AEA: Autoerotic Asphyxia - David Carradine gained fame on TV in the early 70s as Kung Fu. Michael Hutchence was the frontman for hitmaking rock group INXS. Both men died doing the same thing: Autoerotic Asphyxia. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss AEA as well as other public deaths by Asphyxia including the hanging of Jeffrey Epstein, suicide of Robin Williams, and a story about the death of a man accused of being a witch during the Salem Witch Trials and how he died of asphyxia by "pressing".
Transcript Highlights
00:02.49 Introduction
00:39.43 "Blood Beneath My Feet"
04:48.20 Asphyxia by hanging
10:00.77 Suffocation - positional asphyxia
15:06.68 Compression of the neck
19:39.06 Hanging of Lewis Payne
24:40.59 Execution by "pressing"
30:12.40 Killed by hanging in public
35:11.67 Suspension Hanging vs Supported Hanging
39:15.66 Auto-Erotic Asphyxia
45:20.99 Strangle to point of death, and stopping, to cause more terror in victim
50:42.24 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality times. But Joseph Scott More, if you've read my
memoir Blood Beneath my Feet, there's a character, and I
say character, real person, my grandmother Curl, who features quite
prominently in Blood and because she did a lot of
(00:28):
my raising, and still to this day, there's not a
day that goes by I do not think about her.
And I literally mean that, and I've got a photo
of she and I on my mantle. But she had
all of these kind of I guess you'd call them
euphemistic terms that are I think they're kind of unique
(00:48):
to the South and particularly to Southern women. And she'd
say all kinds of things, you know that you would
get the drift of it, you would understand it, but
contextually it seemed out of place. And one of one
of her sayings that she would always use, particularly in
(01:13):
the Deep South. Remember, you know, my family's from Louisiana.
We're Delta people. You know, it's always insufferably hot and
you just learn to live with. But if she ever
got too hot, and that was rare because she was
used to heat, she'd always say, I feel like I'm
smothering to death. Well, there's a lot to be taken
(01:37):
away from that. Smothering for most people, you know, means
that your airways being blocked and you can't breathe. In
south it either means that you're really hot or you're
about to cover something with gravy. But today I'm going
(01:58):
to take you on a little and we're going to learn,
hopefully I'll be up to the task about asphyxial deaths.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body batteries smothering.
That's a big part of asphixial deaths, and they come
(02:23):
in all shapes and size as Dave. When you know,
you begin to think about how someone dies, and the
main element to this is the idea of depriving the
victim of oxygen at the end of the day, because
it is our life source, you know, It's what feeds
(02:44):
our bodies, it's what keeps our brain working. Certainly, our
lungs process at our hearts pump out that oxygenated blood.
Our bodies scream for it, and if that's disrupted in
the slightest way, then it's catastrophic. That's one of the reasons, like,
for instance, people that develop pneumonia, and we're talking about
(03:05):
a natural disease here where their lungs get really heavy
and they can't process oxygen the way they normally do.
It's a real, real problem. I think back to COVID
where they were so anxious. It seemed like every third
person was being put on a vent that would show up,
you know, with chess congestion, and of course that's almost
(03:28):
a death sentence. Everybody uses this term DAVE nowadays nuanced
out of all of the ways that people die from
a traumatic situation, I'd have to say that that asphyxia
or asphyxial deaths are nuanced because you can have them
(03:49):
in a variety of categories, and you know, just to
kind of give everybody an idea of some of these things,
there's multiple modes of asphix it. We have everything from
you've mentioned a couple of leaves. We have strangulation, and
that can either be manual, which means you know, by
the hands. You can have ligature as well, and interestingly enough,
(04:16):
physicians many times will call that mechanical asphixiation because you're
using a mechanism to do it. You talked about a
garrot with John Wayne Gacy. Did you know that grotting
was actually a form of capital punishment. The French used
it extensively in their colonies, and they would tie a
(04:37):
person to a chair and they had a big twist
that went on the back of the chair. It was
like a gigantic key that was hooked to ligature and
they turned that thing around and around until and this
is in public, until the person was asphyxiated. You have,
you know, instances of judicial hanging, and of course we
(04:57):
still you know, have people that hang themselves all the time.
It's probably in my little slice of the Pies of
Death Investigator. It was just behind self inflicted gunshot wounds
as a method for people to end their own lives.
I think one of the reasons is is that everybody
owns a belt, everybody has pair of pants, everybody has
(05:19):
a shirt or a towel. I've seen people commit suicide
with a hair dryer before and not plugging it in
and jumping in the bathtub. I'm talking about tying. And
this was actually on an acute psychord. I got called
into this thing and they had this lady was in
acute distress. She was in a manic phase. They were
(05:44):
giving her drugs to calm her down. Things like adavan
and all that sort of stuff. And they left her
with a hair dryer and she went on the other
side of her hospital bed and tied the plug off
onto the top rail, you know those rails that go
up and down, and she wrapped that that hair dryer
around her neck so that when I observed her, the
(06:05):
hair darwer was hanging on the front of her body
like a big pennant, and the cord was wrapped around
her neck and she just sat down. And people don't
realize you don't have to be standing hanging yourself. And
that's a theme. That's a recurrent theme that you have.
So you know, we have you know, strangulations, hangings, hangings
(06:26):
can come about, and then you know, you can have
accidental hangings. Have a couple of those. A young kid
that was trying to entertain his younger siblings because his
mother was working as a prostitute in Atlanta and he
was left with him. He was I think he's this
precious child, was only nine years old, and he sat
(06:47):
his siblings in front of him, and he had a
batman mask that someone had given him, and he had
an old jump rope that he tied inside of a closet,
and this house was really old, so he could hold
on to the jump rope that was anchored on an
(07:08):
old clothes bar in there and swing out of the closet,
bounce off the wall, and swing back in. He kept
telling the kids that he was he was Batman, and
he got looped around that thing and he hung and
six headed in front of his siblings. And the only
reason somebody found out about it is this horrible neighborhood.
(07:31):
There was a little old lady that lived down the
street and she saw a three year old and it's cold,
it's like in February. Saw a three year old walking
down street only wearing a diaper and a t shirt
and she was crying. And she heard this child crying,
this in the middle of the night, and she just
happened to pop out there. And all this little girl
could say was, I can't remember the child's first name,
(07:55):
but he's sleeping. He's sleeping. And so she goes to
the house and kids still hanging, and other kids are
crying in the house. And so you know, I've had
kids on tire swings that have been hung by doing
the cabbage patch on top of the tire where they're
holding onto the rope. I think pendulums around their body,
and that's a type of hanging. Have we drowning fits
(08:18):
into the category of sphyxial death? Really, yes, Drowning is
because you're replacing oxygen with liquid at that point in time.
So that is, in and of itself an asphyxiation anything
that replaces oxygen in the body, and you have substances
out there or chemicals that are out there that are
(08:39):
what are called oxygen deprivaants. I recall having a young
man that was engaged in something we'll talk about in
just a moment even further, he was engaged in autoeroticism,
and he was he was a salesman and he is
his first job. He was a salesman selling halon fire extinguishers,
(09:02):
and they use halin on boats a lot, and it's
odorless and it's colorless, but it grabs the oxygen out
of the air, binds with it, and if there's a fire,
it immediately knocks down the fire. So if you're on
a ship, these things will be deployed and it jumps
right down on the on the burning fire and extinguishes it.
(09:23):
It's not like foam or anything else, and he was
sniffing this stuff in order to get a rush as
he's pleasuring himself, and he was found dead at his
desk from halon. So you have that carbon monoxide. You know,
there's a number of these agents, and then you have
poison agents. There's classic image of some of the Kurdish
(09:45):
Kurdish occupants in Northern Rock where you know Hussein had
used seren gas, you know, an entire village and wiped
them out. Picture of mother and and child, you know,
hunched over. Then you have suffocation. Suffcation comes in a
(10:05):
variety of different different ways. You can have suffocation where
it's almost a positional asphyxia. The case that jumps to
mind for me the most in my career as a
little kid whose mother again was off with her boyfriend,
left her two older children in charge of a ten
(10:31):
month old I think the child was a child got
wrapped up in it, rolled over, got wrapped up in
an afghan, and the mother had not put the side
rail up, had not even attached it, just pushed the
crib to the wall and the child inverted head downward
against the wall and the mattress wrapped in an afghan
(10:53):
and couldn't break free. Well, that's a suffocation, it's positional asphyxia,
and you'll get those. A lot have drug addicts that
fix on the toilet, heroin addicts because it makes you
so sleepy. I've had at least three of those where
they fall off of the toilet and get in between
the wall and the commode and again their chest can't
rise and fall, and they're so debilitated by the drugs
(11:15):
it's just not happening. You have compression asphixia, and that's
anything that prevents your chest from rising and falling. And
believe it or not, there are a lot of people
DAVE that die in motor vehicle accidents. It will call
them mvas die in motor vehicle accidents where yes they're traumatized,
(11:38):
but you get people that are pinned in vehicles and
their chests can't rise and fall, and they will they
will die as a result of compression asphixia. I've had
a number of those over the years. So there's to
talk about asphixial deaths and kind of how they are
examined and identified and that sort of thing is a
(12:02):
big part of our job. And you might see evidence
people always talk to me many times. One of the
big questions they'll ask, particularly if I'm going on television
to cover something, They'll want to know if there were petiki,
And generally that's a that's something that's a common thing
(12:22):
that you see, particularly in individuals being strangled, because the
blood literally backs up into the head, gets into that
soft tissue around the eyes and gorges that area and
those little vessels pop. Do you know who else gets patiki?
I dave that it's not associated with some kind of
(12:44):
asphyxial death. You don't take no idea about it.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
No idea.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
People that are severely constipated, and that's no joke. It
actually happens. They'll get petiki and women in labor, Okay,
women in labor because of the strength. Yeah, And you know,
I have a very distinct memory of Kimmy, you know,
when she gave birth to Noah Loathies many years ago,
and her head, you know, she's turning red as is
(13:10):
going on.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Does that last after you have the child?
Speaker 1 (13:13):
It dissipates pretty quickly. Kim had one, I remember, and
that's horrible in that beautiful moment, but I remember wanting
to wanting to look at her eyes because I had
heard that for years and looked at her, looked at
her eyes, and she had one tiny little PATIKII. I
(13:34):
didn't mention it to her because I thought that it
would rob the moment.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
All these years, Kim has told all of her friends,
you know, right after I had Noah, Joe was just
staring so lovingly in my eyes. It's like the moment
that I treasured the most. And oh it's a beautiful moments.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
You just can't you just can't escape at many times, Dave.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
You know, with I've talked about all these kind of
modes that are involved in asphyxia. It's such a massive
category of death. I don't know that many people even
think about it at all, certainly, and I don't want
people to think about it. Let me think about it,
you know. I don't want to burden people with I
(14:35):
want to educate people. But you know, this is type
of stuff that we think about, you know, in death investigation,
and you know, you have all of these modalities that
will occur where in essence, you're depriving an individual of
(14:55):
oxygen and there's essentially m four categories where that will fit,
you know, that fit into this idea of of of
asphyxial death. So you've gotten multiple modes, but there's four categories.
(15:16):
Number one is compression of the neck. Compression compression of
the neck. It takes on a variety of presentations. So
we've we've got hanging. Then you've got non suspended ligature strangulation.
Most of the time that's going to come from a
homicide where people are, you know, using a ligature to
(15:39):
actually strangulate the person. You can have manual strangulation, and
manual is different from ligature. Manual is actually wrapping your
hands around somebody. Certain there's two types of man well,
there's actually probably multiple, but let me just give you three.
(16:01):
With compression of the neck, so if you think about
like an old movie where a guy's got on a
pair of black gloves and are approaching somebody with two
hands and they're coming at their neck, that's called throttling.
And you can either do that anteriorly on the front,
or you can do it posteriorly from the rear. You know,
think about all the creepy movies you've seen over the
(16:23):
years where some dark stranger comes up behind somebody and
grabs them by the neck and kind of chokes them
out like that. Then you have what's called a sea
clamp where an individual will come up and externally grab
the trachia. Of course it's external, but they grab the
trachia and they squeeze the trachia and that's where the
(16:43):
thyroid cartilage is. And this area of this kind of
cartilaginous body in the center where you know your tongue
is attached to the hyoid. You've got an Adam's apple there,
and they'll squeeze down on that particular area.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
It's different for men and women when you're talking about
that specific area.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Oh, because I said Adam's apple. No, it's not really.
Women don't have as pronounced of the cartilaginous body that
gives the appearance of quote unquote the atoms apple. And
that's generally a pretty distinctive marker, you know, for men
versus males versus females, something you look for. And then
(17:30):
we have you know, what you may have seen on
in wrestling and with cops where they'll use a choke hold.
And the choke hold is where you know you actually
if you binge your arm and it creates a v
and you put the person's trache right in the crook
of your arm, and you're squeezing, squeezing, squeezing them like that,
(17:53):
and you're and it's not just the airway that's been compromised.
It's also the vessels that are supplying the brain. So
you've got this this double action that's going on relative
to this, you know, the crushing of the airway or
the occlusion of the airway from external pressure and also
clamping down of the vessels.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
When we see that, you know, in movies or TV
or professional wrestling. Yeah, is how long does it take?
I mean, when you get somebody in that kind of
sleeper hole, and is it reversible? I mean, if you
hold it for just a few moments, the person goes out,
you let them go and they return right. Yeah, but
how long? I mean, I'm not trying to figure out
(18:33):
how to kill somebody. I'm just curious. Is there a
point of no return? Or is it like standard or
different for everybody?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Standard? It's not standard, it's it's different from everybody because
a lot of people, let's say you, well, let's just
take an obvious example. You've got a grown man, it's
got a well muscled neck. Compare that to a small
child or a dominiontive person. You know, it's it's more.
And I'll give you a great example, and it says
(19:00):
actually goes to hanging. But if you ever take the
time to look at the conspirators that were all hung
in the old Navy shipyard of relative to Abraham Lincoln,
they hung them all at the same time. Okay, there's
(19:20):
one guy that's hanging in the captured image and his
name is Louis Payne, and all of them to a person,
with the exception of Louis pain had their head turned
to the side, which means that it snapped their neck.
Louis Payne, if you see pictures of him in life,
(19:41):
and some people say that he looks like a guest model,
you'll see what I'm talking about. Just go back and
google his name. Louis Payne. Okay, he's got a really
he's very young. He's got a well muscled neck. When
they dropped him off that scaffolding, his neck didn't break.
He sat there and essentially it's fixated as a result
of ligature around his neck because his neck was so robust.
(20:03):
And you can see him standing or hanging fully erect
you know, like this while everybody else their neck is
snapped and leaned over to one side or forward, and
they're all deceased. He ain't dead. And that really strikes me,
you know when I see that, and we're talking about
the atomical structures of the neck, how long can somebody last?
(20:25):
First off, you don't try it. No one should ever
try a sleep or hole quote unquote, because you're compromising
not just the airway, but you're compromising the croatis which
lead up to the brain. And any compromise of that
oxygen flow to the brain is you're in an unrecoverable
flat spin. You're going to wind up on a vent
(20:46):
in an ICU because you're absent oxygen. Cops they've tried
to keep cops from using it for years and years.
They used to use a nightstick as well, they would,
and they also an arm bar, and they got away
from that a long time ago. Where the bar of
the forearm, if you imagine your form is like a bar.
(21:08):
It's placed against the anterior neck and it creates that
that compression on the neck where oxygen is not you know,
making it up to the brain. There was I think
it was what was it where they called a p
twenty four. I think p. Twenty four is the nightstick
cops used to use, and they had a lot of utility.
It had a separate handle on the side and they
(21:30):
could take it and use it like this. One of
the things they would do. It's kind of a natural reaction.
They would take that old nightstick that had the handle
coming out of the side and they'd hook somebody with
it and then put their foot on the back of
their neck and pull up to get them to comply.
And of course that's you're asking for trouble, you know
(21:52):
when that happens. The neck is very fragile, the airways
very fragile. So you've got a variety of these, you know, everywhere,
from compression the neck to obstruction of the airway. You know,
it's why Mama tells you to chew your food. I've
had kids that have choked to death, you know, on
hot dogs. I know it sounds like a fantasy or
(22:13):
you know, an old wives tale, but no, it does.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Happen to dreams.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right, and the airway is cleared
in that particular case. So anything, and you know how
many times Dave us a dad me as a dad
me as a grandfather, you is a grandfather, have you
said the following words? Get that out of your mouth?
And then it's generally followed up by you don't know
(22:38):
where that's been, you know, And but you know, kids
will they explore the world through their senses and taste
and tactile, and they'll put stuff in their mouth. I
had a colleague of mine that worked a case involving
a golf ball where a kid had stuck a golf
ball and they couldn't clear the airway and they died.
I had a kid that choked to death on a
German cockroach in Atlanta, and when they tried to establish
(23:04):
the airway, they were trying to intubate the child. I'll
never forget this case as long as I lived. And
that was in a fhixial death. The cockroach had crawled
into the child's mouth, the house was infested with him.
He had gotten in the child's airway and child began
to choke. Child was I think like eighteen months old.
And when the EMTs got there, they tried to intubate
(23:26):
the kid, and they destroyed the cockroach but left it
in place. And so when we dissected the neck, we
found the thorax, the little intente the legs, and it
was one of the most bizarre cases that I had
worked because it was so horribly tragic.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
But that's actually an his fixial death.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
It is an asphixial death. And so you know, after
you get through those two categories of obstruction and compression,
you have compression of the chest, which I kind of mentioned.
You know, if you have so much weight on top
of the chest that the chest can't rise. And father
(24:12):
there's actually a famous one of the famous executions from
the Salem witch trial where the guy refused to admit
that he was a witch because he wasn't he'd been
found guilty, and classic line, ultimate hero line. They began,
the men of the community. They tied him down and
(24:33):
began to put stones on his chest, and the preacher
that was standing there said, do you confess to being
a witch? No, add more weight. They'd add more stones,
and these these huge stones. It took like three guys
to put them upon them. Imagine like a millstone, that's
about how big it was. And they got to the
last one and the guy that was running the show said,
(24:58):
will you now confess to be in a witch? And
he looked up and he said more weight, more weight,
and that's compression of the chest. And you can find
people that will get in all kinds of odd positions
that lead to their death. That's a great example of it.
(25:19):
I'd mentioned, you know, drug addicts that fall off of toilets,
people in car accidents, this sort of thing. And I
think finally, probably a very broad category is this idea.
And you could say that all of them are this.
But when we begin to talk about exclusion of oxygen,
and that is the environment in which you normally dwell,
(25:41):
something has happened within this environment to deprive you of oxygen.
One of the things that one of to terrifying things
is like grain silos. Grain silows are, first off, they're
very volatile, they can explode because of the gas in there.
But you also have individuals that, for a number of reasons,
will asphyxiate grain silos absence of oxygen, also inhalation of
(26:05):
the dust over a protracted period of time. I had
a guy, We had guys in New Orleans. There were
whole generations of families and this is not necessarily the
same thing, but just giving you an idea, there were
whole generations of families that worked as sand blasters Dave
and they sand blasted the Huey P. Long Bridge. It's
the longest road trestle in the world. And there's an
(26:28):
adjacent bridge that goes over the Mississippi River and the
thing is made out of steel and it's a constant,
ongoing job because the environments so harsh, and they would
always be sand blasted. Well, these guys, when we would
get them and they would be relatively young men, would
know their history. They developed something called silicosis, which is
(26:49):
deposits of sand in their lungs, and so when you
ran your hand over the surface of lungs, it feels
very grand. And if you slice through that tissue, you
can actually see the little grains of sand that hadn't embedded.
So that's compromising the airway and it leads to an
(27:10):
exclusion of oxygen. Probably the most striking thing though, is when,
and we were mentioning this off air, you know, there
was PSA back in the sixties, and I don't know
if anybody remembers this, but they used to have these
horrible PSAs that would come out just terrifying you and
(27:32):
for good reason. And you hear children in the background
saying three, two, one ready or not here I come,
and it's the disembodied voices. And it was in some
vacant lot where they'd film this in New York and
it would simply say and I think it said don't.
And there were refrigerators that were out there, and what
(27:56):
would happen In the old days, these things didn't have
magnetic locks. Still, go to restaurants and you'll see the
big walking coolers that those handles that they pull on
those things they lock from the outside. Okay, now, now
they have an escape button that you can press inside
and it'll disengage. But these old refrigerators, kids would get
(28:17):
inside of them to hide. And the problem is is
that while inside any oxygen that's in there, the child's
body is displacing that oxygen in cubic inches and the interior.
When you go to buy refrigerator, you look at whatever
store you're going to and they'll give you the interior
(28:38):
size and cubic inches that's how much air you have.
And then once you've taken two or three breasts and
you've expelled carbon dioxide into that environment, there's nothing left
to breathe and of course, one of the worst things
that I can certainly imagine is being locked in what
(29:01):
would become you're coffin in life. I think we as
a race, have, the human race, have tried to find
(29:26):
for years and years the most efficient way of depriving
someone of their life. We don't want it to be
messy or nasty, and for years and still to this date,
there are countries that still employ hanging as a means
(29:47):
to killing people. I saw an image from I can't
remember specifically which Middle Eastern country it was from a
few years back, where they had people tied to a
bridge with nooses and had them on top of a bus.
(30:09):
It's one of the most horrific things I've ever seen.
And these people are there with the ropes hanging loosely,
They're looking around, their hands are tied behind their back,
and the bus begins to slowly move and their legs
are trying to stay up with the movement of the bus.
And finally the bus pulls away and you've got multiple
(30:31):
people that are suddenly hung in spot there where everybody
can see. And of course there was a crowd that
had had joined to watch the spectacle. You know, asphyxiation
has been something that is on the menu. I think
for us as people for years and years. People knew
(30:51):
forever that if you can prevent oxygen uptake in a subject,
that it's going to lead to death.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Let me ask you about a couple of things that
I have made note of over the last several years
in the deaths of some celebrities. Joke sure with what
has been called or is called autoerotic asphyxia.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
What is it?
Speaker 2 (31:17):
David Carriden comes to mind, and Michael Hudgens from an
excess the group, But there are others I'm sure that
have died from.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
What is it?
Speaker 2 (31:26):
And how do people die?
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Well, we have to first look at what the word
auto means itself. Okay, So auto erotic having to do
with sex, okay, and then asphyxia, and it's not meant
to be The practice is not intended to in someone's life.
(31:52):
It's there to enhance sexual pleasure and sensation. I think
that by the time someone gets to that point, I
don't know that many times people are afflicted by this.
They can't receive sexual pleasure any other way. It's something
that's done alone by themselves, you know, out of sight
(32:17):
of everybody else. And what's fascinating is that the cases
I've worked, and there's not a lot of them. A
lot of people sold people in investigations a bill of
goods when they started. There are seminars out there where
you can go and learn about the investigation of autoroticism.
(32:41):
And why I have no idea because it's not something
that happens every day. You know, once you go over
in a generalized course, you kind of get the drift
of what's going on. And I always thought that it
was just ridiculous, and it became to the point where
it's very salacious. I think that, over the course of
my career have actually genuinely handled four and that's over
(33:05):
a twenty year career, and so it's not it's not
as prevalent. I think that it's probably become more prevalent
because people talk about it, and you've got you know,
curiosity seekers out there that hear about it and they
want to experience it. Please nobody, try to.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Let me ask you something, Joe, because this kind of
comes to mind, all right. I wonder how many times
somebody was labeled as suicide when it was something other
than a suicide. It was trying to achieve this type
of joy and ended up in death. What brings that
(33:47):
to mind is the death of Michael Hutchins, where some
people said it was a suicide and it has been
pointed out, no, it was autopia.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
And he's he's again. When Hutchins died, he was not
a not a full suspension. Okay, he was actually kind
of leaning forward on his knees with literature, you know,
around his neck.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Okay, wait a minute, now, is that a common because
that's something that came up with Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Yeah, mm hmmm is that common?
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Not not touching me? And what about wait a minute,
I do not I don't mean to shotgun this, okay,
and I apologize, but in my mind's I am thinking
when I've thought of hanging, it's always been hanging right,
suspended in the air. But Epstein, Hutchins, Robin Williams.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah yeah, Robin actually on a door. Yeah yeah, he did.
And you don't have to be that. That's why you know,
we draw a line. Hanging is kind of a it's
not a good term. I like suspension. If you if
you're gonna DeLine it, if you're gonna use the word hang,
(35:00):
suspension hanging versus supported hanging. And it kind of you
begin to under it again there's that word as nuanced.
You don't have to be, you know, someone that is
suspended and hanging like a judicial hanging off of scaffolding.
And the purpose of judicial hangings, if you will, back then,
was to break the neck. And for some reason, you know,
(35:22):
like the executioner always puts the nod on the left
side of the neck. This is a practice that's done
all around the world. It was done in the Old West,
it was done in Great Britain. Great Britain made great
use of hanging because they're the ones that were responsible
for hanging all of the Nuremberg Trial people. And they
(35:45):
had one guy and the guy was actually the executioner
to the queen and it was a multi generation job.
I think it went back three generations. They wrote a
great book about it. He would fly back and forth
to Germany and he gave detailed notes a three people today,
you know, and he kept a diary of it. But
that's that's meant to break the neck, Okay, Like at
(36:07):
the C C one, C two level where you're you're there,
you know, at the you know, there at the base
of the brain where you're into the primal brain, where
you're shutting down the autonomic nervous system. But many people
that hang themselves and set out to hang themselves, most
(36:29):
of the time they don't break their neck. That's what's
so odd about Epstein, is it Epstein? Epstein's hyoid was broken,
which is generally something you never see it, never see
it in hangings, But you do in strangulation, Yes, you do,
because it's so high up in the neck. It's superior
(36:52):
to the leading edge of the of the noose that
has been fashioned. And not to mention that he had
other fractures in in his uh, the cartilage of his
neck as well the adjacent cartilage, and that that requires
quite a minute force. And even if you were to
tie off on that bed, the second tier, you know,
(37:12):
because there were bunk beds in there, even if you
were to tie off on the top, you couldn't generate
sufficient energy to create that kind of trauma with ripped
up bed sheets or clothing. You know, I don't think
I don't think you could. Michael Biden didn't think you could.
He was present for the autopsy. He said that he
(37:32):
didn't believe. But yet, you know, you've got these people
now with the FBI. I think Bungino and Cash Patel
claimed that they have seen the video and that they've
they've said that this is a that this is a suicide.
I'm not going to believe it until until that video,
which will never be released, would be released. I'm just
(37:53):
not buying it. But yeah, you look at those cases,
compare that to autoroticism. I kind of went for the field.
But with autoroticism, the rush comes about. The way it's
been explained is by the deprivation of oxygen to the brain,
so they will be stimulated many times. In the old days,
(38:14):
when you go out on these cases, Dave, there would
be open pornography, like laying all over the floor and
so that it's in an observable position, so that they're
super stimulated sexually as they're looking at images. And then
to complete the act, they will suspend themselves by the
(38:36):
neck to deprive themselves of oxygen and then touch themselves
at the same time. You actually have people that have
it down to an art where they had one guy
that used velcrow cuffs velcrow bindings between his legs where
he bound himself between his legs, used a dog chain
(38:58):
to tie off on to a door hinge in a
hotel room, and he could move his hands back and
forth between his legs and stimulate himself, and he had
poorn everywhere. The real tragedy in that case, I think
was the poor little housekeeper that had found his body
(39:21):
and daved This lady, God bless her. She was from Guatemala.
She stood maybe five to one. I'll never forget this,
and is actually on Sunday morning, and the bat it
was a micro tail, if you've ever heard of those,
kind of an extended state kind of place. When you
open the door to the hotel room, the first thing
to see on the left is the bathroom like many rooms,
(39:44):
and he's hanging from that hinge and he's nude. And
this poor woman, who could not speak a lick of English,
was terrified. She had her rosary beads with her. And
the reason I know this is that when I got
to the scene, she was huddled on the floor. She
wouldn't sit in a chair. She was just holding her
(40:04):
rosary beads. She was praying, and she was rocking back
and forth. She was like saying, hell, Mary's in Spanish
and rocking back and forth is so terrified her. And
that's actually a response that you get because this is
predominantly a male practice. There's only been a few female
instances of this. One of the first was this case
(40:28):
case out of Germany. It's generally male dependent, and you
will have spouses that have no idea that their better
half is engaged in this behavior, and they come home
and they find an individual suspended and dead worse, and
(40:51):
I did have a case of this. They have a
hidden area that they'll go into. And this one gentleman
that I had was in a garage area where he
had a cubby hole behind the garage where it attached
to the house, and he had, you know, like BTK
had a rat hole where he kept all of his memorabilia. Well,
(41:13):
people that practice autoroticism, they have certain things that really
stimulate them. This guy went into the space and they
couldn't find him. She thought that he had left, and
then they had a bad smell in the house and
they were able to go in and they found him
suspended in there. He's wearing he's wearing fishnet stockings. He's
(41:34):
got a silk plouse on and he's wearing a wig
and he's got this rope around his neck and he
had hung himself in there and there was pouring everywhere,
and this is something that had been ongoing. Another thing
that you find is they love to document to they'll
you know, do videography of himself and go back and
watch it and fantasize. So yeah, that's you know, but
(41:57):
those cases are so rare. They don't happened with great frequency.
You have far more suicides that occur with asphyxiation and
that with a ligature asphyxiation like that. And then of course, Dave,
you know, as you'd mentioned, I can't remember which one
it was, but you had mentioned particularly one serial killer
(42:21):
that had which one John Wayne Gacy? Yeah? Yeah, But
what about you.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Know something that you and I had talked of because
I made a note, but oxygen deprivation in serial killings?
Speaker 1 (42:32):
Yeah? Yeah, what is is it?
Speaker 2 (42:35):
Because it's like a you don't have to have a weapon, Well.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Your hands are your weapon. I don't mean I'm not
being flippant by saying that. I know, but I think
that these people that are involved in serialized homicide like that,
it's a very primal connection that they have to the
victim because they you know, if you stab somebody, there's
chance they're not going to die. All right. But just imagine,
(43:03):
if you view yourself as God almighty, which many of
the serial killers do, you have the power over life
and death, and they can literally chook someone to death
like this. I'll give you a great example. I had
a guy that only could say only he wasn't in
the pantheon of serial killers where you've had, you know,
(43:25):
some people, you know they talk about Bundy, how there's
hundreds and all this. This guy killed six women, certainly
enough to be qualified as a serial killer. But he
used a garrot and he would he would rape these
women and sodomize them. And he used a wire grot,
(43:51):
and so what he would do, talking about the power
of life and death, he would tighten it down on
the back of their neck, and when they were starting
to con he would loosen it and they would start
to breathe again. And he went through this, so you
would see multiple furrows on the neck where he would
readjust the garade while he was doing this. And I
think that a lot of that pathology that you see
(44:13):
with with serial perpetrators has to do with that idea
that they're God's or perceived themselves to be that way.
And you know, I think I shared this maybe on
an earlier episode. Out of all the series of serial
homicides that I worked is four, maybe five I can't
recall now, you know, Dave, I never had a shooter.
(44:36):
I never had a stabber, a cutter. Every single one
of them were as fixial deaths and they were either
with ligature or manual strangulation. These are all individuals that
you know that did this. So it's I think from
a serial standpoint, asphyxiation is something where they gain great
(45:00):
power with it, Dave.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
You know, it didn't occur to me until you were
talking about that of them sending it down person thinks
it's over, and then bringing them back and the terror
that would be struck in the victim all the time.
It just boggles the mind of what people will do
to one another. Yeah, yeah, there's another Yeah, there's another
(45:23):
part of this too, about being exposed to noxious gas.
Is this how does that come into play here?
Speaker 1 (45:33):
Well, Yeah, anything where you're dealing with the replacement of oxygen,
probably what would jump to mind for most people would
be carbon monoxide. Association. And that's as a death investigator,
that's what you're going to run into the most. And
it can happen in I've never seen and I'm not
(45:54):
saying it hasn't happened in my life. In my practice,
it's never happened. I guess you could have homicide application
of noxious gases. I'm sure that that's something that has happened.
I never personally worked one that I was aware of.
Every time I've worked them, they've either been a suicide,
which I've had many generally it involves the car in
(46:17):
the garage with the windows now, or it has been
an accidental death where you know, I had one guy
in particularly that reversed the fan, a family member reversed
the fan on the wall heater so that it actually
(46:37):
blew blew the waste gas into the house and it
killed I think there were six six people in the
house that died, you know, which is you know, beyond
anything that you can imagine. But you know, Dave, probably
(46:58):
the saddest case that I've worked of carbon monoxide. I
had a guy that lived in an old, old home
in New Orleans and it was one of these beautiful
old homes on the outside it didn't look like much,
but the interior was gorgeous. And the folks that have
been to New Orleans have seen some of these homes,
you're going to know precisely what I mean. It's got
(47:18):
this ancient crown molding that goes all the way around
the interior, and the ceilings are all thirteen feet high.
He lived in his house all alone, and he had
a driveway immediately outside of his bedroom, and he had
an old truck that sat out there, and it was
up on blocks, didn't have any tires on it, but
(47:42):
the engine ran. And Dave he had taken an old
fashioned glass cutter, cut a perfect hole in his bedroom
window from the outside, put a pipe into the tailpipe
of this truck, hooked a dryer dryer vent, you know,
(48:02):
one of those expandable hoses that comes off the back
of the dryer to push the exhaust out. Had taped
it down, put it into the window, sealed it with
duct tape, and went and laid down on the bed.
And after he had cranked up the truck and he
had gone into his bedroom and had these huge that
you can imagine. The doors in this room were huge.
(48:23):
There were two and they had gaps, you know, the
old houses always have gaps under the doors, and he'd
taken wet towels and placed them at the base of
the door. And I remember this so vividly going out
to the scene. You know, suicides are always very tragic,
but this one in particular stuck with me. He let
that truck run and it wouldn't take too long because
(48:46):
all that has to happen you cannot have a flow
of air. He knew that the oxygen in the room
has to be replaced with carbon monoxide. And when we
got the scene cleared and I came out and the
guy was laying there, and he had been down for
(49:08):
several days, so he was in the early stages of decomposition. Dave.
There were two black boxes that were laying next to
his body on the bed, one of us left, one
was right, and they were the cremaines of his wife
and daughter who had been killed in a car accident.
(49:31):
And he couldn't bear life any longer without them. And
he told all of his friends about this, you know,
and he had been just as you can imagine. It's
just crushing to him. And he wasn't a very old
fellow and right there on that old bed, he associated
himself with carbon monoxide, the exhaust from an old truck.
(49:54):
It struck a chord with me, as do many of
these cases involved in asphyxia, because there's something so for
some reason, something so very intimate, something so very personal,
about each and every one of them. Sometimes you're just
absent to words to really describe what you've seen. But
(50:16):
we do know this in the world of medical legal
debt investigation, you need to be primed at all times
to be prepared to work these kinds of cases because
they come in all shapes and forms. That's why I
recommend that we stay in the morgue as much as
we can, we learn as much as we can, and
(50:37):
we continue to search out these cases to see where
we can improve as forensic scientists. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
and this is Body Backs
Quality times. But Joseph Scott More, if you've read my
memoir Blood Beneath my Feet, there's a character, and I
say character, real person, my grandmother Curl, who features quite
prominently in Blood and because she did a lot of
(00:28):
my raising, and still to this day, there's not a
day that goes by I do not think about her.
And I literally mean that, and I've got a photo
of she and I on my mantle. But she had
all of these kind of I guess you'd call them
euphemistic terms that are I think they're kind of unique
(00:48):
to the South and particularly to Southern women. And she'd
say all kinds of things, you know that you would
get the drift of it, you would understand it, but
contextually it seemed out of place. And one of one
of her sayings that she would always use, particularly in
(01:13):
the Deep South. Remember, you know, my family's from Louisiana.
We're Delta people. You know, it's always insufferably hot and
you just learn to live with. But if she ever
got too hot, and that was rare because she was
used to heat, she'd always say, I feel like I'm
smothering to death. Well, there's a lot to be taken
(01:37):
away from that. Smothering for most people, you know, means
that your airways being blocked and you can't breathe. In
south it either means that you're really hot or you're
about to cover something with gravy. But today I'm going
(01:58):
to take you on a little and we're going to learn,
hopefully I'll be up to the task about asphyxial deaths.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body batteries smothering.
That's a big part of asphixial deaths, and they come
(02:23):
in all shapes and size as Dave. When you know,
you begin to think about how someone dies, and the
main element to this is the idea of depriving the
victim of oxygen at the end of the day, because
it is our life source, you know, It's what feeds
(02:44):
our bodies, it's what keeps our brain working. Certainly, our
lungs process at our hearts pump out that oxygenated blood.
Our bodies scream for it, and if that's disrupted in
the slightest way, then it's catastrophic. That's one of the reasons, like,
for instance, people that develop pneumonia, and we're talking about
(03:05):
a natural disease here where their lungs get really heavy
and they can't process oxygen the way they normally do.
It's a real, real problem. I think back to COVID
where they were so anxious. It seemed like every third
person was being put on a vent that would show up,
you know, with chess congestion, and of course that's almost
(03:28):
a death sentence. Everybody uses this term DAVE nowadays nuanced
out of all of the ways that people die from
a traumatic situation, I'd have to say that that asphyxia
or asphyxial deaths are nuanced because you can have them
(03:49):
in a variety of categories, and you know, just to
kind of give everybody an idea of some of these things,
there's multiple modes of asphix it. We have everything from
you've mentioned a couple of leaves. We have strangulation, and
that can either be manual, which means you know, by
the hands. You can have ligature as well, and interestingly enough,
(04:16):
physicians many times will call that mechanical asphixiation because you're
using a mechanism to do it. You talked about a
garrot with John Wayne Gacy. Did you know that grotting
was actually a form of capital punishment. The French used
it extensively in their colonies, and they would tie a
(04:37):
person to a chair and they had a big twist
that went on the back of the chair. It was
like a gigantic key that was hooked to ligature and
they turned that thing around and around until and this
is in public, until the person was asphyxiated. You have,
you know, instances of judicial hanging, and of course we
(04:57):
still you know, have people that hang themselves all the time.
It's probably in my little slice of the Pies of
Death Investigator. It was just behind self inflicted gunshot wounds
as a method for people to end their own lives.
I think one of the reasons is is that everybody
owns a belt, everybody has pair of pants, everybody has
(05:19):
a shirt or a towel. I've seen people commit suicide
with a hair dryer before and not plugging it in
and jumping in the bathtub. I'm talking about tying. And
this was actually on an acute psychord. I got called
into this thing and they had this lady was in
acute distress. She was in a manic phase. They were
(05:44):
giving her drugs to calm her down. Things like adavan
and all that sort of stuff. And they left her
with a hair dryer and she went on the other
side of her hospital bed and tied the plug off
onto the top rail, you know those rails that go
up and down, and she wrapped that that hair dryer
around her neck so that when I observed her, the
(06:05):
hair darwer was hanging on the front of her body
like a big pennant, and the cord was wrapped around
her neck and she just sat down. And people don't
realize you don't have to be standing hanging yourself. And
that's a theme. That's a recurrent theme that you have.
So you know, we have you know, strangulations, hangings, hangings
(06:26):
can come about, and then you know, you can have
accidental hangings. Have a couple of those. A young kid
that was trying to entertain his younger siblings because his
mother was working as a prostitute in Atlanta and he
was left with him. He was I think he's this
precious child, was only nine years old, and he sat
(06:47):
his siblings in front of him, and he had a
batman mask that someone had given him, and he had
an old jump rope that he tied inside of a closet,
and this house was really old, so he could hold
on to the jump rope that was anchored on an
(07:08):
old clothes bar in there and swing out of the closet,
bounce off the wall, and swing back in. He kept
telling the kids that he was he was Batman, and
he got looped around that thing and he hung and
six headed in front of his siblings. And the only
reason somebody found out about it is this horrible neighborhood.
(07:31):
There was a little old lady that lived down the
street and she saw a three year old and it's cold,
it's like in February. Saw a three year old walking
down street only wearing a diaper and a t shirt
and she was crying. And she heard this child crying,
this in the middle of the night, and she just
happened to pop out there. And all this little girl
could say was, I can't remember the child's first name,
(07:55):
but he's sleeping. He's sleeping. And so she goes to
the house and kids still hanging, and other kids are
crying in the house. And so you know, I've had
kids on tire swings that have been hung by doing
the cabbage patch on top of the tire where they're
holding onto the rope. I think pendulums around their body,
and that's a type of hanging. Have we drowning fits
(08:18):
into the category of sphyxial death? Really, yes, Drowning is
because you're replacing oxygen with liquid at that point in time.
So that is, in and of itself an asphyxiation anything
that replaces oxygen in the body, and you have substances
out there or chemicals that are out there that are
(08:39):
what are called oxygen deprivaants. I recall having a young
man that was engaged in something we'll talk about in
just a moment even further, he was engaged in autoeroticism,
and he was he was a salesman and he is
his first job. He was a salesman selling halon fire extinguishers,
(09:02):
and they use halin on boats a lot, and it's
odorless and it's colorless, but it grabs the oxygen out
of the air, binds with it, and if there's a fire,
it immediately knocks down the fire. So if you're on
a ship, these things will be deployed and it jumps
right down on the on the burning fire and extinguishes it.
(09:23):
It's not like foam or anything else, and he was
sniffing this stuff in order to get a rush as
he's pleasuring himself, and he was found dead at his
desk from halon. So you have that carbon monoxide. You know,
there's a number of these agents, and then you have
poison agents. There's classic image of some of the Kurdish
(09:45):
Kurdish occupants in Northern Rock where you know Hussein had
used seren gas, you know, an entire village and wiped
them out. Picture of mother and and child, you know,
hunched over. Then you have suffocation. Suffcation comes in a
(10:05):
variety of different different ways. You can have suffocation where
it's almost a positional asphyxia. The case that jumps to
mind for me the most in my career as a
little kid whose mother again was off with her boyfriend,
left her two older children in charge of a ten
(10:31):
month old I think the child was a child got
wrapped up in it, rolled over, got wrapped up in
an afghan, and the mother had not put the side
rail up, had not even attached it, just pushed the
crib to the wall and the child inverted head downward
against the wall and the mattress wrapped in an afghan
(10:53):
and couldn't break free. Well, that's a suffocation, it's positional asphyxia,
and you'll get those. A lot have drug addicts that
fix on the toilet, heroin addicts because it makes you
so sleepy. I've had at least three of those where
they fall off of the toilet and get in between
the wall and the commode and again their chest can't
rise and fall, and they're so debilitated by the drugs
(11:15):
it's just not happening. You have compression asphixia, and that's
anything that prevents your chest from rising and falling. And
believe it or not, there are a lot of people
DAVE that die in motor vehicle accidents. It will call
them mvas die in motor vehicle accidents where yes they're traumatized,
(11:38):
but you get people that are pinned in vehicles and
their chests can't rise and fall, and they will they
will die as a result of compression asphixia. I've had
a number of those over the years. So there's to
talk about asphixial deaths and kind of how they are
examined and identified and that sort of thing is a
(12:02):
big part of our job. And you might see evidence
people always talk to me many times. One of the
big questions they'll ask, particularly if I'm going on television
to cover something, They'll want to know if there were petiki,
And generally that's a that's something that's a common thing
(12:22):
that you see, particularly in individuals being strangled, because the
blood literally backs up into the head, gets into that
soft tissue around the eyes and gorges that area and
those little vessels pop. Do you know who else gets patiki?
I dave that it's not associated with some kind of
(12:44):
asphyxial death. You don't take no idea about it.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
No idea.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
People that are severely constipated, and that's no joke. It
actually happens. They'll get petiki and women in labor, Okay,
women in labor because of the strength. Yeah, And you know,
I have a very distinct memory of Kimmy, you know,
when she gave birth to Noah Loathies many years ago,
and her head, you know, she's turning red as is
(13:10):
going on.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
Does that last after you have the child?
Speaker 1 (13:13):
It dissipates pretty quickly. Kim had one, I remember, and
that's horrible in that beautiful moment, but I remember wanting
to wanting to look at her eyes because I had
heard that for years and looked at her, looked at
her eyes, and she had one tiny little PATIKII. I
(13:34):
didn't mention it to her because I thought that it
would rob the moment.
Speaker 2 (13:37):
All these years, Kim has told all of her friends,
you know, right after I had Noah, Joe was just
staring so lovingly in my eyes. It's like the moment
that I treasured the most. And oh it's a beautiful moments.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
You just can't you just can't escape at many times, Dave.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
You know, with I've talked about all these kind of
modes that are involved in asphyxia. It's such a massive
category of death. I don't know that many people even
think about it at all, certainly, and I don't want
people to think about it. Let me think about it,
you know. I don't want to burden people with I
(14:35):
want to educate people. But you know, this is type
of stuff that we think about, you know, in death investigation,
and you know, you have all of these modalities that
will occur where in essence, you're depriving an individual of
(14:55):
oxygen and there's essentially m four categories where that will fit,
you know, that fit into this idea of of of
asphyxial death. So you've gotten multiple modes, but there's four categories.
(15:16):
Number one is compression of the neck. Compression compression of
the neck. It takes on a variety of presentations. So
we've we've got hanging. Then you've got non suspended ligature strangulation.
Most of the time that's going to come from a
homicide where people are, you know, using a ligature to
(15:39):
actually strangulate the person. You can have manual strangulation, and
manual is different from ligature. Manual is actually wrapping your
hands around somebody. Certain there's two types of man well,
there's actually probably multiple, but let me just give you three.
(16:01):
With compression of the neck, so if you think about
like an old movie where a guy's got on a
pair of black gloves and are approaching somebody with two
hands and they're coming at their neck, that's called throttling.
And you can either do that anteriorly on the front,
or you can do it posteriorly from the rear. You know,
think about all the creepy movies you've seen over the
(16:23):
years where some dark stranger comes up behind somebody and
grabs them by the neck and kind of chokes them
out like that. Then you have what's called a sea
clamp where an individual will come up and externally grab
the trachia. Of course it's external, but they grab the
trachia and they squeeze the trachia and that's where the
(16:43):
thyroid cartilage is. And this area of this kind of
cartilaginous body in the center where you know your tongue
is attached to the hyoid. You've got an Adam's apple there,
and they'll squeeze down on that particular area.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
It's different for men and women when you're talking about
that specific area.
Speaker 1 (17:04):
Oh, because I said Adam's apple. No, it's not really.
Women don't have as pronounced of the cartilaginous body that
gives the appearance of quote unquote the atoms apple. And
that's generally a pretty distinctive marker, you know, for men
versus males versus females, something you look for. And then
(17:30):
we have you know, what you may have seen on
in wrestling and with cops where they'll use a choke hold.
And the choke hold is where you know you actually
if you binge your arm and it creates a v
and you put the person's trache right in the crook
of your arm, and you're squeezing, squeezing, squeezing them like that,
(17:53):
and you're and it's not just the airway that's been compromised.
It's also the vessels that are supplying the brain. So
you've got this this double action that's going on relative
to this, you know, the crushing of the airway or
the occlusion of the airway from external pressure and also
clamping down of the vessels.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
When we see that, you know, in movies or TV
or professional wrestling. Yeah, is how long does it take?
I mean, when you get somebody in that kind of
sleeper hole, and is it reversible? I mean, if you
hold it for just a few moments, the person goes out,
you let them go and they return right. Yeah, but
how long? I mean, I'm not trying to figure out
(18:33):
how to kill somebody. I'm just curious. Is there a
point of no return? Or is it like standard or
different for everybody?
Speaker 1 (18:39):
Standard? It's not standard, it's it's different from everybody because
a lot of people, let's say you, well, let's just
take an obvious example. You've got a grown man, it's
got a well muscled neck. Compare that to a small
child or a dominiontive person. You know, it's it's more.
And I'll give you a great example, and it says
(19:00):
actually goes to hanging. But if you ever take the
time to look at the conspirators that were all hung
in the old Navy shipyard of relative to Abraham Lincoln,
they hung them all at the same time. Okay, there's
(19:20):
one guy that's hanging in the captured image and his
name is Louis Payne, and all of them to a person,
with the exception of Louis pain had their head turned
to the side, which means that it snapped their neck.
Louis Payne, if you see pictures of him in life,
(19:41):
and some people say that he looks like a guest model,
you'll see what I'm talking about. Just go back and
google his name. Louis Payne. Okay, he's got a really
he's very young. He's got a well muscled neck. When
they dropped him off that scaffolding, his neck didn't break.
He sat there and essentially it's fixated as a result
of ligature around his neck because his neck was so robust.
(20:03):
And you can see him standing or hanging fully erect
you know, like this while everybody else their neck is
snapped and leaned over to one side or forward, and
they're all deceased. He ain't dead. And that really strikes me,
you know when I see that, and we're talking about
the atomical structures of the neck, how long can somebody last?
(20:25):
First off, you don't try it. No one should ever
try a sleep or hole quote unquote, because you're compromising
not just the airway, but you're compromising the croatis which
lead up to the brain. And any compromise of that
oxygen flow to the brain is you're in an unrecoverable
flat spin. You're going to wind up on a vent
(20:46):
in an ICU because you're absent oxygen. Cops they've tried
to keep cops from using it for years and years.
They used to use a nightstick as well, they would,
and they also an arm bar, and they got away
from that a long time ago. Where the bar of
the forearm, if you imagine your form is like a bar.
(21:08):
It's placed against the anterior neck and it creates that
that compression on the neck where oxygen is not you know,
making it up to the brain. There was I think
it was what was it where they called a p
twenty four. I think p. Twenty four is the nightstick
cops used to use, and they had a lot of utility.
It had a separate handle on the side and they
(21:30):
could take it and use it like this. One of
the things they would do. It's kind of a natural reaction.
They would take that old nightstick that had the handle
coming out of the side and they'd hook somebody with
it and then put their foot on the back of
their neck and pull up to get them to comply.
And of course that's you're asking for trouble, you know
(21:52):
when that happens. The neck is very fragile, the airways
very fragile. So you've got a variety of these, you know, everywhere,
from compression the neck to obstruction of the airway. You know,
it's why Mama tells you to chew your food. I've
had kids that have choked to death, you know, on
hot dogs. I know it sounds like a fantasy or
(22:13):
you know, an old wives tale, but no, it does.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
Happen to dreams.
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right, and the airway is cleared
in that particular case. So anything, and you know how
many times Dave us a dad me as a dad
me as a grandfather, you is a grandfather, have you
said the following words? Get that out of your mouth?
And then it's generally followed up by you don't know
(22:38):
where that's been, you know, And but you know, kids
will they explore the world through their senses and taste
and tactile, and they'll put stuff in their mouth. I
had a colleague of mine that worked a case involving
a golf ball where a kid had stuck a golf
ball and they couldn't clear the airway and they died.
I had a kid that choked to death on a
German cockroach in Atlanta, and when they tried to establish
(23:04):
the airway, they were trying to intubate the child. I'll
never forget this case as long as I lived. And
that was in a fhixial death. The cockroach had crawled
into the child's mouth, the house was infested with him.
He had gotten in the child's airway and child began
to choke. Child was I think like eighteen months old.
And when the EMTs got there, they tried to intubate
(23:26):
the kid, and they destroyed the cockroach but left it
in place. And so when we dissected the neck, we
found the thorax, the little intente the legs, and it
was one of the most bizarre cases that I had
worked because it was so horribly tragic.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
But that's actually an his fixial death.
Speaker 1 (23:49):
It is an asphixial death. And so you know, after
you get through those two categories of obstruction and compression,
you have compression of the chest, which I kind of mentioned.
You know, if you have so much weight on top
of the chest that the chest can't rise. And father
(24:12):
there's actually a famous one of the famous executions from
the Salem witch trial where the guy refused to admit
that he was a witch because he wasn't he'd been
found guilty, and classic line, ultimate hero line. They began,
the men of the community. They tied him down and
(24:33):
began to put stones on his chest, and the preacher
that was standing there said, do you confess to being
a witch? No, add more weight. They'd add more stones,
and these these huge stones. It took like three guys
to put them upon them. Imagine like a millstone, that's
about how big it was. And they got to the
last one and the guy that was running the show said,
(24:58):
will you now confess to be in a witch? And
he looked up and he said more weight, more weight,
and that's compression of the chest. And you can find
people that will get in all kinds of odd positions
that lead to their death. That's a great example of it.
(25:19):
I'd mentioned, you know, drug addicts that fall off of toilets,
people in car accidents, this sort of thing. And I
think finally, probably a very broad category is this idea.
And you could say that all of them are this.
But when we begin to talk about exclusion of oxygen,
and that is the environment in which you normally dwell,
(25:41):
something has happened within this environment to deprive you of oxygen.
One of the things that one of to terrifying things
is like grain silos. Grain silows are, first off, they're
very volatile, they can explode because of the gas in there.
But you also have individuals that, for a number of reasons,
will asphyxiate grain silos absence of oxygen, also inhalation of
(26:05):
the dust over a protracted period of time. I had
a guy, We had guys in New Orleans. There were
whole generations of families and this is not necessarily the
same thing, but just giving you an idea, there were
whole generations of families that worked as sand blasters Dave
and they sand blasted the Huey P. Long Bridge. It's
the longest road trestle in the world. And there's an
(26:28):
adjacent bridge that goes over the Mississippi River and the
thing is made out of steel and it's a constant,
ongoing job because the environments so harsh, and they would
always be sand blasted. Well, these guys, when we would
get them and they would be relatively young men, would
know their history. They developed something called silicosis, which is
(26:49):
deposits of sand in their lungs, and so when you
ran your hand over the surface of lungs, it feels
very grand. And if you slice through that tissue, you
can actually see the little grains of sand that hadn't embedded.
So that's compromising the airway and it leads to an
(27:10):
exclusion of oxygen. Probably the most striking thing though, is when,
and we were mentioning this off air, you know, there
was PSA back in the sixties, and I don't know
if anybody remembers this, but they used to have these
horrible PSAs that would come out just terrifying you and
(27:32):
for good reason. And you hear children in the background
saying three, two, one ready or not here I come,
and it's the disembodied voices. And it was in some
vacant lot where they'd film this in New York and
it would simply say and I think it said don't.
And there were refrigerators that were out there, and what
(27:56):
would happen In the old days, these things didn't have
magnetic locks. Still, go to restaurants and you'll see the
big walking coolers that those handles that they pull on
those things they lock from the outside. Okay, now, now
they have an escape button that you can press inside
and it'll disengage. But these old refrigerators, kids would get
(28:17):
inside of them to hide. And the problem is is
that while inside any oxygen that's in there, the child's
body is displacing that oxygen in cubic inches and the interior.
When you go to buy refrigerator, you look at whatever
store you're going to and they'll give you the interior
(28:38):
size and cubic inches that's how much air you have.
And then once you've taken two or three breasts and
you've expelled carbon dioxide into that environment, there's nothing left
to breathe and of course, one of the worst things
that I can certainly imagine is being locked in what
(29:01):
would become you're coffin in life. I think we as
a race, have, the human race, have tried to find
(29:26):
for years and years the most efficient way of depriving
someone of their life. We don't want it to be
messy or nasty, and for years and still to this date,
there are countries that still employ hanging as a means
(29:47):
to killing people. I saw an image from I can't
remember specifically which Middle Eastern country it was from a
few years back, where they had people tied to a
bridge with nooses and had them on top of a bus.
(30:09):
It's one of the most horrific things I've ever seen.
And these people are there with the ropes hanging loosely,
They're looking around, their hands are tied behind their back,
and the bus begins to slowly move and their legs
are trying to stay up with the movement of the bus.
And finally the bus pulls away and you've got multiple
(30:31):
people that are suddenly hung in spot there where everybody
can see. And of course there was a crowd that
had had joined to watch the spectacle. You know, asphyxiation
has been something that is on the menu. I think
for us as people for years and years. People knew
(30:51):
forever that if you can prevent oxygen uptake in a subject,
that it's going to lead to death.
Speaker 2 (31:01):
Let me ask you about a couple of things that
I have made note of over the last several years
in the deaths of some celebrities. Joke sure with what
has been called or is called autoerotic asphyxia.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
What is it?
Speaker 2 (31:17):
David Carriden comes to mind, and Michael Hudgens from an
excess the group, But there are others I'm sure that
have died from.
Speaker 1 (31:25):
What is it?
Speaker 2 (31:26):
And how do people die?
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Well, we have to first look at what the word
auto means itself. Okay, So auto erotic having to do
with sex, okay, and then asphyxia, and it's not meant
to be The practice is not intended to in someone's life.
(31:52):
It's there to enhance sexual pleasure and sensation. I think
that by the time someone gets to that point, I
don't know that many times people are afflicted by this.
They can't receive sexual pleasure any other way. It's something
that's done alone by themselves, you know, out of sight
(32:17):
of everybody else. And what's fascinating is that the cases
I've worked, and there's not a lot of them. A
lot of people sold people in investigations a bill of
goods when they started. There are seminars out there where
you can go and learn about the investigation of autoroticism.
(32:41):
And why I have no idea because it's not something
that happens every day. You know, once you go over
in a generalized course, you kind of get the drift
of what's going on. And I always thought that it
was just ridiculous, and it became to the point where
it's very salacious. I think that, over the course of
my career have actually genuinely handled four and that's over
(33:05):
a twenty year career, and so it's not it's not
as prevalent. I think that it's probably become more prevalent
because people talk about it, and you've got you know,
curiosity seekers out there that hear about it and they
want to experience it. Please nobody, try to.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Let me ask you something, Joe, because this kind of
comes to mind, all right. I wonder how many times
somebody was labeled as suicide when it was something other
than a suicide. It was trying to achieve this type
of joy and ended up in death. What brings that
(33:47):
to mind is the death of Michael Hutchins, where some
people said it was a suicide and it has been
pointed out, no, it was autopia.
Speaker 1 (33:54):
And he's he's again. When Hutchins died, he was not
a not a full suspension. Okay, he was actually kind
of leaning forward on his knees with literature, you know,
around his neck.
Speaker 2 (34:07):
Okay, wait a minute, now, is that a common because
that's something that came up with Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
Yeah, mm hmmm is that common?
Speaker 2 (34:17):
Not not touching me? And what about wait a minute,
I do not I don't mean to shotgun this, okay,
and I apologize, but in my mind's I am thinking
when I've thought of hanging, it's always been hanging right,
suspended in the air. But Epstein, Hutchins, Robin Williams.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah yeah, Robin actually on a door. Yeah yeah, he did.
And you don't have to be that. That's why you know,
we draw a line. Hanging is kind of a it's
not a good term. I like suspension. If you if
you're gonna DeLine it, if you're gonna use the word hang,
(35:00):
suspension hanging versus supported hanging. And it kind of you
begin to under it again there's that word as nuanced.
You don't have to be, you know, someone that is
suspended and hanging like a judicial hanging off of scaffolding.
And the purpose of judicial hangings, if you will, back then,
was to break the neck. And for some reason, you know,
(35:22):
like the executioner always puts the nod on the left
side of the neck. This is a practice that's done
all around the world. It was done in the Old West,
it was done in Great Britain. Great Britain made great
use of hanging because they're the ones that were responsible
for hanging all of the Nuremberg Trial people. And they
(35:45):
had one guy and the guy was actually the executioner
to the queen and it was a multi generation job.
I think it went back three generations. They wrote a
great book about it. He would fly back and forth
to Germany and he gave detailed notes a three people today,
you know, and he kept a diary of it. But
that's that's meant to break the neck, Okay, Like at
(36:07):
the C C one, C two level where you're you're there,
you know, at the you know, there at the base
of the brain where you're into the primal brain, where
you're shutting down the autonomic nervous system. But many people
that hang themselves and set out to hang themselves, most
(36:29):
of the time they don't break their neck. That's what's
so odd about Epstein, is it Epstein? Epstein's hyoid was broken,
which is generally something you never see it, never see
it in hangings, But you do in strangulation, Yes, you do,
because it's so high up in the neck. It's superior
(36:52):
to the leading edge of the of the noose that
has been fashioned. And not to mention that he had
other fractures in in his uh, the cartilage of his
neck as well the adjacent cartilage, and that that requires
quite a minute force. And even if you were to
tie off on that bed, the second tier, you know,
(37:12):
because there were bunk beds in there, even if you
were to tie off on the top, you couldn't generate
sufficient energy to create that kind of trauma with ripped
up bed sheets or clothing. You know, I don't think
I don't think you could. Michael Biden didn't think you could.
He was present for the autopsy. He said that he
(37:32):
didn't believe. But yet, you know, you've got these people
now with the FBI. I think Bungino and Cash Patel
claimed that they have seen the video and that they've
they've said that this is a that this is a suicide.
I'm not going to believe it until until that video,
which will never be released, would be released. I'm just
(37:53):
not buying it. But yeah, you look at those cases,
compare that to autoroticism. I kind of went for the field.
But with autoroticism, the rush comes about. The way it's
been explained is by the deprivation of oxygen to the brain,
so they will be stimulated many times. In the old days,
(38:14):
when you go out on these cases, Dave, there would
be open pornography, like laying all over the floor and
so that it's in an observable position, so that they're
super stimulated sexually as they're looking at images. And then
to complete the act, they will suspend themselves by the
(38:36):
neck to deprive themselves of oxygen and then touch themselves
at the same time. You actually have people that have
it down to an art where they had one guy
that used velcrow cuffs velcrow bindings between his legs where
he bound himself between his legs, used a dog chain
(38:58):
to tie off on to a door hinge in a
hotel room, and he could move his hands back and
forth between his legs and stimulate himself, and he had
poorn everywhere. The real tragedy in that case, I think
was the poor little housekeeper that had found his body
(39:21):
and daved This lady, God bless her. She was from Guatemala.
She stood maybe five to one. I'll never forget this,
and is actually on Sunday morning, and the bat it
was a micro tail, if you've ever heard of those,
kind of an extended state kind of place. When you
open the door to the hotel room, the first thing
to see on the left is the bathroom like many rooms,
(39:44):
and he's hanging from that hinge and he's nude. And
this poor woman, who could not speak a lick of English,
was terrified. She had her rosary beads with her. And
the reason I know this is that when I got
to the scene, she was huddled on the floor. She
wouldn't sit in a chair. She was just holding her
(40:04):
rosary beads. She was praying, and she was rocking back
and forth. She was like saying, hell, Mary's in Spanish
and rocking back and forth is so terrified her. And
that's actually a response that you get because this is
predominantly a male practice. There's only been a few female
instances of this. One of the first was this case
(40:28):
case out of Germany. It's generally male dependent, and you
will have spouses that have no idea that their better
half is engaged in this behavior, and they come home
and they find an individual suspended and dead worse, and
(40:51):
I did have a case of this. They have a
hidden area that they'll go into. And this one gentleman
that I had was in a garage area where he
had a cubby hole behind the garage where it attached
to the house, and he had, you know, like BTK
had a rat hole where he kept all of his memorabilia. Well,
(41:13):
people that practice autoroticism, they have certain things that really
stimulate them. This guy went into the space and they
couldn't find him. She thought that he had left, and
then they had a bad smell in the house and
they were able to go in and they found him
suspended in there. He's wearing he's wearing fishnet stockings. He's
(41:34):
got a silk plouse on and he's wearing a wig
and he's got this rope around his neck and he
had hung himself in there and there was pouring everywhere,
and this is something that had been ongoing. Another thing
that you find is they love to document to they'll
you know, do videography of himself and go back and
watch it and fantasize. So yeah, that's you know, but
(41:57):
those cases are so rare. They don't happened with great frequency.
You have far more suicides that occur with asphyxiation and
that with a ligature asphyxiation like that. And then of course, Dave,
you know, as you'd mentioned, I can't remember which one
it was, but you had mentioned particularly one serial killer
(42:21):
that had which one John Wayne Gacy? Yeah? Yeah, But
what about you.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Know something that you and I had talked of because
I made a note, but oxygen deprivation in serial killings?
Speaker 1 (42:32):
Yeah? Yeah, what is is it?
Speaker 2 (42:35):
Because it's like a you don't have to have a weapon, Well.
Speaker 1 (42:40):
Your hands are your weapon. I don't mean I'm not
being flippant by saying that. I know, but I think
that these people that are involved in serialized homicide like that,
it's a very primal connection that they have to the
victim because they you know, if you stab somebody, there's
chance they're not going to die. All right. But just imagine,
(43:03):
if you view yourself as God almighty, which many of
the serial killers do, you have the power over life
and death, and they can literally chook someone to death
like this. I'll give you a great example. I had
a guy that only could say only he wasn't in
the pantheon of serial killers where you've had, you know,
(43:25):
some people, you know they talk about Bundy, how there's
hundreds and all this. This guy killed six women, certainly
enough to be qualified as a serial killer. But he
used a garrot and he would he would rape these
women and sodomize them. And he used a wire grot,
(43:51):
and so what he would do, talking about the power
of life and death, he would tighten it down on
the back of their neck, and when they were starting
to con he would loosen it and they would start
to breathe again. And he went through this, so you
would see multiple furrows on the neck where he would
readjust the garade while he was doing this. And I
think that a lot of that pathology that you see
(44:13):
with with serial perpetrators has to do with that idea
that they're God's or perceived themselves to be that way.
And you know, I think I shared this maybe on
an earlier episode. Out of all the series of serial
homicides that I worked is four, maybe five I can't
recall now, you know, Dave, I never had a shooter.
(44:36):
I never had a stabber, a cutter. Every single one
of them were as fixial deaths and they were either
with ligature or manual strangulation. These are all individuals that
you know that did this. So it's I think from
a serial standpoint, asphyxiation is something where they gain great
(45:00):
power with it, Dave.
Speaker 2 (45:02):
You know, it didn't occur to me until you were
talking about that of them sending it down person thinks
it's over, and then bringing them back and the terror
that would be struck in the victim all the time.
It just boggles the mind of what people will do
to one another. Yeah, yeah, there's another Yeah, there's another
(45:23):
part of this too, about being exposed to noxious gas.
Is this how does that come into play here?
Speaker 1 (45:33):
Well, Yeah, anything where you're dealing with the replacement of oxygen,
probably what would jump to mind for most people would
be carbon monoxide. Association. And that's as a death investigator,
that's what you're going to run into the most. And
it can happen in I've never seen and I'm not
(45:54):
saying it hasn't happened in my life. In my practice,
it's never happened. I guess you could have homicide application
of noxious gases. I'm sure that that's something that has happened.
I never personally worked one that I was aware of.
Every time I've worked them, they've either been a suicide,
which I've had many generally it involves the car in
(46:17):
the garage with the windows now, or it has been
an accidental death where you know, I had one guy
in particularly that reversed the fan, a family member reversed
the fan on the wall heater so that it actually
(46:37):
blew blew the waste gas into the house and it
killed I think there were six six people in the
house that died, you know, which is you know, beyond
anything that you can imagine. But you know, Dave, probably
(46:58):
the saddest case that I've worked of carbon monoxide. I
had a guy that lived in an old, old home
in New Orleans and it was one of these beautiful
old homes on the outside it didn't look like much,
but the interior was gorgeous. And the folks that have
been to New Orleans have seen some of these homes,
you're going to know precisely what I mean. It's got
(47:18):
this ancient crown molding that goes all the way around
the interior, and the ceilings are all thirteen feet high.
He lived in his house all alone, and he had
a driveway immediately outside of his bedroom, and he had
an old truck that sat out there, and it was
up on blocks, didn't have any tires on it, but
(47:42):
the engine ran. And Dave he had taken an old
fashioned glass cutter, cut a perfect hole in his bedroom
window from the outside, put a pipe into the tailpipe
of this truck, hooked a dryer dryer vent, you know,
(48:02):
one of those expandable hoses that comes off the back
of the dryer to push the exhaust out. Had taped
it down, put it into the window, sealed it with
duct tape, and went and laid down on the bed.
And after he had cranked up the truck and he
had gone into his bedroom and had these huge that
you can imagine. The doors in this room were huge.
(48:23):
There were two and they had gaps, you know, the
old houses always have gaps under the doors, and he'd
taken wet towels and placed them at the base of
the door. And I remember this so vividly going out
to the scene. You know, suicides are always very tragic,
but this one in particular stuck with me. He let
that truck run and it wouldn't take too long because
(48:46):
all that has to happen you cannot have a flow
of air. He knew that the oxygen in the room
has to be replaced with carbon monoxide. And when we
got the scene cleared and I came out and the
guy was laying there, and he had been down for
(49:08):
several days, so he was in the early stages of decomposition. Dave.
There were two black boxes that were laying next to
his body on the bed, one of us left, one
was right, and they were the cremaines of his wife
and daughter who had been killed in a car accident.
(49:31):
And he couldn't bear life any longer without them. And
he told all of his friends about this, you know,
and he had been just as you can imagine. It's
just crushing to him. And he wasn't a very old
fellow and right there on that old bed, he associated
himself with carbon monoxide, the exhaust from an old truck.
(49:54):
It struck a chord with me, as do many of
these cases involved in asphyxia, because there's something so for
some reason, something so very intimate, something so very personal,
about each and every one of them. Sometimes you're just
absent to words to really describe what you've seen. But
(50:16):
we do know this in the world of medical legal
debt investigation, you need to be primed at all times
to be prepared to work these kinds of cases because
they come in all shapes and forms. That's why I
recommend that we stay in the morgue as much as
we can, we learn as much as we can, and
(50:37):
we continue to search out these cases to see where
we can improve as forensic scientists. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
and this is Body Backs
Host
Nancy Grace
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