays. Before they do that, they'll turn
that around really quickly. They'll develop them and throw them
(52:32):
up on the lightboard, and they'll look for any kind
of what we refer to as radio opaque items that
are in there, like broken knife blades are certainly projectiles
from a firearm. You want to avoid as you're removing
this tape. You don't want to go ripping and roaring.
Here's a couple of reasons why. First off, with the tape,
(52:53):
if you begin to kind of cut it, then you're
compromising the integrity of that tape to dislodge it, okay,
just to facilitate opening the bag. So you don't know
what's going to be contained on either aspect of that tape,
like on the smooth surface that's on the backside, the
non tacky surface, and then on the underside which I
(53:16):
can get into that certainly, but then you think about
the bag itself. Well, these bags are non to a
certain degree. They're a non poorous surface. They're not exactly
like glass, but it's you're not dealing with wood like
rough wood either. There are any number of times when
you can actually get fingerprints off of bags. Certainly the
(53:37):
interior heat and humidity play a role in this, but
you have to work from the perspective that anything that
is on the surface of that bag has the potential
of leaving something behind. And that could be a latent
print that's left behind, an oil or here's something, Dave
that not many people have heard of before. We have
(53:58):
something to refer to as plastic prints, and a plastic
print is all of our listeners just imagine. And this
is something I do with my granddaughter. She loves Plato.
She loves Plato in hadn't got the silly putty yet,
but she loves Plato. Harper and I will be playing
with Plato. You know, if you press your finger into
(54:19):
the Plato and remove it, you can actually appreciate your fingerprint.
It's the same principle with duct tape, with that tacky
the glue the adhesive that's on there. Did you know
that you can actually press your finger and I urge anybody. Look,
if you've ever wrapped Christmas presents and you're in a
frenzy on Christmas Eve, you know how kind of wadded
(54:41):
that the tape gets and it'll get stuck to your
hand you're trying to get it off. Well, you're leaving
a plastic print. It's not oil dependent, okay, because that's
on smooth surfaces. You leave a print behind because and
it transfers from these fatty lipids that are on the
surface of your fingers. Okay, it's easily compromised. But when
(55:01):
you talk about leaving it behind in this adhesive that's resilient, dude,
it really is. And so you can actually image that.
There's any number of sprays that you can apply to
this that'll kind of capture it, and you can get
beautiful photographs of this stuff and they can be matched
up with people. So it's akin to almost like walking
(55:24):
through a minefield because you don't because you can't see
anything when you're doing it. So you have to assume
that every place you put your hand in order to
remove tape or whatever the case might be that could
lead to a compromise.
Speaker 2 (55:40):
Joe, let me ask you. You're observing the body or
you're observed you know the bag, okay, And you see tape,
you see bags, you see all of this overall, and
you're making not just mental notes but physical notes as
you begin to unravel this, whether it's duct tape or bags.
What is that process for doc documenting and how do
(56:01):
you get to because your goal here is to find
out how this person died.
Speaker 1 (56:05):
Correct in the case of JJ Valow, if they've already
done X rays and they don't see any obvious signs
of bullets or knife blades that are broken off, or
fractures that might result from blunt force trauma like he
had his skull crushed. As horrible as that is, then
you begin to think, well, is it strugg related or
(56:27):
is it something else? And you begin to exclude things,
and you know, doctor Warren's conclusion relative to JJ was
that his remains demonstrated to them based upon how that
white bag, remember I mentioned a white bag earlier in
this episode was wrapped around his head with multiple links
(56:51):
of this tape, that his death resulted from suffocation. That's
a diagnosis of exclusion is What that means is that
you have gotten to this point you don't have any
other answers to what may have brought about his death.
Speaker 2 (57:08):
Are you suggesting that he was alive when they put
the bag on his head?
Speaker 1 (57:12):
Yes, yeah, I am. And you know how I know
that day I tell you I know it. He actually
had marks on his little fingers that would be consistent
with a struggle. These are anti mortem, which means, of course,
all my listeners you know, know this prior to death.
That's where these insults came from. He's got these marks
(57:34):
that are on his wrist. His hands were actually bound
with duct tape. They were overlapped on top of one another,
and multiple twists of this tape were facilitated like that.
So imagine, if you want to get a sense of
how horrific this is, if you have ever been in
a position where you've had to struggle to breathe, that's
(57:56):
what this child's face with his brain is screaming, I
need oxygen, and it's at that point in time. Let
me paint this picture for you a little bit more
in depth. This is a child that had to wear
a diaper at his age. This child was totally dependent
upon the adults in his life to take care of it.
(58:18):
He had physical issues, he had developmental issues, and whoever
did this put a plastic bag over this baby's head
and turned that tape over and over and over again
and blocked his airway. He could not uptake oxygen at all,
and he's struggling. That primal brain is kicking in and
(58:41):
he's fighting. He's fighting. However, he could in order to
try to break the surface of the proverbial water just
to get a breath, and he couldn't. It wasn't there
any longer.
Speaker 2 (58:51):
The one thing that a lot of us can hold
on to when we cover these stories is that the
victim didn't suffer. But now you're telling me the exact opposite.
And you were able to determine this by the way
his body was found in the ground, that not only
was he murdered by probably a loved one, but that
(59:11):
he suffered and knew who did it and what they
were doing when it was happening.
Speaker 1 (59:16):
I'm saying that plainly. Yeah, he had an awareness, and
yes he did suffer. That conclusion is being drawn by
what doctor Warren had stated. There was evidence there that
he had struggled. He had fought for his life. People
use that term, they throw it around, to what degree
do you have the ability to fight for your life
if you're a small child and you've got the hands
(59:41):
of an adult or adults on you facilitating your death.
In order to honor both Tyler and JJ, we're going
to have two separate episodes detailing the information that we
(01:00:01):
have surrounding their deaths and the findings of the forensic
pathologists and the forensic anthropologists. Tune in Thursday for our
follow up episode where we will be discussing the death
of Tyler Ryan. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags.
Host
Nancy Grace
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