September 16, 2023 • 31 mins
The FBI's investigation into James Knott's Kentucky home reveals a shocking discovery: 40 human skulls, femurs, hip bones, and spinal cords used as decorations. In response to this disturbing find, Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack delve deep into the complex and unsettling world of how human remains are treated, examining the blurred boundaries between respect and violation. Through personal stories, including that of a mortician's questionable actions and a chilling account of James Knott's home adorned with human skulls, the duo grapples with society's morbid fascinations. Additionally, they explore historical figures like William Burke and contemporary controversies surrounding Harvard Medical School. The episode culminates in a somber reflection on the trade of human trophies in our digital age, and discussion of ethical dilemmas surrounding these issues, prompting us to question our society's values and the importance of respecting the dignity of the deceased.
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Time-codes:
[00:00:20] - Joseph Scott Morgan gives an overview of his experience as a death investigator, introducing the episode's story about a man who worked for a prestigious institution and drove a car with vanity plate hinting at death
[00:04:00] - Joe Scott narrates a shocking tale of a mortician's twisted expression of love, and argues that the dead are the most defenseless and that those in the mortuary industry should honor the dead.
[00:06:20] - Dave Mack introduces the story of James Knott, a man in Kentucky whose home was raided by the FBI, leading to the discovery of 40 human skulls and other bones used as decorations.
[00:07:44] - Insight into the intricate and complex process of dissecting human brains and spinal cords is shared.
[00:10:13] - Joe's passion for history and architecture leads to a discussion on ossuaries in Portugal and Milan, Italy.
[00:13:00] - Joe recounts the chilling response of James Knott to FBI agents during a warrant execution and raises questions about Knott's motives and activities, speculating on the possibility of him being a necrophile, grave robber, serial killer, or trafficker in human remains.
[00:15:20] - A Harvard medical school bag's discovery thickens the plot around Knott.
[00:16:37] - Dave probes the enigma of preparing human remains for display, including cleaning and sourcing the remains.
[00:19:40] - How can one acquire so many skulls? Joe presents his theories and also discusses methods of cleaning bones, including using bleach or a heating process.
[00:23:20] - Joseph Scott Morgan delves into the history of William Burke and William Hare, two serial killers known for selling bodies for medical dissections, and explains the prohibition against human dissections in medical schools during that period, leading to a market for human remains.
[00:25:37] - The debate steers towards the legality and ethics of anatomical gifts, and the trust issues surrounding anatomical donations. Harvard Medical School's involvement in this case raises questions.
00:27:12] Morgan explains how certain individuals, including Cecil Lodge, former head of the Harvard Medical School Anatomical Gift Program, allegedly brokered human remains.
[00:28:06] - A step-by-step journey through the body dissection process in medical schools.
[00:29:38] - The morbid market of body parts as "souvenirs" is put under the spotlight. Dave highlights the modern-day horror of trading human trophies on social media.
[00:32:00] - Joe Scott contemplates the future repercussions of the episode's revelations on industry regulations.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Bodybags with Joseph Scott Morgan as a former death investigator.
There's any number of names I've been called over the years.
I think that people have a real discomfort with death.
(00:30):
They have a real discomfort around things involving the dead,
and it's almost comical many times. I guess the first
one I remember is, Hey, you're just like Quincy. And
to bring it up to more modern times, probably Dexter.
People will refer to me as Dexter. Hey, you're just
like Dexter, And of course I always say no, I'm not.
(00:53):
I'm not a serial killer. But traditionally, I guess the
one thing that people have me with, because it's that
imagery that comes to mind, is the grim Reaper. That's
pretty horrible in and of itself you think about it. Today,
we're going to talk about a man that actually rode
(01:14):
around in a car and he worked for very prestigious institution.
And the car that he wrote around in it had
a vanity plate. And on that vanity plate where the
letters g R I M DASH are. Now, I don't
(01:34):
know what that means to you, but it sounds suspiciously
like the Reaper himself. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this
is Bodybacks. Dave. We were talking about names just a
while ago, and isn't it interesting when you get involved
in whatever your career track is, there are some monikers
(01:58):
I guess that are hung on you. Maybe people forget
your name. I don't know. Did people ever refer to
you as the radio guy? Oh buddy?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Still you get called all kinds of things. And I've
wondered that about you, because when I explain who you are,
most of them already know who you are because they've
seen you on TV over the last ten to fifteen years,
so they know you do something with criminal stuff. And
then when I try to explain he's a professor, try
to lay it all out there, and ultimately it comes
(02:28):
back to the dude deals with bones in DNA, and
I don't really know how to explain it. But these
people that we're going to be talking about today, and
I see people because we've got to start with one.
But boy, what is it? Scratch a liar? Find a thief?
Speaker 1 (02:42):
You know, I've never heard that before. Really, I've heard
about pulling the thread on the sweater and the whole
thing comes unraveled. But scratch, give it to him again.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Scratch a liar, Find a thief.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Scratch a liar, Find a thief. Wow, okay, I'm following
that one away. I hope you don't have that copyright.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
I got it from Ray, the movie about Ray Charles.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Oh, holy smokes. Okay, well there you go.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
But bottom lining it, this goes to the heart and
soul of human beings and how we treat people when
they're alive and when they're dead, and the efforts we
go to be respectful. What we're going to be talking
about today, if nothing else, is the most disrespectful thing
I can think of happening to somebody without their family
knowing or anybody else. It's a story I didn't think
(03:26):
I would ever see, Joe. I'm going to be honest
with you. I know, crazy stuff happens. But when you
start mentioning Harvard, I tend to on the level goes up.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
How do you measure respect for the dead? On an
interesting little side, there was a story that came out
many years ago, and if you remember, I don't know
if you remember, the old newspaper insert magazine that would
come out in the Sunday papers called Parade. When you
open the Sunday paper, the coupons fallout and parade falls out,
And there was a feature article in there about a
(03:55):
mortician that lived in miss I think it was Mississippi,
and her family had owned this mortuary for years and years.
But there was this old gentleman that she regarded in
a fatherly way, and he had no family members and
he worked around the funeral home. Her family was apparently
gone her dad and genuinely loved this man, really loved him.
(04:19):
It was really creepy because what she had done is
that when this guy died, she had him embalmed there
in the facility that she owned, and dave she took
his body and stood him up in the corner of
her home and left him there if aestuoned in his
son to go to meeting. The article talked about how
(04:41):
she would have to touch up his makeup every now
and then. But there was this image of her sitting
on you know how they take those fish eye lens
images on these magazines, and she was seated on her
sofa and over her left or right shoulder is this
guy's corpse in the background. And people had allowed this
to go go on. Now I can't say that that's
necessarily disrespectful. But certain people when you begin to think
(05:06):
about how you honor the dead, how you take care
of them, because let's face it, we can get off
into a spiritual realm here and say that the dead
are no longer people. I think their families would argue
that they still are because that body, that shell that
remains is still representative of that individual and a life
that they lived, and how you treat those remains. Arguably,
(05:30):
if you want to think about the dead or the
most defenseless, right, I mean, there's nothing they can do
if you try to violate them in any way. And
so there's this built in trust that people that work
in the mortuary industry and those that are in the
anatomical gift industry. It's kind of unspoken. You know that
(05:50):
you're supposed to honor the dead, and in this case
it would seem at least that wasn't the case.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
In this particular case. This is where the the FBI.
When the FBI does a raid, oftentimes the search warrant
is always very specific as to what they're after. In particular,
the man of James not living in Kentucky, FBI comes
to raid his place. Now he is a man who
has a little bit of a record. I don't want
(06:18):
to dismiss it, but he did have past history with
crime and he was not allowed to own a gun.
When the FBI or local authorities think you are a
convicted felon who is not allowed to have a gun
and something pops up on their radar, they're going to
go look. And so the FBI raids this home of
mister James not in Bullock County, Kentucky, and what they
(06:41):
find forty human skulls. But that's not all. They find
spinal cords that are being used as decorations. They find
femurs and hip bones. And I don't know because I've
never handled these, but Joe Scott Morgan, I'm going to
be willing to bet that femurs from a bone standpoint
(07:03):
are pretty thick and big. When it comes to human beings.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Oh boy, you've got the pelvis and the hip So
if you're thinking about those, they're very robust. They're spinal cords.
But my suspicion is here that we're talking about vertebra.
You know, they're saying this guy had spinal cords, and
I'm not saying that he couldn't. As a matter of fact,
(07:27):
I've got to say probably in the morgue when we
do detailed dissections on bodies, and it will do it
for any number of reasons, any kind of trauma that
an individual may have sustained as a result of a
motor vehicle accent, certainly with gunshot ones, certain diseases. One
of the most difficult procedures that you can do in
(07:48):
the morgue is the removal of the brain and the
spinal cord and get this leave it intact, and you
have to go in anderily. So what that means is
that once you have removed the organs out of the body,
you go down the mid line of the anterior aspect
(08:10):
or the front of the spine. Okay, so you're only
going to see the front of the spine if you're
obviously looking at the interier the of the body. And
to do that dissection with a bone saw, it's very difficult,
and so you can actually take out a spinal cord intact.
(08:31):
It's a very very tedious process in order to do this,
and they will be retained many times in a jar
for instance, and they'll be preserved and what's really kind
of creepy about it when you see it is that
with the spinal cord itself, it's attached to the brain stem.
(08:53):
And if you've ever seen a brain with a spinal
cord attached, David looks like something from outer space because
it's like the brain has this long, long tail attached
to it. And I've seen these in jars. For instance.
I've actually removed a few and put them into jars,
completely intact, and as they age and they're there in
(09:16):
that glass and kind of floating, it looks like some
type of snake, some alien type of snake, just kind
of wrapped and coiled in that environment, and it sits
there and you're waiting for it to reveal its secrets.
(09:49):
Make no mistake. I love to travel, truly do I
value it more than just about anything else. I mean,
money's great, you gotta have money in order to travel.
But if you're talking about a big, fancy house and
a big fancy car, I'm going to take travel day
in and day out because you just learned so much.
And there's a couple of places I've always want to
go and it's part of who I am, it's what
(10:09):
I do. But there's two places one is in Portugal
and the other is in Milan, Italy. And I'm not
going to Milan to see fashion. I've always wanted to
go and see what's referred to as an austuary, and
it's actually referred to as the San Berndino Asa in Milan.
(10:30):
And there is another one, this oshuary that is in
Portugal in Ivora, and it's called the Chapel of Bones.
And what has happened over the centuries is that the
monks that take care of the remains which are buried
underground that create oshuaries. And oshuaries are these little areas
(10:51):
that have nothing but stack skeletal remains. And the one
in Portugal is quite beautiful. It's actually a chapel with
an altar that has been created for worship underground, and
it's quite striking when you see it. I've always wanted
to enter this place and just see what it's like.
But here's what I can't imagine. Dave. You're a FBI
(11:14):
agent and you're sent out to execute a warrant and
the guy that comes to the door has wild hair,
wild eyes. He answers the door and you ask him, Hey,
who's here in the house with you, and his response
is only my dead friends. And that's the response that
(11:34):
the FBI agent's got from James Not.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
I'm thinking they were just glad that he didn't look
at them and say you're next. The whole thing about
the FBI doing a search warrant and being surprised. I
don't necessarily know that. I believe that. I know they
were there as part of a gun investigation, But as
we started peeling this onion, there's so much more to this,
and all I could think of he is it legal?
(12:00):
And b if it's not illegal.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Why listen? No offense to Bullock County, Kentucky. I'm sure
it's a lovely place. I would I'd go visit Bullock County, Kentucky.
But you're talking about one man in this location, this
James Knot, that has been identified by the FBI, and
he's got all of these remains that are inside of
(12:24):
his home. I mean, you've got remains that has a
scarf wrapped around the circumference of the skull. He's got
another skull that is apparently immediately adjacent either on or
in his bed dave where he slept. The question is,
is this is this guy a necro file. Does he
(12:44):
rob Graves or is it something darker than that? If
you can imagine, is he a serial killer or is
he trafficking in human remains? I don't know. It seems
like he took a lot of pride in this, but yeah,
they found a lot of weapons in there. But what's
interesting and charge him with anything related to the human remains?
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Day you mentioned one of the skulls being on or
near the bed. I actually spent some time on this
because my first thought was, if this skull is attached
to something else and is laying there on the pillow
under the covers, we might just not do this show.
I don't think I could handle it. But what they
did find, and you mentioned the decorations and things like that,
(13:25):
the reality of this is I don't think their first
thought the FBI was we've got a massive serial killer
on our hands. Who is crazy? That passed Dahmer and Bundy.
I don't think they thought that because as part of
a bigger investigation, the FBI was not just aware of
(13:45):
the trafficking in human remains or is that what you
call the bones I mean in this particular case.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, that's what they're referred to US.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
And Harvard in particular, has been in the news in
the last couple of months over some scannds. So as
we move forward here, I wanted to give you an
idea of what the FBI found. The man had AK
forty seven with loaded magazines, dummy grenades, two plates of
body armor, loaded thirty eight special revolver, black powder primers,
(14:16):
elastic blasting caps, a detonation cord, inert grenade components, and
you have to ask, well, was there anything else in
the mix of all this the bones, the skulls, the
spinal cords, and the weapons. A Harvard Medical School bag.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
You talk about putting two and two together, you begin
to think, first off, I don't know, maybe there are
Harvard trained physicians in Bullock County, Kentucky. Maybe there are,
Maybe there's former faculty members, maybe there's people that donate.
I think one of the first questions that I would
ask this fella is how did you come into possession
of this back? And why is it here? Because when
(14:57):
you start to see all of these an at comical specimens,
and that's really what they are, they are atomical specimens,
each and every single item there, whether it's one of
the skulls, the spinal column, slash chords, the femurs, the
hip bones, all of these sorts of things. You begin
(15:17):
to think, well, you've got these specimens. Here, is this
in some way affiliated with Harvard Medical School? And how
did you come into possession this? Back? I mean, the
AK forty seven's are really intriguing. Your previously convicted felon.
You're not supposed to have any of this stuff. But dude,
we've got to talk about the human remains. How did
you come into possession of them? And I think that
(15:38):
that's when this takes a turn.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Dave, and I wanted to know from you, Joe, when
one gets human remains like this where he's able to
use them as decorations. They had to have been scrubbed, cleaned.
I don't know where they came from right now, so
I'm just assuming that they've been cleaned up, because I
don't know what a non cleaned up skull would look like.
(16:00):
I'm really out of my depth here, Joe. What are
we talking about? Are we talking about bones that have
gone through somebody's dishwasher? Have they come out of a lab?
How did they use these at Harvard? What is the
purpose of having skeletal remains, where this guy could have forty.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Skulls with skulls in particular, when you're talking about a
gross anatomy lab. Previous institution was at We had a
gross anatomy lab and I spent a lot of time
in there with my students and we'd have generally I
don't know five, six, sometimes eight bodies that were in
there that the students from several different departments within the
(16:37):
university would utilize to do gross anatomy with. Trust me
when I say the dissections are extensive, and you want
them to be extensive, Dave, because these people are going
to go into the medical arts and you want them
to understand just I mean as my detail as possible,
(16:58):
every nuance of an anatomy and how everything works. It's
not just the anatomy, it's the physiology and understanding how
all of that works together in order to make us
who we are and how you're going to treat these
people in the future. So with that said, the fact
that he had in tax skulls is kind of interesting
because many times, if they were in fact intact, we
(17:19):
don't have all of those details. You will not find
a fully intact skull out of a medical school, because
what do you have to do, Well, you have to
open the head, take the brain out, and you cannot
appreciate neuro anatomy as it applies specifically to the brain
without eviscerrating the brain from the skull. So, if that's
(17:40):
the case where these skulls completely intact, did they have
a solid incision which is referred to the incision is
actually referred to as a circumferential incision, which is a
fancy way of saying the incision goes all the way
around the skull. So if he's got in tax skulls,
that's one of the ways. You know, somebody asked me
if is this a real human skull? If I see
(18:03):
the skull cap is still on there, or what's referred
to as the calvarium, it becomes the calvarium when you
pop the off of the skull. If I see something
that is intact and somebody's got it up on a
shelf or something like that, I'm going to look at
it and I'm going to say, well, if that's intact,
why would you have an intact skull? Because you know
that it probably is not part of a gross anatomy class,
(18:27):
there's a higher likelihood unless you're collecting human remains, there's
a higher likelihood that it's probably a mock up that
just looks like bone because most of the time these
students have to pop the caps, these calvariums off of
them to take the brain out in order to examine it.
There's no other way to get the brain out, Okay,
is what it comes down to. When it is said
(18:48):
by the FBI that he had forty human skulls, you
begin to think, well, my word, how did you get
these and what state were they in? It's an interesting thing.
Unless the people in Bullet County, Kentucky had went out
to the local cemetery and looked around, they had a
bunch of holes in the ground. There's got to be
some other explanation for this guy being in possession of
(19:11):
these skulls, forty of them. This guy's only thirty nine
years old. How do you collect that many skulls in
that period of time in your life? And what's the
purpose for you have in them? And back to your
point about how do you get these bones clean? There's
any number of ways that you get them clean. People
have used bleach over the years, forensic anthropologists actually use
(19:31):
a technique that is not for the squeamish. If we have, say,
for instance, bones that come to us out of the field,
and the tissue there might be some decomposing tissue that's
still on there, they will essentially slowly heat that bone
inside of a pot with water or chemical mixture inside
(19:52):
of it, and the soft tissue will fall away, and
so that what you're left with is raw bone, just
pure bone. If you've gotten medical students that are utilizing
bone as a tool for understanding anatomy, they're not very
skilled with tools at this point, and you're going to
get a lot of tool marks on these bones. You'll
(20:13):
see scalpel scraping, for instance. You'll see where they've used
scissors to cut away tendons and those sorts of things,
and if you closely examine it, you can see that
somebody has done something to these bones.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
I know that as we move forward, I don't want
to make a light of this by Joe. I don't
know any other way. When you've got a man who's
got forty skulls on his property and he's made decorations
out of them, I would think, and I mean this
if that's your thing, that you like this type of
imagery and around you, that you just by plastic that
it would hold up longer. And this seems to be
more from a shock value standpoint of And when I
(20:48):
saw the guy's mugshot, my first, second, and third thought was, hey, man,
don't rule out the possibility that he is a serial killer.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Well here's the thing, Dave, there's a certain level of
comfort than visual has develops with this. There's almost a
callous that develops, I think psychologically to being around human remains.
I 'argue you. For instance, when I spent hours and
hours in the Morgue and it was my daily routine,
I'd go in, I'd have a cup coffee or soda
(21:16):
or something like that, and I'd be standing at the counter,
you know, writing there'd be bodies laid out in there.
If I just grabbed John Q Public and said, hey,
I want you to come to work with me, I'll
go through the drive through by you a cup coffee
and you can come and talk to me at the counter.
And I've got bodies laid out in there. You think
that person's going to listen to anything I have to say.
They're not going to sit there and calmly drink their coffee.
(21:38):
And for me, it goes to this idea that you've
become very comfortable in this environment. You don't give it
a second thought because it's part of the world that
you occupy. So when you're talking about this gentleman from
up in Kentucky, you begin to think, how in the
world do you get to this level of comfort at
this point in your life where you are actually sleeping
(22:02):
with a human skull in your bed. I'm gonna throw
(22:24):
out a couple of names to you, Dave. The names
actually come from a few years back. William Burke and
William Hare, and these guys were from Scotland and they
were a pair of serial killers and they kind of
had an interesting, let's say, modus operandi. They were killing
(22:45):
people in order to create a market for anatomical gifts,
and these gifts of these bodies of these people that
they were killing. We're going to a gentleman that was
highly respected and highly regarded by the name of doctor
Robert Knox. But the problem was this, when you worked
(23:07):
in medical schools back during that period of time, there
was a prohibition against doing human dissections, and so there
was a real market, and this happened a lot. There
were several cases. There's even a very infamous case that
occurred in Georgia where they went in under many years ago,
went under one of the old buildings at the Medical
(23:27):
College of Georgia it's no longer call that now, where
they found an area where bones had been dumped. Medical
students pre Civil War were doing dissections on human remains
that were provided to them by grave robbers. They would
do them by candle light, just so that they could
understand human anatomy. But the reason I bring this up
is that actually one of the center points of this
(23:49):
investigation that the FBI is conducting involves a man and Dave.
His email handle that he actually used was William.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Burke James Knott, the Kentucky man that had the forty skulls.
He was the one using William Burke as a Facebook
Messenger name, and he was the one, according to the
FBI and their paperwork, that's who actually was using that name,
and his contact was Jeremy Pauley, Jeremy Paully being from Pennsylvania.
As you start looking at these things, these people are
(24:21):
all using Facebook Messenger. Joe You've got James Not with
the forty skulls in Kentucky and his contact Jeremy in Pennsylvania.
That's where that investigation begins to really open up to
because ultimately who had that Harvard Medical School bag and
how to end up in Kentucky at the home of
James Knot.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
That's an excellent question because you know, now you're getting
into the area of anatomical gifts. Who in the world
is going to have access to human remains? Well, it's
the people that put their hands on the human remain.
What's the quickest way to facilitate that if you're looking
to actually distribute these among people, Well, if you sign
(25:05):
a will and you say, okay, I want my body
to go to X, Okay, I want it to go
to I don't know there's people that actually donate their
bodies to the body Farm in Tennessee. I've had people
ask me about that, something I would want to do,
but people do that. But there are a large number
of people that say, for instance, they want their body
(25:25):
donated from medical science. And it's certainly admirable, I think
because the body is going to be used in order
to teach people so that they can go out and
become future practitioners in the medical arts. And you begin
to think about this, there's a certain level of trust
that comes along with these donations. And it would appear
(25:46):
that how Harvard kind of weaves its way into this
whole drama. There was a fellow by the name of
Cecil Lodge who's formerly he headed up the Harvard Medical
School Anatomical Gift program. So there's your point of contact.
And what was happening apparently was Lodge has been allegedly
(26:08):
using I don't want to say Facebook marketplace, but he's
been utilizing Facebook as a way to broker human remains
and individuals that are tied into here. You've got this
fellow in Pennsylvania that's brokering or that the remains are
coming to them. There's an individual in Arkansas that is
(26:29):
a funeral director. They're acquiring things. They're acquiring things like
skin dissected out, hands, feet, all these sorts of things
that you normally use so that people can do detailed dissections.
Let me kind of explain to you how this works,
because I think a lot of folks might believe that
when a body is used by medical school to teach
(26:54):
gross anatomy. They're going to take that body and keep
it stored forever and ever. Amen, That's not what happens.
Here's how the process goes. So let's just say the
Cecil Lodge fellow has a body that is donated to
Harvard Medical School. And I'm sure that there are many
alumni that have donated their body, particularly those that came
through the medical school. And let's face it, Dave, those
(27:17):
are very powerful people. Can you imagine. So an individual says, Okay,
I want my dad's body, my mom's body to go
to Harvard Medical School. It was their wish. Maybe the
individual before they passed on signed an agreement making their
body an anatomical gift. Well, Lodge takes the body. It
will actually pass before the medical school students, the incoming freshmen,
(27:40):
well I say incoming freshmen, and they're not referred to
as freshmen, they refer to as first years. And that's
when you take gross anatomy in medical school. That first
year you got started the baseline here and they do
their dissection. There might be two or three of these
students on one body, working as a team, and they'll
work with this body, perhaps through an entire semester and
(28:00):
in some cases through an entire year. Well, what happens
to the body after that? Do they go and have
a funeral service? No. Most of the time those bodies
are then taken to a facility where there's a standing
agreement where those bodies will then be cremated. That's not
what happened. So after these bodies would have gone through
(28:22):
these detailed dissections at Harvard, apparently things changed. They weren't
going out to be cremated. These bodies were being retained,
and allegedly what has happened is that parts of these
bodies were being broken to individuals that Lodge has allegedly
been networked with throughout the country. It goes out to
(28:43):
these individuals, and then these individuals have people that are
interested in purchasing interesting souvenirs body parts, skulls, spinal columns,
a pelvis, a thigh bone, or femur, anything that just
kind of peaks their interest. There are people that will
take the small elements of a hand, for instance, say
(29:04):
the digits off of a finger, and make necklaces out
of these things. There are people that make human teeth
necklaces out of these things. Most of the time it
doesn't happen here in the US. But if that's where
your imagination runs to, it's being fueled by these individuals
that participate in this kind of behavior.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
We have people that we trust with the last vet.
This is my mom, you know, this is my dad,
this is my wife, and you're at the funeral home
at my emotionally weakest moment. Maybe we have decided to
do cremation. I expect this to be all of my
loved one. I don't expect for you. You're already charging
(29:47):
me a bundle to do this job, and now you're
gonna take my mom's skull and sell it to some
guy so he can make a vase out of it
in Kentucky. No, here's what we actually have. We have
James Knot at the forty Skullman. We have the Pennsylvania guy,
Jeremy Pauley. We have the head of the Harvard, the
(30:10):
former More guy at Harvard, this whole and Candace Chapman
out of Little Rock. All of these people playing a
role in taking body parts that were not intended to
be a lamp and they're moving them around the country.
And it's not just small, It's not just Joe Scott
and Dave needing a femur for a lucky stick. This
(30:31):
is a whole big thing using social media to reach
other like minded individuals, to create these trophies, these things,
and to move them around the country. It's a big group.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Yeah, it is. And to this day there are essentially
mister Lodge along with his wife Denise, who is also
involved in this. There are five other people that you've named.
They have only been charged at this point Tom and
not convicted. And right now we're going to wait and
see what happens with this case because it's going to
(31:07):
impact i think Dave in the long run, it's going
to impact policy as it applies to all of these
other groups, all of these people that you allow into
that circle within the anatomical gift environment and within mortuaries
that are trusted with taking care of the dead, but
(31:27):
more importantly taking care of their memories and their families.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Bodybags with Joseph Scott Morgan as a former death investigator.
There's any number of names I've been called over the years.
I think that people have a real discomfort with death.
(00:30):
They have a real discomfort around things involving the dead,
and it's almost comical many times. I guess the first
one I remember is, Hey, you're just like Quincy. And
to bring it up to more modern times, probably Dexter.
People will refer to me as Dexter. Hey, you're just
like Dexter, And of course I always say no, I'm not.
(00:53):
I'm not a serial killer. But traditionally, I guess the
one thing that people have me with, because it's that
imagery that comes to mind, is the grim Reaper. That's
pretty horrible in and of itself you think about it. Today,
we're going to talk about a man that actually rode
(01:14):
around in a car and he worked for very prestigious institution.
And the car that he wrote around in it had
a vanity plate. And on that vanity plate where the
letters g R I M DASH are. Now, I don't
(01:34):
know what that means to you, but it sounds suspiciously
like the Reaper himself. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this
is Bodybacks. Dave. We were talking about names just a
while ago, and isn't it interesting when you get involved
in whatever your career track is, there are some monikers
(01:58):
I guess that are hung on you. Maybe people forget
your name. I don't know. Did people ever refer to
you as the radio guy? Oh buddy?
Speaker 2 (02:07):
Still you get called all kinds of things. And I've
wondered that about you, because when I explain who you are,
most of them already know who you are because they've
seen you on TV over the last ten to fifteen years,
so they know you do something with criminal stuff. And
then when I try to explain he's a professor, try
to lay it all out there, and ultimately it comes
(02:28):
back to the dude deals with bones in DNA, and
I don't really know how to explain it. But these
people that we're going to be talking about today, and
I see people because we've got to start with one.
But boy, what is it? Scratch a liar? Find a thief?
Speaker 1 (02:42):
You know, I've never heard that before. Really, I've heard
about pulling the thread on the sweater and the whole
thing comes unraveled. But scratch, give it to him again.
Speaker 2 (02:50):
Scratch a liar, Find a thief.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Scratch a liar, Find a thief. Wow, okay, I'm following
that one away. I hope you don't have that copyright.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
I got it from Ray, the movie about Ray Charles.
Speaker 1 (03:01):
Oh, holy smokes. Okay, well there you go.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
But bottom lining it, this goes to the heart and
soul of human beings and how we treat people when
they're alive and when they're dead, and the efforts we
go to be respectful. What we're going to be talking
about today, if nothing else, is the most disrespectful thing
I can think of happening to somebody without their family
knowing or anybody else. It's a story I didn't think
(03:26):
I would ever see, Joe. I'm going to be honest
with you. I know, crazy stuff happens. But when you
start mentioning Harvard, I tend to on the level goes up.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
How do you measure respect for the dead? On an
interesting little side, there was a story that came out
many years ago, and if you remember, I don't know
if you remember, the old newspaper insert magazine that would
come out in the Sunday papers called Parade. When you
open the Sunday paper, the coupons fallout and parade falls out,
And there was a feature article in there about a
(03:55):
mortician that lived in miss I think it was Mississippi,
and her family had owned this mortuary for years and years.
But there was this old gentleman that she regarded in
a fatherly way, and he had no family members and
he worked around the funeral home. Her family was apparently
gone her dad and genuinely loved this man, really loved him.
(04:19):
It was really creepy because what she had done is
that when this guy died, she had him embalmed there
in the facility that she owned, and dave she took
his body and stood him up in the corner of
her home and left him there if aestuoned in his
son to go to meeting. The article talked about how
(04:41):
she would have to touch up his makeup every now
and then. But there was this image of her sitting
on you know how they take those fish eye lens
images on these magazines, and she was seated on her
sofa and over her left or right shoulder is this
guy's corpse in the background. And people had allowed this
to go go on. Now I can't say that that's
necessarily disrespectful. But certain people when you begin to think
(05:06):
about how you honor the dead, how you take care
of them, because let's face it, we can get off
into a spiritual realm here and say that the dead
are no longer people. I think their families would argue
that they still are because that body, that shell that
remains is still representative of that individual and a life
that they lived, and how you treat those remains. Arguably,
(05:30):
if you want to think about the dead or the
most defenseless, right, I mean, there's nothing they can do
if you try to violate them in any way. And
so there's this built in trust that people that work
in the mortuary industry and those that are in the
anatomical gift industry. It's kind of unspoken. You know that
(05:50):
you're supposed to honor the dead, and in this case
it would seem at least that wasn't the case.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
In this particular case. This is where the the FBI.
When the FBI does a raid, oftentimes the search warrant
is always very specific as to what they're after. In particular,
the man of James not living in Kentucky, FBI comes
to raid his place. Now he is a man who
has a little bit of a record. I don't want
(06:18):
to dismiss it, but he did have past history with
crime and he was not allowed to own a gun.
When the FBI or local authorities think you are a
convicted felon who is not allowed to have a gun
and something pops up on their radar, they're going to
go look. And so the FBI raids this home of
mister James not in Bullock County, Kentucky, and what they
(06:41):
find forty human skulls. But that's not all. They find
spinal cords that are being used as decorations. They find
femurs and hip bones. And I don't know because I've
never handled these, but Joe Scott Morgan, I'm going to
be willing to bet that femurs from a bone standpoint
(07:03):
are pretty thick and big. When it comes to human beings.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
Oh boy, you've got the pelvis and the hip So
if you're thinking about those, they're very robust. They're spinal cords.
But my suspicion is here that we're talking about vertebra.
You know, they're saying this guy had spinal cords, and
I'm not saying that he couldn't. As a matter of fact,
(07:27):
I've got to say probably in the morgue when we
do detailed dissections on bodies, and it will do it
for any number of reasons, any kind of trauma that
an individual may have sustained as a result of a
motor vehicle accent, certainly with gunshot ones, certain diseases. One
of the most difficult procedures that you can do in
(07:48):
the morgue is the removal of the brain and the
spinal cord and get this leave it intact, and you
have to go in anderily. So what that means is
that once you have removed the organs out of the body,
you go down the mid line of the anterior aspect
(08:10):
or the front of the spine. Okay, so you're only
going to see the front of the spine if you're
obviously looking at the interier the of the body. And
to do that dissection with a bone saw, it's very difficult,
and so you can actually take out a spinal cord intact.
(08:31):
It's a very very tedious process in order to do this,
and they will be retained many times in a jar
for instance, and they'll be preserved and what's really kind
of creepy about it when you see it is that
with the spinal cord itself, it's attached to the brain stem.
(08:53):
And if you've ever seen a brain with a spinal
cord attached, David looks like something from outer space because
it's like the brain has this long, long tail attached
to it. And I've seen these in jars. For instance.
I've actually removed a few and put them into jars,
completely intact, and as they age and they're there in
(09:16):
that glass and kind of floating, it looks like some
type of snake, some alien type of snake, just kind
of wrapped and coiled in that environment, and it sits
there and you're waiting for it to reveal its secrets.
(09:49):
Make no mistake. I love to travel, truly do I
value it more than just about anything else. I mean,
money's great, you gotta have money in order to travel.
But if you're talking about a big, fancy house and
a big fancy car, I'm going to take travel day
in and day out because you just learned so much.
And there's a couple of places I've always want to
go and it's part of who I am, it's what
(10:09):
I do. But there's two places one is in Portugal
and the other is in Milan, Italy. And I'm not
going to Milan to see fashion. I've always wanted to
go and see what's referred to as an austuary, and
it's actually referred to as the San Berndino Asa in Milan.
(10:30):
And there is another one, this oshuary that is in
Portugal in Ivora, and it's called the Chapel of Bones.
And what has happened over the centuries is that the
monks that take care of the remains which are buried
underground that create oshuaries. And oshuaries are these little areas
(10:51):
that have nothing but stack skeletal remains. And the one
in Portugal is quite beautiful. It's actually a chapel with
an altar that has been created for worship underground, and
it's quite striking when you see it. I've always wanted
to enter this place and just see what it's like.
But here's what I can't imagine. Dave. You're a FBI
(11:14):
agent and you're sent out to execute a warrant and
the guy that comes to the door has wild hair,
wild eyes. He answers the door and you ask him, Hey,
who's here in the house with you, and his response
is only my dead friends. And that's the response that
(11:34):
the FBI agent's got from James Not.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
I'm thinking they were just glad that he didn't look
at them and say you're next. The whole thing about
the FBI doing a search warrant and being surprised. I
don't necessarily know that. I believe that. I know they
were there as part of a gun investigation, But as
we started peeling this onion, there's so much more to this,
and all I could think of he is it legal?
(12:00):
And b if it's not illegal.
Speaker 1 (12:03):
Why listen? No offense to Bullock County, Kentucky. I'm sure
it's a lovely place. I would I'd go visit Bullock County, Kentucky.
But you're talking about one man in this location, this
James Knot, that has been identified by the FBI, and
he's got all of these remains that are inside of
(12:24):
his home. I mean, you've got remains that has a
scarf wrapped around the circumference of the skull. He's got
another skull that is apparently immediately adjacent either on or
in his bed dave where he slept. The question is,
is this is this guy a necro file. Does he
(12:44):
rob Graves or is it something darker than that? If
you can imagine, is he a serial killer or is
he trafficking in human remains? I don't know. It seems
like he took a lot of pride in this, but yeah,
they found a lot of weapons in there. But what's
interesting and charge him with anything related to the human remains?
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Day you mentioned one of the skulls being on or
near the bed. I actually spent some time on this
because my first thought was, if this skull is attached
to something else and is laying there on the pillow
under the covers, we might just not do this show.
I don't think I could handle it. But what they
did find, and you mentioned the decorations and things like that,
(13:25):
the reality of this is I don't think their first
thought the FBI was we've got a massive serial killer
on our hands. Who is crazy? That passed Dahmer and Bundy.
I don't think they thought that because as part of
a bigger investigation, the FBI was not just aware of
(13:45):
the trafficking in human remains or is that what you
call the bones I mean in this particular case.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, that's what they're referred to US.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
And Harvard in particular, has been in the news in
the last couple of months over some scannds. So as
we move forward here, I wanted to give you an
idea of what the FBI found. The man had AK
forty seven with loaded magazines, dummy grenades, two plates of
body armor, loaded thirty eight special revolver, black powder primers,
(14:16):
elastic blasting caps, a detonation cord, inert grenade components, and
you have to ask, well, was there anything else in
the mix of all this the bones, the skulls, the
spinal cords, and the weapons. A Harvard Medical School bag.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
You talk about putting two and two together, you begin
to think, first off, I don't know, maybe there are
Harvard trained physicians in Bullock County, Kentucky. Maybe there are,
Maybe there's former faculty members, maybe there's people that donate.
I think one of the first questions that I would
ask this fella is how did you come into possession
of this back? And why is it here? Because when
(14:57):
you start to see all of these an at comical specimens,
and that's really what they are, they are atomical specimens,
each and every single item there, whether it's one of
the skulls, the spinal column, slash chords, the femurs, the
hip bones, all of these sorts of things. You begin
(15:17):
to think, well, you've got these specimens. Here, is this
in some way affiliated with Harvard Medical School? And how
did you come into possession this? Back? I mean, the
AK forty seven's are really intriguing. Your previously convicted felon.
You're not supposed to have any of this stuff. But dude,
we've got to talk about the human remains. How did
you come into possession of them? And I think that
(15:38):
that's when this takes a turn.
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Dave, and I wanted to know from you, Joe, when
one gets human remains like this where he's able to
use them as decorations. They had to have been scrubbed, cleaned.
I don't know where they came from right now, so
I'm just assuming that they've been cleaned up, because I
don't know what a non cleaned up skull would look like.
(16:00):
I'm really out of my depth here, Joe. What are
we talking about? Are we talking about bones that have
gone through somebody's dishwasher? Have they come out of a lab?
How did they use these at Harvard? What is the
purpose of having skeletal remains, where this guy could have forty.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
Skulls with skulls in particular, when you're talking about a
gross anatomy lab. Previous institution was at We had a
gross anatomy lab and I spent a lot of time
in there with my students and we'd have generally I
don't know five, six, sometimes eight bodies that were in
there that the students from several different departments within the
(16:37):
university would utilize to do gross anatomy with. Trust me
when I say the dissections are extensive, and you want
them to be extensive, Dave, because these people are going
to go into the medical arts and you want them
to understand just I mean as my detail as possible,
(16:58):
every nuance of an anatomy and how everything works. It's
not just the anatomy, it's the physiology and understanding how
all of that works together in order to make us
who we are and how you're going to treat these
people in the future. So with that said, the fact
that he had in tax skulls is kind of interesting
because many times, if they were in fact intact, we
(17:19):
don't have all of those details. You will not find
a fully intact skull out of a medical school, because
what do you have to do, Well, you have to
open the head, take the brain out, and you cannot
appreciate neuro anatomy as it applies specifically to the brain
without eviscerrating the brain from the skull. So, if that's
(17:40):
the case where these skulls completely intact, did they have
a solid incision which is referred to the incision is
actually referred to as a circumferential incision, which is a
fancy way of saying the incision goes all the way
around the skull. So if he's got in tax skulls,
that's one of the ways. You know, somebody asked me
if is this a real human skull? If I see
(18:03):
the skull cap is still on there, or what's referred
to as the calvarium, it becomes the calvarium when you
pop the off of the skull. If I see something
that is intact and somebody's got it up on a
shelf or something like that, I'm going to look at
it and I'm going to say, well, if that's intact,
why would you have an intact skull? Because you know
that it probably is not part of a gross anatomy class,
(18:27):
there's a higher likelihood unless you're collecting human remains, there's
a higher likelihood that it's probably a mock up that
just looks like bone because most of the time these
students have to pop the caps, these calvariums off of
them to take the brain out in order to examine it.
There's no other way to get the brain out, Okay,
is what it comes down to. When it is said
(18:48):
by the FBI that he had forty human skulls, you
begin to think, well, my word, how did you get
these and what state were they in? It's an interesting thing.
Unless the people in Bullet County, Kentucky had went out
to the local cemetery and looked around, they had a
bunch of holes in the ground. There's got to be
some other explanation for this guy being in possession of
(19:11):
these skulls, forty of them. This guy's only thirty nine
years old. How do you collect that many skulls in
that period of time in your life? And what's the
purpose for you have in them? And back to your
point about how do you get these bones clean? There's
any number of ways that you get them clean. People
have used bleach over the years, forensic anthropologists actually use
(19:31):
a technique that is not for the squeamish. If we have, say,
for instance, bones that come to us out of the field,
and the tissue there might be some decomposing tissue that's
still on there, they will essentially slowly heat that bone
inside of a pot with water or chemical mixture inside
(19:52):
of it, and the soft tissue will fall away, and
so that what you're left with is raw bone, just
pure bone. If you've gotten medical students that are utilizing
bone as a tool for understanding anatomy, they're not very
skilled with tools at this point, and you're going to
get a lot of tool marks on these bones. You'll
(20:13):
see scalpel scraping, for instance. You'll see where they've used
scissors to cut away tendons and those sorts of things,
and if you closely examine it, you can see that
somebody has done something to these bones.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
I know that as we move forward, I don't want
to make a light of this by Joe. I don't
know any other way. When you've got a man who's
got forty skulls on his property and he's made decorations
out of them, I would think, and I mean this
if that's your thing, that you like this type of
imagery and around you, that you just by plastic that
it would hold up longer. And this seems to be
more from a shock value standpoint of And when I
(20:48):
saw the guy's mugshot, my first, second, and third thought was, hey, man,
don't rule out the possibility that he is a serial killer.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
Well here's the thing, Dave, there's a certain level of
comfort than visual has develops with this. There's almost a
callous that develops, I think psychologically to being around human remains.
I 'argue you. For instance, when I spent hours and
hours in the Morgue and it was my daily routine,
I'd go in, I'd have a cup coffee or soda
(21:16):
or something like that, and I'd be standing at the counter,
you know, writing there'd be bodies laid out in there.
If I just grabbed John Q Public and said, hey,
I want you to come to work with me, I'll
go through the drive through by you a cup coffee
and you can come and talk to me at the counter.
And I've got bodies laid out in there. You think
that person's going to listen to anything I have to say.
They're not going to sit there and calmly drink their coffee.
(21:38):
And for me, it goes to this idea that you've
become very comfortable in this environment. You don't give it
a second thought because it's part of the world that
you occupy. So when you're talking about this gentleman from
up in Kentucky, you begin to think, how in the
world do you get to this level of comfort at
this point in your life where you are actually sleeping
(22:02):
with a human skull in your bed. I'm gonna throw
(22:24):
out a couple of names to you, Dave. The names
actually come from a few years back. William Burke and
William Hare, and these guys were from Scotland and they
were a pair of serial killers and they kind of
had an interesting, let's say, modus operandi. They were killing
(22:45):
people in order to create a market for anatomical gifts,
and these gifts of these bodies of these people that
they were killing. We're going to a gentleman that was
highly respected and highly regarded by the name of doctor
Robert Knox. But the problem was this, when you worked
(23:07):
in medical schools back during that period of time, there
was a prohibition against doing human dissections, and so there
was a real market, and this happened a lot. There
were several cases. There's even a very infamous case that
occurred in Georgia where they went in under many years ago,
went under one of the old buildings at the Medical
(23:27):
College of Georgia it's no longer call that now, where
they found an area where bones had been dumped. Medical
students pre Civil War were doing dissections on human remains
that were provided to them by grave robbers. They would
do them by candle light, just so that they could
understand human anatomy. But the reason I bring this up
is that actually one of the center points of this
(23:49):
investigation that the FBI is conducting involves a man and Dave.
His email handle that he actually used was William.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Burke James Knott, the Kentucky man that had the forty skulls.
He was the one using William Burke as a Facebook
Messenger name, and he was the one, according to the
FBI and their paperwork, that's who actually was using that name,
and his contact was Jeremy Pauley, Jeremy Paully being from Pennsylvania.
As you start looking at these things, these people are
(24:21):
all using Facebook Messenger. Joe You've got James Not with
the forty skulls in Kentucky and his contact Jeremy in Pennsylvania.
That's where that investigation begins to really open up to
because ultimately who had that Harvard Medical School bag and
how to end up in Kentucky at the home of
James Knot.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
That's an excellent question because you know, now you're getting
into the area of anatomical gifts. Who in the world
is going to have access to human remains? Well, it's
the people that put their hands on the human remain.
What's the quickest way to facilitate that if you're looking
to actually distribute these among people, Well, if you sign
(25:05):
a will and you say, okay, I want my body
to go to X, Okay, I want it to go
to I don't know there's people that actually donate their
bodies to the body Farm in Tennessee. I've had people
ask me about that, something I would want to do,
but people do that. But there are a large number
of people that say, for instance, they want their body
(25:25):
donated from medical science. And it's certainly admirable, I think
because the body is going to be used in order
to teach people so that they can go out and
become future practitioners in the medical arts. And you begin
to think about this, there's a certain level of trust
that comes along with these donations. And it would appear
(25:46):
that how Harvard kind of weaves its way into this
whole drama. There was a fellow by the name of
Cecil Lodge who's formerly he headed up the Harvard Medical
School Anatomical Gift program. So there's your point of contact.
And what was happening apparently was Lodge has been allegedly
(26:08):
using I don't want to say Facebook marketplace, but he's
been utilizing Facebook as a way to broker human remains
and individuals that are tied into here. You've got this
fellow in Pennsylvania that's brokering or that the remains are
coming to them. There's an individual in Arkansas that is
(26:29):
a funeral director. They're acquiring things. They're acquiring things like
skin dissected out, hands, feet, all these sorts of things
that you normally use so that people can do detailed dissections.
Let me kind of explain to you how this works,
because I think a lot of folks might believe that
when a body is used by medical school to teach
(26:54):
gross anatomy. They're going to take that body and keep
it stored forever and ever. Amen, That's not what happens.
Here's how the process goes. So let's just say the
Cecil Lodge fellow has a body that is donated to
Harvard Medical School. And I'm sure that there are many
alumni that have donated their body, particularly those that came
through the medical school. And let's face it, Dave, those
(27:17):
are very powerful people. Can you imagine. So an individual says, Okay,
I want my dad's body, my mom's body to go
to Harvard Medical School. It was their wish. Maybe the
individual before they passed on signed an agreement making their
body an anatomical gift. Well, Lodge takes the body. It
will actually pass before the medical school students, the incoming freshmen,
(27:40):
well I say incoming freshmen, and they're not referred to
as freshmen, they refer to as first years. And that's
when you take gross anatomy in medical school. That first
year you got started the baseline here and they do
their dissection. There might be two or three of these
students on one body, working as a team, and they'll
work with this body, perhaps through an entire semester and
(28:00):
in some cases through an entire year. Well, what happens
to the body after that? Do they go and have
a funeral service? No. Most of the time those bodies
are then taken to a facility where there's a standing
agreement where those bodies will then be cremated. That's not
what happened. So after these bodies would have gone through
(28:22):
these detailed dissections at Harvard, apparently things changed. They weren't
going out to be cremated. These bodies were being retained,
and allegedly what has happened is that parts of these
bodies were being broken to individuals that Lodge has allegedly
been networked with throughout the country. It goes out to
(28:43):
these individuals, and then these individuals have people that are
interested in purchasing interesting souvenirs body parts, skulls, spinal columns,
a pelvis, a thigh bone, or femur, anything that just
kind of peaks their interest. There are people that will
take the small elements of a hand, for instance, say
(29:04):
the digits off of a finger, and make necklaces out
of these things. There are people that make human teeth
necklaces out of these things. Most of the time it
doesn't happen here in the US. But if that's where
your imagination runs to, it's being fueled by these individuals
that participate in this kind of behavior.
Speaker 2 (29:23):
We have people that we trust with the last vet.
This is my mom, you know, this is my dad,
this is my wife, and you're at the funeral home
at my emotionally weakest moment. Maybe we have decided to
do cremation. I expect this to be all of my
loved one. I don't expect for you. You're already charging
(29:47):
me a bundle to do this job, and now you're
gonna take my mom's skull and sell it to some
guy so he can make a vase out of it
in Kentucky. No, here's what we actually have. We have
James Knot at the forty Skullman. We have the Pennsylvania guy,
Jeremy Pauley. We have the head of the Harvard, the
(30:10):
former More guy at Harvard, this whole and Candace Chapman
out of Little Rock. All of these people playing a
role in taking body parts that were not intended to
be a lamp and they're moving them around the country.
And it's not just small, It's not just Joe Scott
and Dave needing a femur for a lucky stick. This
(30:31):
is a whole big thing using social media to reach
other like minded individuals, to create these trophies, these things,
and to move them around the country. It's a big group.
Speaker 1 (30:45):
Yeah, it is. And to this day there are essentially
mister Lodge along with his wife Denise, who is also
involved in this. There are five other people that you've named.
They have only been charged at this point Tom and
not convicted. And right now we're going to wait and
see what happens with this case because it's going to
(31:07):
impact i think Dave in the long run, it's going
to impact policy as it applies to all of these
other groups, all of these people that you allow into
that circle within the anatomical gift environment and within mortuaries
that are trusted with taking care of the dead, but
(31:27):
more importantly taking care of their memories and their families.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Host
Nancy Grace
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