August 17, 2025 • 59 mins
Arsonists set fires for may different reasons; revenge, money, cover-up a Crime, pyrophilia. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss how the crime is investigated, the evidence left behind, and why burning up the scene of a crime to get rid of evidence, often creates the evidence needed to catch the perp.
Transcript Highlights
00:00:00.00 Introduction - Fire
00:05:08.55 Getting hurt at fire scenes
00:09:59.88 Four sources
00:15:06.98 Watching fire
00:20:04.78 Arsonists use fire to make money, cover up a crime, render down a body
00:25:09.86 Somebody laying on their back, clothing on back many time is intact
00:30:17.15 Using fire for revenge
00:35:16.22 Memory of first time faced with a burned body in morgue
00:39:58.89 Linear surgical incisions to prevent body from splitting open
00:45:05.58 Most people die from smoke inhalation
00:50:17.55 Being short of breath, sad way to die
00:55:02.50 Treating the body with respect
00:59:47.19 Personal story, conclusion
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quality dams. But Joseph's gotten more. You know, I don't
really know how how man originally discovered fire. We always
have this image in our minds. I don't know about
you guys. I have it of you know, these kind
(00:23):
of chromagnum looking creatures that are sitting around in a
cave and all of a sudden, one of them, you know,
strikes a rock against another rock, and suddenly they discover,
you know, fire. I've always thought that maybe it was
a lightning strike, perhaps this kind of natural manifestation, maybe
(00:44):
from the sweet Lord above. Something caught on fire, and
they were amazed by it, and they took it and
they kept it, and it provided so much for them.
It provided it split the night at that point in time,
no artificial light. Suddenly they had naturally occurring light where
they could see in the darkness those things that were
out there. Suddenly they had access to warmth when it
(01:09):
was very, very cold. Can you imagine being in the
midst of the ice age or at the end of
the last ice age, and you're freezing to death, but
yet you have this cloe that you can sit around
and rub your hands in front of. They learned how
to cook, perhaps with fire. But now in the modern context,
(01:36):
fire represents many other things. We can manufacture things with it,
we can fuel things, industry runs on it. But in
my world fire fire generally comes down to this, something
is being destroyed that may be a criminal otherwise would
(02:00):
not want to be found today on bodybags, We're going
to have kind of a brief primer, a brief discussion
on fire and arson. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this
is bodybags. Dave. The scaredest I have ever been at
(02:26):
any type of scene. For me, this is me personally. Okay,
let me run down this. Let me break this down
to you. Where cases not where there was an active
shooter still running around, or there was an angry crowd
or something like that. Because I had my share of those.
It was always involving structure fires. First off, since I
(02:49):
was a little boy, I've always been fascinated by firefighters,
not cops. I was not one of those kids that
wanted to be a cop. I always loved firefighters and
when I was little, I don't know if you remember this.
Do you remember Texico fire Chief? It was like the
gas they used to have Texico fire Chief. Texico used
(03:10):
to sell firefighter helmets, and they were old fashioned helmets,
and you could get the deluxe model that had a
radio that you could.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Put out inside.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
My uncle, my uncle, who I regard in my life
as the closest thing I really ever had to a father,
he bought that from me, the most treasure gifts I
ever had. And I always liked firefighters. I liked firefighters
as a death investigator because firefighters are fascinating in the
sense that they don't it doesn't matter to them if
(03:42):
they get dirty, they don't care, and they've always got
some new piece of equipment that they want to something
like that. It's like, I could have the worst decomposed
body in the world that is down a ravine and
there's a whole group of them over there saying, dog,
you don't have to go down on that hill. We've
you know, we'll send Jim and Bob down there and
(04:03):
we'll you know, we'll fashion this new kind of knot
and we'll put them, you know, put them in the
basket and we'll bring them up, or we'll dig out
the hole around this area for you, you know. And
it was always amazing, and you know, the I'd always
have friends that were police officers out there, and they
just be kind of standing back because you know, firefighters
and cops have this interesting relationship. And the cops were like,
(04:25):
I'm not going near that. I'm not doing it. You
know firefighters, you know, of course, the old adage about
them is you know they and when everybody else is
running away, they're running in right. And so this world
that around fire has always been terrifying me. You know,
the only times I've ever been injured at crom scenes
have been at fire scenes. I've had wow, uh okay,
(04:48):
here's something cool, a little trivia about Morgan. I actually
had a beam fall and strike me in the head
and it was still on fire. It had at it
had like a small flame on it, and the whole
thing had burning embers on it. Wow, completely doused it.
(05:09):
I had a nail go through my boot into my foot,
really old pair of boots. By the way, I should
have I should have thrown away. And I actually had
electricity arc off of a puddle of water onto my
foot and I'm not tingling in my leg and I
(05:30):
fell backwards. It stunned me for a second. And that
was because there was an electrical line and that hadn't
cut the power yet and they pulled the line down.
So that's as close to death as I've really come.
I've had shots fired over my head, but it was not.
There's something about being in that world, that world of
(05:51):
all that remains of a building, a structure, a car.
There's kind of this infamous bridge down in New Orleans
called the Huey P. Long Bridge, named after the governor
from back in the thirties and Dave. The scene was
really narrow. It had two lanes on either side. And
as a matter of fact, the bridge is this gigantic
(06:13):
metal structure, steel structure, and their entire families that have
made their living off of this bridge as sand blasters,
because the thing always has to be referred And in
the middle of this bridge, going across the river at
one point in time, there is a train track, and
the train track also consists of the world's longest train trestle,
(06:38):
and it starts way on one side of Mississippi River
and it continues onto what they call the West Bank.
And I don't know if it's still the longest or not,
but there was a guy that was in a corvette
that was driving over the top of it racing somebody
on the scene, and these lanes are really narrow, and Dave,
he hit the curve on one side and this is
hundreds of feet in the air above the Mississippi River
(07:01):
down below. He hit the curb, rolled the thing over
and it's when they had those they were like the
new total fiberglass bodies on the scene. Well, I got
there and the whole thing had been engulfed, and it's
windy up there. It's like really windy, and I thought
that I thought that everything was out. The fire was doused,
(07:21):
and dude, I got adjacent to the scene and all
the cops, I mean all the firefighters are wearing respirators, right,
and they were like looking at me. And I walked
up and I found out why they were wearing respirators,
because this fiberglass was burning in there. And dude, they
had to take me back and the EMTs had to
put me on oxygen because I was innolating this scene
(07:42):
or inhaling I'm sorry, inhaling this gas coming off of
this or the product coming off of it. It's a
weird world. You walk into any kind of home that
has been destroyed. And I may have mentioned this before
on body bags, but you walk in to it, and
as a death investigator who knows a little bit about
(08:05):
arson very little, I walk into that environment and everything
looks black and charred. I can't make out detail. I've
even lost bodies inside of houses because I can't tell
where the ceiling that has caved in or the furniture
that is burned down. I can't delineate between the body
(08:27):
that is also charged that is in there. It's a
weird kind of It's the most unique environment that you
ever go into. And people often forget about arson investigators
as being part of the forensic community. You know, they
think I don't know what they think about arsen But
to me, they are at the top of the heap
because they have to know something about everything. Most of
(08:50):
them are firefighters and cops. They testified. They are top
end experts in their field. They understand chemistry, they understand physics,
and they also understand how to run a homicide investigation,
and so their skill set is something that most people
(09:12):
don't understand, and they are amazed. I love talking to
them because I learn. I just try to keep my
mouth shut, which is hard for me, keep my eye
and my ears open and just listen. But you know,
one of the rudimentary things that you have to learn
is kind of the nature of fire. And we don't normally,
you don't give fire much consideration. You've seen pictures of
(09:34):
me and my family. We go out even in the
wintertime on our boat and there's an island not too
far from where we keep our boat, and we take
firewood out there and just build a big bonfire and
sit around bonfire. Most people don't think about that. What
is fire? What's the nature of it? You know, kind
of how it works. So fire itself has four components
(09:55):
to it, and so let me just kind of run
these down to you. You have to have a fuel source, okay,
and sometimes the fuel source can be rolled into what's
also referred to as accelerants. That that's like if you
let's just say you're using a charcoal grill. All right, Well,
the charcoal in there is fuel, right, but in order
(10:16):
to initiate that charcoal into a sustainable fire or have
it burned, you have to put lighter fluid on it
most of the time. All right. I know that there's
the brands out there that say you don't need it,
but that's how they yeah, they lie. So you get
it started like that, and so the thing, the thing burns,
But you also have to strike off a match or
use a lighter to get the thing initiated. Well, you
(10:39):
have to have fuel in order for that to happen. No,
it seems simplistic. You have to have heat. And what
I mean by that is heat is a product of
an actual burning fire. So that's heat is one of
the components. You have to have oxygen. Remember how many
times have we heard about there being a fire in
(11:00):
a location where the fire literally runs out of oxygen
in the room and completely consumes it and so it dies.
All right, that's the reason. For instance, like with if
you've ever heard of a halon fire extinguisher that you
use them on boats, you can't see it. It's it's invisible,
(11:21):
actually really autoerotic case involving halon halon canister as a
guy was inhaling this stuff, and what it does is
it binds with the oxygen and it's an oxygen deprivant,
and so it just knocks the oxygen down. So you
have to have oxygen, all right, and then you have
to have an uninhibited chemical reaction. And this chemical reaction
(11:46):
has to be ongoing. If you think about going to
chemistry class and you're demonstrating and you see this immediate
reaction where something bubbles over, or you have this reactive
change in color or whatever you're working on in the lab,
that's kind of a one off kind of thing. But
you think about fire, fire is truly an ongoing chemical
(12:07):
experiment because it has to be sustained and if you're
absent any of these components, it's going to go out.
I mean, just think about it. Back to the idea
of heat. If a fire dies out is there's an
insufficient amount of heat being generated in order to burn
the fuel that's existing there. So those are essentially the
(12:30):
four main components of fire, and without that, you don't
really have a fire per se. Now you might get
like a flashover where an individual might be in a
room and I've actually had this happen day where they
come in and arsonist has come in and they spread
(12:53):
gasoline all in a room. And this one particular future
rocket scientist did this with a couple of gallons of gas.
The windows and the doors were closed in the room,
and this idiot strikes a match and of course it
kills him. But after it burned off, you know, that
(13:13):
gas that was on the floor and everything, it was
non sustainable. First off, the room that he was in
had a marble tile floor. Oh, my goodness's not going
to burn. H Yeah, and the ceiling was it had asbestos.
Uh So, I don't know where this guy did his
(13:34):
research or whatever, but it didn't it didn't burn, you know,
just it was not sustainable, but it killed him. So
you know, you have to be in a uh this
kind of sustainable environment for it to actually continue to
thrive in this environment because absent that, you're you're not
going to You're just not going to have the end
(13:57):
product of a fire that is burning before you know where.
You think about sitting around a campfire, and one of
the some of the most fun you'll ever have at a
campfire is actually taking a piece of wood when it's
beginning to die down and placing the foot on and
you're sustaining that, You're sustaining that uninhibited chemical reaction and
it's burning up before you. The fuel is literally vaporizing
(14:18):
in the air before you. You're receiving heat off of
you're receiving comfort, You're roasting marshmallows, or weenies or whatever
it is that you're doing.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
Were you a firebug as a kid? You ain't light
matches in the bathroom. I mean, I'm thinking you're like
Andrew was man.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
But I just yeah, well maybe Andrew and I your
son have the commet. I don't know. But have you
ever noticed that fire is a weird thing? And since
that it has almost like a hypnotic effect on it.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Yes, on some people it does.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
You sit there and you just have you ever seen
anybody at a fireside and they'll just stare at the
fire and they'll just kind of rock back and forth.
There were you know, at Christmas time when they put
the thing on the they run the thing with the
fire burning, and you hear the popping and crackling. I
don't ever, Dave, I promise you. I watched stuff on
my phone. I rarely have ever turned and I've got
(15:08):
a huge TV in my house. I rarely turned this
thing on. But yet if that thing's on a Christmas time,
I'll find myself like in a trance. Just listen to
Perry Como's sing in the background.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
Those dag blasted chestnuts up and fire man.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
So yeah, so yeah, and it's it's an amazing thing.
But here's the rub with fire. Fire does, in fact
provide us with many of the essentials that we are
depended upon in this life. We couldn't survive without it. Nowadays,
in modern times, we always have access to it. I
(15:48):
can't tell you how many spare matchbooks I have in
my house, and lighters and all these sorts of things.
And you know, if I had to, I could. You know,
I could take a and I could strike it, and
I could create a fire. But fire also has one
other element to it. It is arguably the most, if
(16:11):
not one of the most destructive forces in the world.
All you got to do is take a look out
west during wild fire season, take a look recently at
the palisades out there around Malibu in that area, and
it gives you an idea of what happens when fire
fire inside of control. There are two images from the
(16:49):
Vietnam Era that will always stay with me that I've
seen in the news, and I know many of you
guys have. And those images are the young child that's
running down the road and she doesn't have her clothes on,
and she was in a village where her village got
(17:11):
hit with napalm, which is essentially gelaginous gasoline, and it
doesn't matter what you do, you can't extinguish it as
a matter of fact that that young girl became a
grown woman and she survived. The other image is of
the monk that we've seen images of from Southeast Asia
(17:33):
and protests for peace. He goes into a lotus position
and has poured apparently accelerant all of himself in his
robes and has set himself ablaze and sat there and
never moved and no pun intended. Those images are burned
(17:54):
into my brain. I can't unsee that when we're in
the world of fire investigation and viewing things from the
perspective of what crime has been committed. Arson itself is
(18:15):
a category that stands alone among all the others because
it's used for a variety of reasons. And you know,
when you know, obviously the girl in an a pomp
strike that was a product of war, that's not arson.
You have this monk that was doing this in protest,
(18:37):
that's not arson. But it has a level of lethality
and it has a level of destruction that criminals have
come to appreciate for a long long time now because
they believe that if they set something to blaze, that
they're going to eradicate any opportunity for us to collect
evidence at a scene. And I've often held that if
(19:01):
in fact, you can go back and conduct your investigation thoroughly,
they I believe that arsenists leave more evidence behind by
starting fires. You know, they use particular types of accelerant,
whether it be kerosene, gasoline, fuel oil. I've seen fires
(19:25):
started with electricity, intentionally set phosphorus triggers, all these other
things that are out there, and you're getting into high
end things, you know, you start talking about electrical fires
that are intentionally set, as opposed to somebody running down
to the local, you know, stop and rob and getting
a gallon gasoline and coming back home and dows in
(19:47):
a place. It's a bit more sophistication involved in that.
And so arsenists actually come in all shapes and sizes,
but their motivations are really varied. I mean, you've got
I think most popularly you think about people destroying things
for money, insurance money. They set houses on fire, structures
(20:08):
on fire, businesses on fire and try to collect off
of that. Of course, you have in our area and
depth investigation. You have an individual that is dead inside
of a house. The house has been, you know, just
engulfed with flames, and what they're trying to do is
trying to render down that body so that there's nothing
left that we can go back and examine.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
It's amazing to me how many times people do that.
They burn a house down to cover up the murder
of somebody they shot in the head and their recliner,
and it's like, dude, you realize how long it takes
to render a body down. Things I've learned from Joseph
Scott Morgan by doing body Bags. It's like, it's not
going to happen. If you're going to go to crime school,
that should be like day three, don't do this.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, But yet they persist, don't they. Dave I love
about Yeah. I mean like you think about you remember
the case Terra Green instead out of yeah idea of Georgia.
We covered that for you and it's not just me names. Yeah,
and you know when they and I remember, I think
I did an episode of body Bags on that case
(21:13):
because there was a lot of a lot of static
about a couple of years ago. But those fellows were
in court again but anyway, you know, she was found
in an old pecan orchard, uh, down in in South Georgia.
Something I learned about pecan wood at that particular time
that I was fascinated by that I did not know.
(21:35):
Uh did you know that next to hickory, pecan is
the hottest burning wood that's out there. And the fact
that they had scraped pecan wood out there, that I
believed that they used as fuel source for her body.
Because keep in mind, human bodies are not fuel sources,
(21:58):
all right there, They're not. They make fuel sources. So
it requires you to put the body with a fuel source,
stack fuel source on top of the body, underlay the
body with fuel source, put an accelerant on the body,
and you begin that process of rendering down a body.
And Dave, they burned that lady's body for so long
(22:19):
that they were only able to find little bits of
her left behind. That was almost a successful attempt at
criminal arson there.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
That case, you know, Joe, that one case with Terry Grinstead.
I'm glad you brought it up because that was one
of those ones where I learned. When you were talking
about the different I didn't I don't know that much
about a lot of the things we end up talking
about because I'm not learned in that area. But when
you start studying a case and you start breaking it down,
and you're going, why did this not work? And why
(22:50):
did this work? And it's amazing to me how some
of the stupidest people can come up with the best
ways and some of the smartest people are so stupid
when it comes to crime. But I will tell you, yeah,
firing up something I used to think was a good
idea until we started doing this show. I you know,
I'm not a criminal. I'm not going to be burning
stuff down. I would have thought, you know, hey, if
(23:12):
you're going to ruin your prints and everything else, go
ahead and light it on fire. But actually you're actually
may as well pour super glue on it.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah. Yeah, And you're you are creating. That's why I
will say, you're creating, uh, creating more evidence I believe,
and evidence of And listen, if you go out here's
another big one. And this is kind of a broad
assertion here, but if you go if you go out
and purchase a gallon of gasoline for this express purpose,
(23:44):
that goes to intent, you know, which is kind of
the body of a crime. You know you're thinking about
did you intend intend to do this? It's really hard
to explain away while we have you on CCTV taking
a gallon jug or taking a gallon gas can or
five gallon gas can fill it up with gas when
you don't normally do that, and then suddenly there's a
blaze in your backyard. You walk out there and there's
(24:06):
human remains there. So it kind of you know, the
act of actually doing that, even more so than going
out and buying a gun, because there's a lot of
reasons you can say, well, I went out and bought
a gun. I wanted it for a home defense. Maybe
I've had it laying around the house. But you know,
you get a lot of people and I've covered these
cases where individuals will show up and they'll have in
(24:27):
the back of their pickup truck several cans that are empty,
top them off, and go back and it's within just
a short bit of time that they're burning a body.
So you know, you've got this idea of eradication of evidence,
and yeah, clothing burns away to a great degree, but
(24:47):
did you know that like when we have bodies that
have been burned, let's you say, just imagine in your mind,
you've got somebody laying on their back, all right, and
you pour gas all over the anterior or the front
of their body, struck a match, and the antior portion
(25:10):
of their body envelops in flame.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Well, do you know the clothing on the backside many
times is intact. It doesn't just all burn out. I mean,
just think about it. We talked about oxygen just a
moment ago. Yeah, So if body is in contact with
the floor or the ground, fire, fire is always going
to seek oxygen, all right, and so it's not going
(25:35):
to go It might burn for a second if you've
got gas that has kind of leached into the around it,
but it's not really sustainable. It's not away all of
the clothing. Clothing is a big part of like getting
bodies identified, learning where they come from. Also if there's
any trauma, because you know, if you've got somebody who's
been shot in the back or they've been beaten, you're
(25:59):
not destroying that evidence, that physical evidence that exists there.
So when you get these really sophisticated guys. And I
know I've mentioned this book on air again, I'm going
to do it again because I want everybody to read it.
Murdering Cowita County. There was a guy that was murdered
back in the thirties, I think, or the forties, I
(26:19):
can't remember, in Georgia. And the guy that facilitated that
had what he referred to as his hired men, which
were these two African American fellows to tend the fire.
And they constantly pumped wood into this fire pit with
this guy's body in it, and they turned the coals.
(26:41):
They turned his body in there almost like they're cooking. Wow,
and the body begins to render down till there was
nothing left but ash. And you know how they retrieved
in that case, they retrieved what became known in that
specific case, this is a concept in law. You hear
the term the corpus delecti, which means the body daved.
(27:02):
They found one little chip of bone that was called
an eddy in a creek where they dumped these purlap sacks,
because they even went to the trouble of taking shovels,
digging out the hole and putting them into the sacks,
going to the creek and dumping the sacks in the
creek and then burning sacks. But that one little bit
of bone was evidence. And this is before and that's
(27:25):
kind of an assumption, scientific assumption because biologically, back during
that time, they had no way to tie it back
to that guy. All they knew is that they had
a bone or a piece of a bone even but
they used that, and you know, that was the only case.
That was the first case I think maybe in American
history where the testimony of an African American man was
(27:48):
used to put a white man in the electric chair
and he died. They fried his ass. So yeah, and
it's kind of a seminal case. So Murton calwieda County.
Ever get a chance read the book. There was a
movie that was done with Andy Griffith and Johnny Cash
back in the early eighties. But the book is fantastic
and it talks about and Fire plays a big part
(28:10):
of that. Then we've got another group that you've heard of, Pyromania,
which is album. Yeah, yeah, it's not that but yeah, yeah,
Fire Brigades you got it made or whatever it is.
But yeah, Pyromania is a sexual affectation, you know, where
(28:30):
they they have this idea that they get gratification from
watching fire. I had mentioned before the show that I
won't go into all of the details. I was talking
and I was at a conference one time, and I
was talking to these investigators and they had mentioned how
this one fellow that they they had worked this case.
(28:52):
Fire Battalion responds to a fully engulfed home and there's
like a family of five burning death in the home.
And I'll put to you delicately he's standing in the street,
fully nude and fully aroused when they are fixated on
the fire.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
So you know, did he set the fire, Joe? Do
you know?
Speaker 1 (29:12):
I mean specifically for his own sexual And so I
never case. That was just passed on to me from them,
And I was thinking, you know, I talked about the
there's no basement in the house. It's just the endless,
it's bottomless. Uh. You think you've seen it all, and
then you know, you get to that point where you
(29:35):
know you haven't, and then other people burn for other reasons.
You've got, uh, you've got these revenge burnings that take
place where people and these are where you know, I'm
going to destroy you. I'm going to eradicate everything. I
reflect back, and I know that some of our listeners
(29:56):
will remember, uh this uh, precious child back then that
his dad and mom were in a we're in a
custody battle and the dad set this kid on fire
and scarred him for life. And that has happened many
times over the years. There was the one movie, I
(30:16):
can't remember which one it was where the lady I
think it was Angela Bassett. People are going to remember
this movie where you know, she her husband was you know,
running around on her and she took all of his clothes,
knocked the window out of his Mercedes, put his clothes
in the car, poured gas in the car, and she
strikes a match and sets the Mercedes and the clothes
on fire, you know, in the driveway. So yeah, I
(30:38):
mean you have you have this idea of revenge as well,
so concealment of crime, revenge, personal monetary gain. You know
you can have that. You have people that contract to
do arson. There are people that are skilled at it,
believe it or not.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Well, in the movie Goodfellas, it showed you know, the
guys over there burning the burning the club, remember, yeah,
for insurance money.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Yeah, absolutely it was. That was Joe Peshi and Henry
Hill's character did that. I tell you one of the
most chilling chilling depictions of an arsonist is actually Mickey Rourke.
And people might not remember this. He played that role
in the movie Body Heat. Oh wow, William Hurt and
he gives one of the most chilling resertations on arson
(31:29):
that you've ever heard, and he really you know, and
he was depicted as a pro at doing this. And
there are people that can do this, and they sell
themselves as somebody that can cover up their crimes and
not you know, not be caught by virtue of them.
They essentially cover all of their bases. But a couple
of things that you're looking for and that we look
(31:49):
for at scenes most of the time with fire with arson,
is that we'll have individuals that will take, say, for instance,
and accelerate. And when I say accelerant, just think gasoline
for instance. It can be any number of things. But
arson investigators look for things like splash patterns. For instance,
(32:11):
if you take a a bucket of gasoline, uh, and
you toss it on a wall and uh, you know
it's a sheet rock wall, gypsum, you strike a match
and you you set it ablaze, Well, did you know
that you can actually those arson investigators can actually follow
(32:32):
the splash pattern on the wall that it'll burn into it.
You can see it where if you you know, if
you think about splashing a wall with something, striking a
match and putting it to the wall, you'll see the
pattern of splash kind of how it And most of
the time another rule of thumb that we use wherever
it doesn't happen every time, but wherever you see, particularly
(32:54):
in a structure, the most damage has occurred, that is
going to point you toward the point of origin of
the fire because it's burned the longest. You know, unless
you have like a store of gasoline in the house
or something that's explosive that does more damage, most of
the time you're going to have an area that has
(33:16):
more damage than any other location. Those are just like
a few of the things you know that you kind
of look for at a fire scene if you're trying,
if they're trying to determine exactly where the point of
origin is. So source point of origin, what utility did
they use to start this with? Did they just take
(33:38):
like old newspapers and pile them up in a corner,
anything else that's flammable and they set that ablaze. If
you get in there and you've got furniture that's burned
in place, but it's all askew, and maybe in one
corner you get an idea when you walk in there that, okay,
the furniture was actually intended to be the fuel source,
(33:58):
because you know, you're not going to have like your
lazy boy in a sofa stacked on top of one another.
And it doesn't matter. I mean, if it catches on fire,
that's not necessarily going to mean that the lazy boy
is going to fall off of the sofa. It's going
to burn in place. Most of the time. Now, the
firefighters might pull it down, but you'll have it all
(34:18):
kind of congregated in that area. You look for those
little cues like that at a scene, and you also
look for position of the body. You know, what is
it that stands out about a body? If you're dealing
with a body at a scene, what is it that's
there that kind of stinks? And I don't mean that literally,
I mean that in the sense of from an investigative,
(34:40):
what is it that just doesn't seem right in this
particular environment. You know, for us in death investigation, we
see what remains of this, We see all that's left behind.
The big question is who and what started this inferna.
(35:13):
I still have a memory of the first time I
was ever faced with a burned body in the morgue.
There's actually two things I said correctly. I remember two
things that I saw in the morgue related to fire.
(35:34):
The first one's kind of standard stuff. It was still
shocking for my young eyes to behold at that time,
because I realized I was looking at a human being
that had been burned, and it was a homicide and
a subsequent arson where the structure that they were in
(35:57):
was set on fire after the individual had been shot,
and the fire had been really, really hot. And my
first reaction was when I saw the body. And I
mean no disrespect by this, but it looked to me,
in my untrained eye, it looked like something that had
fallen off of a grill into the truck overriquets below,
(36:23):
and it was it was black. The body was black drawn.
You could barely make out any clothing that remained, no
facial features, hair was all gone, the hands were clawlike.
And I remember looking at that body and it gave
(36:45):
off be perfectly, honestly, it gave off the smell of
burned meat. And I remember I couldn't and this is
my personal recollection here again, for the longest time, I
couldn't eat. I couldn't eat grilled meat. I have a
(37:07):
distinct memory of that. And now I was, you know,
this young virile, you know guy that I loved the steak,
I loved hamburgers, all that stuff. Still do this day.
But I got past that. But I remember being kind
of repulsed by it. That was my first and then
on top of it, I had to go into that
body with a scalpel and open the body. And so
because I was the autopsy assistant, and so you kind
(37:30):
of get a double dose of it. Now, if you
can imagine, Dave, even more horrific than that. Was the
first time that I ever assisted in the autopsy on
an individual that had been burned in a house fire
(37:54):
and had I'm doing air quotes, had survived for a
month on the burn unit at a hospital in New Orleans.
And for any of you out there that have had
family members that have been burned and been subjected to
intense heat, you're going to understand what I'm saying. It's
(38:17):
a real specialty in medicine to be able to deal
with with burn patients, it's unlike anything else. It's I
guess you get satisfaction from it because you know that
you're trying to help them, trying to help them move on,
trying to reconstruct their live if they can survive. Because
it's once, particularly once a certain percentage of your body
(38:39):
is burned, there's high probability you're no longer going to
be able to fight off all the little nasties that
are outside trying to attack you. Many folks die of
sept semia, you know, there's a myriad of things that
they die from. But Dave, I remember this one fellow,
and he was massive. And when I say massive, he
(39:01):
may at that point when I saw him, may have
been the biggest body I had ever seen come into
the autopsy room. So when we were observing him, I
remember talking to the forensic pathologist and he was saying,
this is what it looks like to be on a
burn unit, be a patient on a burn unit. And
(39:24):
we had the reports before us in life. This guy
had been one hundred and eighty five pounds, so he
had been in the burn unit for a month. And
what happens is many times these people go into renal
failure and they can't outprocess fluids and he was so swollen. Dave, well,
(39:51):
along with the swelling, what has to happen because the
skin on these individuals actually splits, so in advance of that,
the surgeon will come in and they make these linear
incisions in the body and they're all over the body.
You've never seen the like of it. It is. It
(40:15):
rivals anything I've ever seen in the autopsy room. And
they will make these surgical incisions that are rather lengthy,
all over the surface of the skin because if they
don't the skin on its own because of the tension
and the retention of water and fluid in the body,
they will begin to split open. So they have to
(40:35):
make incisions all over the body to try to stem that,
and eventually the body just it cannot it cannot function
to a point where it's a survival event. Survivable event,
and they're going to be They're going to die. And
(40:56):
many people I always have this question, and it doesn't
necessarily revolve around fire related death, but you have these
events where people will say, well, they were in the
hospital for a long time, why did you have to
do an autopsy? Well, yes, you're absolutely right. The injuries
(41:18):
are documented. Everything has been X rayed and photographed, and
you've got the treatment records, surgical records we've got in
case of burn victims, we've got every time a skin
graft has been attached. I mean, just it's voluminous. There's
always charting going on. But we're still going to do
the autopsy. The reason we're still going to do the
autopsy is that this is a homicide. This is a homicide.
(41:42):
And if you don't do the autopsy, even if a
person's been in the hospital for a protracted period of time,
when the thing goes to court, a defense attorney will
look at this and say, well, how do we know
what really killed this individual? You're se that just based
on the doctor's notes here that it's a you know that,
(42:04):
yeah they got burned, but yet you didn't do an autopsy.
How can you prove that? And you kind of head
that off at the past by having a forensic pathologist
look at not just the records, but actually taking a
look at the at the body, uh in total there
in the autopsy room. And for me, for me, it
(42:25):
was it. It stuck with me that first body that
I saw a lot of them after that but that
first body that I saw that came off of a
burn unit that had been treated for a protracted period
of time, it stuck with me, you know, it really
it made me think it was It was one of
(42:45):
those cases where when you look at the individual and
I don't think about this a lot where I go
around saying, I hope they didn't suffer. A lot of
families say that, and you don't really know if people suffer.
But I look at that and that's one of the
cases where you think, I hope they I hope they
weren't aware of this because it's so it was so
(43:08):
grotesque and horrible, you know, when you see this, and
I've that that part of me within me, and I
don't think I'm I'm not being sadistic when I say this.
That's one of the reasons I think that people that
have murdered others need to be present for autopsies. And
(43:28):
I know that it's not legally possible, you know, because
people are presumed innocent until proven guilty, But you want
people that have done great harm to individuals to understand
what happens to subjects. And when you see somebody that's
burned like this, subjected to severe heat, intense heat. It
(43:50):
really gives you pause. It's like you want that individual
to see what they have done because they're not going
to go through this. Their family is not going to
go through this. And it's really, you know, really throws
up the stops on in your spirit. You know, it's
so over the top. Dave.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
But Joe, what about the term burned to death.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
We've heard that said by people on you know, talk
shows that you know, on crime that the body that
the person burned to death.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
And that's not true, is it? In most cases?
Speaker 1 (44:22):
In most cases it's not. Now you have, like I
just gave you the example. I gave everybody example of
the person that's on the burn unit. They most of
the time when you have a homicide or let's just
say it's an accidental death, let's just don't let's don't
necessarily say homicides. Let's just say an accidental death as
(44:42):
related to to fire. Most people do not burn to
a crisp and die like that. Okay, that's not how
it necessarily works. It's not like the last scene in
the original Raiders Lost arc, you know, where people are
incinerating and that sort of thing. By the presence of
(45:03):
God coming out of the ark of the Covenant.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
So that was not a documentary, Is that what you're
telling me?
Speaker 1 (45:08):
That was not a documentary. Most people in our world
that are subjected to a fire an environment involving fire,
are going to die as a result of smoke inhalation
almost I'd say probably ninety nine percent, maybe not that many,
ninety five percent of those deaths. And it causes from
(45:33):
inhaling those bits that are in the air and you're
not it's not like you're just inhaling smoke. Most people
don't understand the component smoke is a product of things
burning up. It's actually this, it's actually one of the
sub components of fire. You're talking about when fuel is vaporized. Okay,
(45:55):
So when it's vaporized and extends out that if you're
in that vironment, you're you know, you're trying to get
your breath. What did they always tell us when we
were kids, if there was a house fire, you're supposed
to go. You're supposed to do what you're supposed to
go to the floor and crawl along the floor because
that's where the remaining oxygen is. All that stuff floating
up in the air, and they're absolutely right, is toxic.
(46:16):
So it's not and this is not if you're let's
just say you're in a house, or you could be
inside of a car. All of those elements within that
car which are man made, really let that hang there
in a second that our man made are going to
in dwell that environment and they're going to burn. And
(46:37):
remember how we said earlier on when I was talking
about an uninhibited chemical reaction. Well, if if you've got
like carpet, okay, you've got some kind of synthetic carpet
in a house and it's burning, did you know that
one of the major components of carpet is petroleum. It's
petroleum based, and so how do you how does all
(46:58):
that bound together? Well, it's very complex chemically, all right.
So once you once heat is subjected to that, you
kind of free all that stuff up that's in the
carpet and all of a sudden it's floating around the air. Dave.
You can find things like arsenic floating around, you know,
in this environment. So when you get when you get
you know, people breathing in and a fire, you'll see
(47:22):
these components on their toxicology that are coming back and
it's amazing. It's this litany, this list of stuff that's
kind of free floating around in their blood that they've
taken on. Not to mention the absence of actual breathable
oxygen in the environment. One of the main components that
we're looking for, though, you know that's going to lead
(47:43):
to death, is going to be you know, carbon monoxide asphyxiation.
It literally turns the body cherry pink. The skin is pink,
nail beds are pink, the eyes are pink. You open
up the body, the viscera, the organs have a pink hue.
(48:05):
The blood when you draw it out, it looks like
the only way I've been able to describe it to people,
think about a manufactured piece of candy that's like this
brilliant pink color that was created in a lab. The
first candy that comes to me. I used to love
these on us kids were not now laters or what
(48:27):
they're called, and they're kind of hard taffy, and there
was a pink one in there. That's what the viscera
looks like. Throughout the body. The blood is even that color,
and the carbon monoxide turns the blood absent the oxygen
that color. So if we see that color manifesting itself
just visually, we don't. We're going to run a test.
(48:47):
It's called a carboxy hemoglobin level. But when you see
that pink, automatically, the alarm bell goes off, and you
know that this person has inhaled carbon monoxide along with
this myriad of other things you know, in the environment,
and it's noncompatible with life. The balance gets so out
of whack because we require a certain amount of oxygen,
(49:10):
and you know, we don't live in a pure oxygen
environment anyway. You know, people talk about the oxygen air
and yeah, it's there, but you're breathing in these other components.
All you know, there's an ron out there, there's carbon
dioxide that you're rebreathing sometimes, you know, plants take up
carbon dioxide, they produce oxygen and that sort of thing,
and so all these elements are kind of floating around.
(49:30):
But it's sustainable with life when you get in that
closed environment like a home and you're literally swimming in
a chemical experiment at this point in time, and the
fire that's in there is like the bunting burner you
would have in a lab, only it's visible you're in
the midst of it, and you're trying to gasp for
air and there's nothing really left for you to grab
(49:52):
hold of to breathe, that sort of thing, And as
heat increases a around the body, most of the time
the person is going to die within a few minutes,
and there is an awareness if you don't, don't try
to shade yourself into this idea that there's no awareness
(50:14):
that you're dying. I mean, if anybody has ever struggled
with breathe, if you've ever had pneumonia or anything like,
you know what it's like to be shorter breath. If
you ever had a heart event, you know what it's
like to be shorter breath. Same principle here, there's an
awareness it's a horrible way to die because your body
is your brain is screaming, I need oxygen, I need oxygen.
So when they finally die, then comes to heat. And
(50:35):
I think that that's where this idea that people say, well,
they burn to death, and it's kind of convenient to
say that because you've got a fire, You've got this
event that occurs where the house is caving in around them.
They're surrounded by intense flames, and people think they burn
to death. There are cases where people have literally been
(50:58):
had gasoline thrown all over the Hey, there was just
a case, remember day back in Virginia last week, that
house and the representative in Virginia. The guy walks up
with a bucket a gasoline, throws it on the sky
and flips a match on him and strikes a lighter
or whatever this nut job does and set this guy
on blaze. This poor guy, I don't at this moment, Thomas,
(51:19):
we're talking right now. I don't know what his status is.
I pray for him and his family. I hope he's okay.
But he was talking, you know, when he left. But
you know, he's on the burn unit somewhere, and this
is a this is gonna be a long uphill battle
for him. But he But go ahead, David, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (51:35):
I was going to ask you about Mercedes Vega. Yeah,
out in Arizona, Americopa County. It was one of the
stories that you had sent and I thought, if we
could just briefly if she's an exotic dancer, right, yeah,
and they find her on the highway.
Speaker 1 (51:53):
Yeah, in the car. Yeah, a car in the car
is a blaze at that point.
Speaker 3 (51:57):
Right now, if you find a car where the body inside, yeah,
I'm going to assume that the person was not there
of their own free will.
Speaker 2 (52:06):
Yeah, wrong assumption if you're an investigator.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
But I'm not.
Speaker 3 (52:09):
I'm a journalist, So I'm just thinking out loud. How
do you go into that where as an investigator, you're
looking at a dead body in a car murder, suicide,
accidental death? I mean yeah, I mean, can you be
overcome with smokes that you couldn't get yourself out of it?
Can it happen that fast?
Speaker 1 (52:26):
I think that, Well, that's an excellent question. I think
that the circumstances would have to be just right. Say,
for instance, if you've got a fire that starts, let's
just say it's an accidental fire. There are people that
die in car accidents as a result of a fire
catching a car, a vehicle car fire, and it's like,
and this is really horrible. I didn't talk about these,
(52:47):
but you have what are called entrapment fires where a
person can't get free of the car. You've got like
maybe engine block intrusion, the line, the fuel line gets clipped,
it sparks off, and the is literally sitting there and
now in those cases, there have been those cases where
individuals literally do burn to death. But in her case,
(53:08):
where you have a body that's found in a car
and the car and the body are both burning, when
I hear hoof beats, I'm not gonna think camel Okay,
I'm pretty much gonna think that this individual has probably
sustained some kind of lethal injury and the people that
(53:29):
perpetrated this wanted to burn the car up in order
to get away with it. So with her her case
in particular, I think that it's important to understand that
when they would do an examination, the ideal circumstances to
do this examination would be not to remove her from
(53:50):
the car. Not to remove from the car, you would
the idea would be to take the car with her
body in it, put it onto the back of a
flatbed like a wreckord flatbed, tarp it up covered tarps,
and take it to the crime lab and process the
car with the body in it.
Speaker 3 (54:11):
Have yeah on side. Note, have you ever had a
tarp fall off? Let's see, I heard about it.
Speaker 1 (54:17):
No, I have not had that happen. I've never had
that happen. I have heard of cases non associated with
offices that I that I'm aware of where the flap
part of the flap came loose and it's like blowing
in the wind as it's going down. You have to
be very very careful because yeah, it would be There
have been cases. There was a famous case that I'm
(54:38):
aware of. I think it was in South Georgia where
delivery service actually failed to secure the rear door and
the body on the body gurney came out of the
back of the car and came out of the back
of it was a it was a hearse but it
was a van, a van Hearst, you know that was
operator as a private contractor, rolled out into the the
(55:00):
highway in turned over and then a car ran over
the body. It hit it. So you have to be
very very You have to treat not just from an
evidentiary standpoint, but for the dead and their family. You
have to make sure that you're treating these bodies with
the utmost respect. Particularly, I mean the body. The person
(55:20):
that that body represents has gone through enough. The family
will soon be going through enough once they're notified of this.
But we do know this, We do know that the
body holds a lot of evidence that you have to
be able to assess you want to get the body
into a prime, ideal set of circumstances. One of the
(55:44):
interesting things that we see with fire deaths. Have folks
asked me about this a lot. Had One lady tellm
asked me, She said, how was that? She phrased it
to me one time she said, what's boxing got to
do with fire? And I didn't I didn't register with
(56:04):
me what she was saying. And I was at a conference,
like a true crime thing, and we talked about it,
and she had said, I've heard that their bodies move
in fire. I was like, oh, you're talking about the
pugilistic position. And so as a body is subjected to fire,
(56:25):
and you can't really draw any conclusions of scientific conclusions
like were they alive versus dead when the fire started?
All bodies are going to do this, But the bodies
at the joints, even at the hip flexers, the knees,
the feet, the elbows, the hands, it's all going to
draw up and the back years ago when they began
(56:50):
to see this, the powers that be looked at this
and said, wow, that looks just like a pugilism. And
of course pugilism is the old term for boxing. And
so when you'll get these people that have their hands
that will clinch, their hands will clinch and they'll draw up.
I'm going to conclude this episode of body Bags with
(57:11):
something I don't normally do. I'm going to tell a
story real quick and you can actually see it. It's
in the first chapter of my book Blood Beneath My Feet.
And I was really at the end of my career.
I had had enough and was really struggling with PTSD
and these things that I was going through. And one
(57:36):
night I was in the middle of Georgia four hundred
and I worked a case of a young man that
was in a Ford ranger. He slammed into a bridge
abutment and it was pouring down rain. His car had
caught on fire and he was entrapped. As I'm trying
to work the case and examine his body, something happened
(57:57):
to me that changed the course of my life and
certainly my career that day. As the rain kind of
dripped down off of my face and down my glasses,
I couldn't see real well. I leaned into the cab
and this young man was entrapped and he had burned
to death. In his car, and as I reached over
(58:19):
tried to detect if his seat belt was buckled, his
left hand brushed my right cheek, and instinctively I reached up,
grabbed the wrist of this clawed hand, and it snapped off.
In mind, I stat there in the rain. No one
(58:40):
else is with me, cops are off doing their thing,
and I considered what I was holding in my hand,
just for a second, this burned claw that was left behind.
I walked off into the night. I sat beneath the
bridge and I wept, shaking uncontrollably, asking myself what the world,
(59:01):
what was I doing? Why was I here? That was
after a twenty year career, and that night my life changed.
It changed because I knew that I could no longer
do this. And fire played a big role in that
stop sign. We all have stop signs in our lives,
don't we, Those warning signs that pop up in a
(59:24):
case like this involving fire was my stop sign, and
pretty soon thereafter I had to give it up. I
had to hang it up. So fire will always be
part of who I am. It will always be part
of those things I talk about. It will always be
part of the stories of the Dead. I'm Joseph Scott
(59:48):
Morgan and this is body Backs.
Quality dams. But Joseph's gotten more. You know, I don't
really know how how man originally discovered fire. We always
have this image in our minds. I don't know about
you guys. I have it of you know, these kind
(00:23):
of chromagnum looking creatures that are sitting around in a
cave and all of a sudden, one of them, you know,
strikes a rock against another rock, and suddenly they discover,
you know, fire. I've always thought that maybe it was
a lightning strike, perhaps this kind of natural manifestation, maybe
(00:44):
from the sweet Lord above. Something caught on fire, and
they were amazed by it, and they took it and
they kept it, and it provided so much for them.
It provided it split the night at that point in time,
no artificial light. Suddenly they had naturally occurring light where
they could see in the darkness those things that were
out there. Suddenly they had access to warmth when it
(01:09):
was very, very cold. Can you imagine being in the
midst of the ice age or at the end of
the last ice age, and you're freezing to death, but
yet you have this cloe that you can sit around
and rub your hands in front of. They learned how
to cook, perhaps with fire. But now in the modern context,
(01:36):
fire represents many other things. We can manufacture things with it,
we can fuel things, industry runs on it. But in
my world fire fire generally comes down to this, something
is being destroyed that may be a criminal otherwise would
(02:00):
not want to be found today on bodybags, We're going
to have kind of a brief primer, a brief discussion
on fire and arson. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this
is bodybags. Dave. The scaredest I have ever been at
(02:26):
any type of scene. For me, this is me personally. Okay,
let me run down this. Let me break this down
to you. Where cases not where there was an active
shooter still running around, or there was an angry crowd
or something like that. Because I had my share of those.
It was always involving structure fires. First off, since I
(02:49):
was a little boy, I've always been fascinated by firefighters,
not cops. I was not one of those kids that
wanted to be a cop. I always loved firefighters and
when I was little, I don't know if you remember this.
Do you remember Texico fire Chief? It was like the
gas they used to have Texico fire Chief. Texico used
(03:10):
to sell firefighter helmets, and they were old fashioned helmets,
and you could get the deluxe model that had a
radio that you could.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Put out inside.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
My uncle, my uncle, who I regard in my life
as the closest thing I really ever had to a father,
he bought that from me, the most treasure gifts I
ever had. And I always liked firefighters. I liked firefighters
as a death investigator because firefighters are fascinating in the
sense that they don't it doesn't matter to them if
(03:42):
they get dirty, they don't care, and they've always got
some new piece of equipment that they want to something
like that. It's like, I could have the worst decomposed
body in the world that is down a ravine and
there's a whole group of them over there saying, dog,
you don't have to go down on that hill. We've
you know, we'll send Jim and Bob down there and
(04:03):
we'll you know, we'll fashion this new kind of knot
and we'll put them, you know, put them in the
basket and we'll bring them up, or we'll dig out
the hole around this area for you, you know. And
it was always amazing, and you know, the I'd always
have friends that were police officers out there, and they
just be kind of standing back because you know, firefighters
and cops have this interesting relationship. And the cops were like,
(04:25):
I'm not going near that. I'm not doing it. You
know firefighters, you know, of course, the old adage about
them is you know they and when everybody else is
running away, they're running in right. And so this world
that around fire has always been terrifying me. You know,
the only times I've ever been injured at crom scenes
have been at fire scenes. I've had wow, uh okay,
(04:48):
here's something cool, a little trivia about Morgan. I actually
had a beam fall and strike me in the head
and it was still on fire. It had at it
had like a small flame on it, and the whole
thing had burning embers on it. Wow, completely doused it.
(05:09):
I had a nail go through my boot into my foot,
really old pair of boots. By the way, I should
have I should have thrown away. And I actually had
electricity arc off of a puddle of water onto my
foot and I'm not tingling in my leg and I
(05:30):
fell backwards. It stunned me for a second. And that
was because there was an electrical line and that hadn't
cut the power yet and they pulled the line down.
So that's as close to death as I've really come.
I've had shots fired over my head, but it was not.
There's something about being in that world, that world of
(05:51):
all that remains of a building, a structure, a car.
There's kind of this infamous bridge down in New Orleans
called the Huey P. Long Bridge, named after the governor
from back in the thirties and Dave. The scene was
really narrow. It had two lanes on either side. And
as a matter of fact, the bridge is this gigantic
(06:13):
metal structure, steel structure, and their entire families that have
made their living off of this bridge as sand blasters,
because the thing always has to be referred And in
the middle of this bridge, going across the river at
one point in time, there is a train track, and
the train track also consists of the world's longest train trestle,
(06:38):
and it starts way on one side of Mississippi River
and it continues onto what they call the West Bank.
And I don't know if it's still the longest or not,
but there was a guy that was in a corvette
that was driving over the top of it racing somebody
on the scene, and these lanes are really narrow, and Dave,
he hit the curve on one side and this is
hundreds of feet in the air above the Mississippi River
(07:01):
down below. He hit the curb, rolled the thing over
and it's when they had those they were like the
new total fiberglass bodies on the scene. Well, I got
there and the whole thing had been engulfed, and it's
windy up there. It's like really windy, and I thought
that I thought that everything was out. The fire was doused,
(07:21):
and dude, I got adjacent to the scene and all
the cops, I mean all the firefighters are wearing respirators, right,
and they were like looking at me. And I walked
up and I found out why they were wearing respirators,
because this fiberglass was burning in there. And dude, they
had to take me back and the EMTs had to
put me on oxygen because I was innolating this scene
(07:42):
or inhaling I'm sorry, inhaling this gas coming off of
this or the product coming off of it. It's a
weird world. You walk into any kind of home that
has been destroyed. And I may have mentioned this before
on body bags, but you walk in to it, and
as a death investigator who knows a little bit about
(08:05):
arson very little, I walk into that environment and everything
looks black and charred. I can't make out detail. I've
even lost bodies inside of houses because I can't tell
where the ceiling that has caved in or the furniture
that is burned down. I can't delineate between the body
(08:27):
that is also charged that is in there. It's a
weird kind of It's the most unique environment that you
ever go into. And people often forget about arson investigators
as being part of the forensic community. You know, they
think I don't know what they think about arsen But
to me, they are at the top of the heap
because they have to know something about everything. Most of
(08:50):
them are firefighters and cops. They testified. They are top
end experts in their field. They understand chemistry, they understand physics,
and they also understand how to run a homicide investigation,
and so their skill set is something that most people
(09:12):
don't understand, and they are amazed. I love talking to
them because I learn. I just try to keep my
mouth shut, which is hard for me, keep my eye
and my ears open and just listen. But you know,
one of the rudimentary things that you have to learn
is kind of the nature of fire. And we don't normally,
you don't give fire much consideration. You've seen pictures of
(09:34):
me and my family. We go out even in the
wintertime on our boat and there's an island not too
far from where we keep our boat, and we take
firewood out there and just build a big bonfire and
sit around bonfire. Most people don't think about that. What
is fire? What's the nature of it? You know, kind
of how it works. So fire itself has four components
(09:55):
to it, and so let me just kind of run
these down to you. You have to have a fuel source, okay,
and sometimes the fuel source can be rolled into what's
also referred to as accelerants. That that's like if you
let's just say you're using a charcoal grill. All right, Well,
the charcoal in there is fuel, right, but in order
(10:16):
to initiate that charcoal into a sustainable fire or have
it burned, you have to put lighter fluid on it
most of the time. All right. I know that there's
the brands out there that say you don't need it,
but that's how they yeah, they lie. So you get
it started like that, and so the thing, the thing burns,
But you also have to strike off a match or
use a lighter to get the thing initiated. Well, you
(10:39):
have to have fuel in order for that to happen. No,
it seems simplistic. You have to have heat. And what
I mean by that is heat is a product of
an actual burning fire. So that's heat is one of
the components. You have to have oxygen. Remember how many
times have we heard about there being a fire in
(11:00):
a location where the fire literally runs out of oxygen
in the room and completely consumes it and so it dies.
All right, that's the reason. For instance, like with if
you've ever heard of a halon fire extinguisher that you
use them on boats, you can't see it. It's it's invisible,
(11:21):
actually really autoerotic case involving halon halon canister as a
guy was inhaling this stuff, and what it does is
it binds with the oxygen and it's an oxygen deprivant,
and so it just knocks the oxygen down. So you
have to have oxygen, all right, and then you have
to have an uninhibited chemical reaction. And this chemical reaction
(11:46):
has to be ongoing. If you think about going to
chemistry class and you're demonstrating and you see this immediate
reaction where something bubbles over, or you have this reactive
change in color or whatever you're working on in the lab,
that's kind of a one off kind of thing. But
you think about fire, fire is truly an ongoing chemical
(12:07):
experiment because it has to be sustained and if you're
absent any of these components, it's going to go out.
I mean, just think about it. Back to the idea
of heat. If a fire dies out is there's an
insufficient amount of heat being generated in order to burn
the fuel that's existing there. So those are essentially the
(12:30):
four main components of fire, and without that, you don't
really have a fire per se. Now you might get
like a flashover where an individual might be in a
room and I've actually had this happen day where they
come in and arsonist has come in and they spread
(12:53):
gasoline all in a room. And this one particular future
rocket scientist did this with a couple of gallons of gas.
The windows and the doors were closed in the room,
and this idiot strikes a match and of course it
kills him. But after it burned off, you know, that
(13:13):
gas that was on the floor and everything, it was
non sustainable. First off, the room that he was in
had a marble tile floor. Oh, my goodness's not going
to burn. H Yeah, and the ceiling was it had asbestos.
Uh So, I don't know where this guy did his
(13:34):
research or whatever, but it didn't it didn't burn, you know,
just it was not sustainable, but it killed him. So
you know, you have to be in a uh this
kind of sustainable environment for it to actually continue to
thrive in this environment because absent that, you're you're not
going to You're just not going to have the end
(13:57):
product of a fire that is burning before you know where.
You think about sitting around a campfire, and one of
the some of the most fun you'll ever have at a
campfire is actually taking a piece of wood when it's
beginning to die down and placing the foot on and
you're sustaining that, You're sustaining that uninhibited chemical reaction and
it's burning up before you. The fuel is literally vaporizing
(14:18):
in the air before you. You're receiving heat off of
you're receiving comfort, You're roasting marshmallows, or weenies or whatever
it is that you're doing.
Speaker 3 (14:26):
Were you a firebug as a kid? You ain't light
matches in the bathroom. I mean, I'm thinking you're like
Andrew was man.
Speaker 1 (14:33):
But I just yeah, well maybe Andrew and I your
son have the commet. I don't know. But have you
ever noticed that fire is a weird thing? And since
that it has almost like a hypnotic effect on it.
Speaker 2 (14:45):
Yes, on some people it does.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
You sit there and you just have you ever seen
anybody at a fireside and they'll just stare at the
fire and they'll just kind of rock back and forth.
There were you know, at Christmas time when they put
the thing on the they run the thing with the
fire burning, and you hear the popping and crackling. I
don't ever, Dave, I promise you. I watched stuff on
my phone. I rarely have ever turned and I've got
(15:08):
a huge TV in my house. I rarely turned this
thing on. But yet if that thing's on a Christmas time,
I'll find myself like in a trance. Just listen to
Perry Como's sing in the background.
Speaker 3 (15:20):
Those dag blasted chestnuts up and fire man.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
So yeah, so yeah, and it's it's an amazing thing.
But here's the rub with fire. Fire does, in fact
provide us with many of the essentials that we are
depended upon in this life. We couldn't survive without it. Nowadays,
in modern times, we always have access to it. I
(15:48):
can't tell you how many spare matchbooks I have in
my house, and lighters and all these sorts of things.
And you know, if I had to, I could. You know,
I could take a and I could strike it, and
I could create a fire. But fire also has one
other element to it. It is arguably the most, if
(16:11):
not one of the most destructive forces in the world.
All you got to do is take a look out
west during wild fire season, take a look recently at
the palisades out there around Malibu in that area, and
it gives you an idea of what happens when fire
fire inside of control. There are two images from the
(16:49):
Vietnam Era that will always stay with me that I've
seen in the news, and I know many of you
guys have. And those images are the young child that's
running down the road and she doesn't have her clothes on,
and she was in a village where her village got
(17:11):
hit with napalm, which is essentially gelaginous gasoline, and it
doesn't matter what you do, you can't extinguish it as
a matter of fact that that young girl became a
grown woman and she survived. The other image is of
the monk that we've seen images of from Southeast Asia
(17:33):
and protests for peace. He goes into a lotus position
and has poured apparently accelerant all of himself in his
robes and has set himself ablaze and sat there and
never moved and no pun intended. Those images are burned
(17:54):
into my brain. I can't unsee that when we're in
the world of fire investigation and viewing things from the
perspective of what crime has been committed. Arson itself is
(18:15):
a category that stands alone among all the others because
it's used for a variety of reasons. And you know,
when you know, obviously the girl in an a pomp
strike that was a product of war, that's not arson.
You have this monk that was doing this in protest,
(18:37):
that's not arson. But it has a level of lethality
and it has a level of destruction that criminals have
come to appreciate for a long long time now because
they believe that if they set something to blaze, that
they're going to eradicate any opportunity for us to collect
evidence at a scene. And I've often held that if
(19:01):
in fact, you can go back and conduct your investigation thoroughly,
they I believe that arsenists leave more evidence behind by
starting fires. You know, they use particular types of accelerant,
whether it be kerosene, gasoline, fuel oil. I've seen fires
(19:25):
started with electricity, intentionally set phosphorus triggers, all these other
things that are out there, and you're getting into high
end things, you know, you start talking about electrical fires
that are intentionally set, as opposed to somebody running down
to the local, you know, stop and rob and getting
a gallon gasoline and coming back home and dows in
(19:47):
a place. It's a bit more sophistication involved in that.
And so arsenists actually come in all shapes and sizes,
but their motivations are really varied. I mean, you've got
I think most popularly you think about people destroying things
for money, insurance money. They set houses on fire, structures
(20:08):
on fire, businesses on fire and try to collect off
of that. Of course, you have in our area and
depth investigation. You have an individual that is dead inside
of a house. The house has been, you know, just
engulfed with flames, and what they're trying to do is
trying to render down that body so that there's nothing
left that we can go back and examine.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
It's amazing to me how many times people do that.
They burn a house down to cover up the murder
of somebody they shot in the head and their recliner,
and it's like, dude, you realize how long it takes
to render a body down. Things I've learned from Joseph
Scott Morgan by doing body Bags. It's like, it's not
going to happen. If you're going to go to crime school,
that should be like day three, don't do this.
Speaker 1 (20:52):
Yeah, But yet they persist, don't they. Dave I love
about Yeah. I mean like you think about you remember
the case Terra Green instead out of yeah idea of Georgia.
We covered that for you and it's not just me names. Yeah,
and you know when they and I remember, I think
I did an episode of body Bags on that case
(21:13):
because there was a lot of a lot of static
about a couple of years ago. But those fellows were
in court again but anyway, you know, she was found
in an old pecan orchard, uh, down in in South Georgia.
Something I learned about pecan wood at that particular time
that I was fascinated by that I did not know.
(21:35):
Uh did you know that next to hickory, pecan is
the hottest burning wood that's out there. And the fact
that they had scraped pecan wood out there, that I
believed that they used as fuel source for her body.
Because keep in mind, human bodies are not fuel sources,
(21:58):
all right there, They're not. They make fuel sources. So
it requires you to put the body with a fuel source,
stack fuel source on top of the body, underlay the
body with fuel source, put an accelerant on the body,
and you begin that process of rendering down a body.
And Dave, they burned that lady's body for so long
(22:19):
that they were only able to find little bits of
her left behind. That was almost a successful attempt at
criminal arson there.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
That case, you know, Joe, that one case with Terry Grinstead.
I'm glad you brought it up because that was one
of those ones where I learned. When you were talking
about the different I didn't I don't know that much
about a lot of the things we end up talking
about because I'm not learned in that area. But when
you start studying a case and you start breaking it down,
and you're going, why did this not work? And why
(22:50):
did this work? And it's amazing to me how some
of the stupidest people can come up with the best
ways and some of the smartest people are so stupid
when it comes to crime. But I will tell you, yeah,
firing up something I used to think was a good
idea until we started doing this show. I you know,
I'm not a criminal. I'm not going to be burning
stuff down. I would have thought, you know, hey, if
(23:12):
you're going to ruin your prints and everything else, go
ahead and light it on fire. But actually you're actually
may as well pour super glue on it.
Speaker 1 (23:20):
Yeah. Yeah, And you're you are creating. That's why I
will say, you're creating, uh, creating more evidence I believe,
and evidence of And listen, if you go out here's
another big one. And this is kind of a broad
assertion here, but if you go if you go out
and purchase a gallon of gasoline for this express purpose,
(23:44):
that goes to intent, you know, which is kind of
the body of a crime. You know you're thinking about
did you intend intend to do this? It's really hard
to explain away while we have you on CCTV taking
a gallon jug or taking a gallon gas can or
five gallon gas can fill it up with gas when
you don't normally do that, and then suddenly there's a
blaze in your backyard. You walk out there and there's
(24:06):
human remains there. So it kind of you know, the
act of actually doing that, even more so than going
out and buying a gun, because there's a lot of
reasons you can say, well, I went out and bought
a gun. I wanted it for a home defense. Maybe
I've had it laying around the house. But you know,
you get a lot of people and I've covered these
cases where individuals will show up and they'll have in
(24:27):
the back of their pickup truck several cans that are empty,
top them off, and go back and it's within just
a short bit of time that they're burning a body.
So you know, you've got this idea of eradication of evidence,
and yeah, clothing burns away to a great degree, but
(24:47):
did you know that like when we have bodies that
have been burned, let's you say, just imagine in your mind,
you've got somebody laying on their back, all right, and
you pour gas all over the anterior or the front
of their body, struck a match, and the antior portion
(25:10):
of their body envelops in flame.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Right.
Speaker 1 (25:15):
Well, do you know the clothing on the backside many
times is intact. It doesn't just all burn out. I mean,
just think about it. We talked about oxygen just a
moment ago. Yeah, So if body is in contact with
the floor or the ground, fire, fire is always going
to seek oxygen, all right, and so it's not going
(25:35):
to go It might burn for a second if you've
got gas that has kind of leached into the around it,
but it's not really sustainable. It's not away all of
the clothing. Clothing is a big part of like getting
bodies identified, learning where they come from. Also if there's
any trauma, because you know, if you've got somebody who's
been shot in the back or they've been beaten, you're
(25:59):
not destroying that evidence, that physical evidence that exists there.
So when you get these really sophisticated guys. And I
know I've mentioned this book on air again, I'm going
to do it again because I want everybody to read it.
Murdering Cowita County. There was a guy that was murdered
back in the thirties, I think, or the forties, I
(26:19):
can't remember, in Georgia. And the guy that facilitated that
had what he referred to as his hired men, which
were these two African American fellows to tend the fire.
And they constantly pumped wood into this fire pit with
this guy's body in it, and they turned the coals.
(26:41):
They turned his body in there almost like they're cooking. Wow,
and the body begins to render down till there was
nothing left but ash. And you know how they retrieved
in that case, they retrieved what became known in that
specific case, this is a concept in law. You hear
the term the corpus delecti, which means the body daved.
(27:02):
They found one little chip of bone that was called
an eddy in a creek where they dumped these purlap sacks,
because they even went to the trouble of taking shovels,
digging out the hole and putting them into the sacks,
going to the creek and dumping the sacks in the
creek and then burning sacks. But that one little bit
of bone was evidence. And this is before and that's
(27:25):
kind of an assumption, scientific assumption because biologically, back during
that time, they had no way to tie it back
to that guy. All they knew is that they had
a bone or a piece of a bone even but
they used that, and you know, that was the only case.
That was the first case I think maybe in American
history where the testimony of an African American man was
(27:48):
used to put a white man in the electric chair
and he died. They fried his ass. So yeah, and
it's kind of a seminal case. So Murton calwieda County.
Ever get a chance read the book. There was a
movie that was done with Andy Griffith and Johnny Cash
back in the early eighties. But the book is fantastic
and it talks about and Fire plays a big part
(28:10):
of that. Then we've got another group that you've heard of, Pyromania,
which is album. Yeah, yeah, it's not that but yeah, yeah,
Fire Brigades you got it made or whatever it is.
But yeah, Pyromania is a sexual affectation, you know, where
(28:30):
they they have this idea that they get gratification from
watching fire. I had mentioned before the show that I
won't go into all of the details. I was talking
and I was at a conference one time, and I
was talking to these investigators and they had mentioned how
this one fellow that they they had worked this case.
(28:52):
Fire Battalion responds to a fully engulfed home and there's
like a family of five burning death in the home.
And I'll put to you delicately he's standing in the street,
fully nude and fully aroused when they are fixated on
the fire.
Speaker 2 (29:09):
So you know, did he set the fire, Joe? Do
you know?
Speaker 1 (29:12):
I mean specifically for his own sexual And so I
never case. That was just passed on to me from them,
And I was thinking, you know, I talked about the
there's no basement in the house. It's just the endless,
it's bottomless. Uh. You think you've seen it all, and
then you know, you get to that point where you
(29:35):
know you haven't, and then other people burn for other reasons.
You've got, uh, you've got these revenge burnings that take
place where people and these are where you know, I'm
going to destroy you. I'm going to eradicate everything. I
reflect back, and I know that some of our listeners
(29:56):
will remember, uh this uh, precious child back then that
his dad and mom were in a we're in a
custody battle and the dad set this kid on fire
and scarred him for life. And that has happened many
times over the years. There was the one movie, I
(30:16):
can't remember which one it was where the lady I
think it was Angela Bassett. People are going to remember
this movie where you know, she her husband was you know,
running around on her and she took all of his clothes,
knocked the window out of his Mercedes, put his clothes
in the car, poured gas in the car, and she
strikes a match and sets the Mercedes and the clothes
on fire, you know, in the driveway. So yeah, I
(30:38):
mean you have you have this idea of revenge as well,
so concealment of crime, revenge, personal monetary gain. You know
you can have that. You have people that contract to
do arson. There are people that are skilled at it,
believe it or not.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Well, in the movie Goodfellas, it showed you know, the
guys over there burning the burning the club, remember, yeah,
for insurance money.
Speaker 1 (31:05):
Yeah, absolutely it was. That was Joe Peshi and Henry
Hill's character did that. I tell you one of the
most chilling chilling depictions of an arsonist is actually Mickey Rourke.
And people might not remember this. He played that role
in the movie Body Heat. Oh wow, William Hurt and
he gives one of the most chilling resertations on arson
(31:29):
that you've ever heard, and he really you know, and
he was depicted as a pro at doing this. And
there are people that can do this, and they sell
themselves as somebody that can cover up their crimes and
not you know, not be caught by virtue of them.
They essentially cover all of their bases. But a couple
of things that you're looking for and that we look
(31:49):
for at scenes most of the time with fire with arson,
is that we'll have individuals that will take, say, for instance,
and accelerate. And when I say accelerant, just think gasoline
for instance. It can be any number of things. But
arson investigators look for things like splash patterns. For instance,
(32:11):
if you take a a bucket of gasoline, uh, and
you toss it on a wall and uh, you know
it's a sheet rock wall, gypsum, you strike a match
and you you set it ablaze, Well, did you know
that you can actually those arson investigators can actually follow
(32:32):
the splash pattern on the wall that it'll burn into it.
You can see it where if you you know, if
you think about splashing a wall with something, striking a
match and putting it to the wall, you'll see the
pattern of splash kind of how it And most of
the time another rule of thumb that we use wherever
it doesn't happen every time, but wherever you see, particularly
(32:54):
in a structure, the most damage has occurred, that is
going to point you toward the point of origin of
the fire because it's burned the longest. You know, unless
you have like a store of gasoline in the house
or something that's explosive that does more damage, most of
the time you're going to have an area that has
(33:16):
more damage than any other location. Those are just like
a few of the things you know that you kind
of look for at a fire scene if you're trying,
if they're trying to determine exactly where the point of
origin is. So source point of origin, what utility did
they use to start this with? Did they just take
(33:38):
like old newspapers and pile them up in a corner,
anything else that's flammable and they set that ablaze. If
you get in there and you've got furniture that's burned
in place, but it's all askew, and maybe in one
corner you get an idea when you walk in there that, okay,
the furniture was actually intended to be the fuel source,
(33:58):
because you know, you're not going to have like your
lazy boy in a sofa stacked on top of one another.
And it doesn't matter. I mean, if it catches on fire,
that's not necessarily going to mean that the lazy boy
is going to fall off of the sofa. It's going
to burn in place. Most of the time. Now, the
firefighters might pull it down, but you'll have it all
(34:18):
kind of congregated in that area. You look for those
little cues like that at a scene, and you also
look for position of the body. You know, what is
it that stands out about a body? If you're dealing
with a body at a scene, what is it that's
there that kind of stinks? And I don't mean that literally,
I mean that in the sense of from an investigative,
(34:40):
what is it that just doesn't seem right in this
particular environment. You know, for us in death investigation, we
see what remains of this, We see all that's left behind.
The big question is who and what started this inferna.
(35:13):
I still have a memory of the first time I
was ever faced with a burned body in the morgue.
There's actually two things I said correctly. I remember two
things that I saw in the morgue related to fire.
(35:34):
The first one's kind of standard stuff. It was still
shocking for my young eyes to behold at that time,
because I realized I was looking at a human being
that had been burned, and it was a homicide and
a subsequent arson where the structure that they were in
(35:57):
was set on fire after the individual had been shot,
and the fire had been really, really hot. And my
first reaction was when I saw the body. And I
mean no disrespect by this, but it looked to me,
in my untrained eye, it looked like something that had
fallen off of a grill into the truck overriquets below,
(36:23):
and it was it was black. The body was black drawn.
You could barely make out any clothing that remained, no
facial features, hair was all gone, the hands were clawlike.
And I remember looking at that body and it gave
(36:45):
off be perfectly, honestly, it gave off the smell of
burned meat. And I remember I couldn't and this is
my personal recollection here again, for the longest time, I
couldn't eat. I couldn't eat grilled meat. I have a
(37:07):
distinct memory of that. And now I was, you know,
this young virile, you know guy that I loved the steak,
I loved hamburgers, all that stuff. Still do this day.
But I got past that. But I remember being kind
of repulsed by it. That was my first and then
on top of it, I had to go into that
body with a scalpel and open the body. And so
because I was the autopsy assistant, and so you kind
(37:30):
of get a double dose of it. Now, if you
can imagine, Dave, even more horrific than that. Was the
first time that I ever assisted in the autopsy on
an individual that had been burned in a house fire
(37:54):
and had I'm doing air quotes, had survived for a
month on the burn unit at a hospital in New Orleans.
And for any of you out there that have had
family members that have been burned and been subjected to
intense heat, you're going to understand what I'm saying. It's
(38:17):
a real specialty in medicine to be able to deal
with with burn patients, it's unlike anything else. It's I
guess you get satisfaction from it because you know that
you're trying to help them, trying to help them move on,
trying to reconstruct their live if they can survive. Because
it's once, particularly once a certain percentage of your body
(38:39):
is burned, there's high probability you're no longer going to
be able to fight off all the little nasties that
are outside trying to attack you. Many folks die of
sept semia, you know, there's a myriad of things that
they die from. But Dave, I remember this one fellow,
and he was massive. And when I say massive, he
(39:01):
may at that point when I saw him, may have
been the biggest body I had ever seen come into
the autopsy room. So when we were observing him, I
remember talking to the forensic pathologist and he was saying,
this is what it looks like to be on a
burn unit, be a patient on a burn unit. And
(39:24):
we had the reports before us in life. This guy
had been one hundred and eighty five pounds, so he
had been in the burn unit for a month. And
what happens is many times these people go into renal
failure and they can't outprocess fluids and he was so swollen. Dave, well,
(39:51):
along with the swelling, what has to happen because the
skin on these individuals actually splits, so in advance of that,
the surgeon will come in and they make these linear
incisions in the body and they're all over the body.
You've never seen the like of it. It is. It
(40:15):
rivals anything I've ever seen in the autopsy room. And
they will make these surgical incisions that are rather lengthy,
all over the surface of the skin because if they
don't the skin on its own because of the tension
and the retention of water and fluid in the body,
they will begin to split open. So they have to
(40:35):
make incisions all over the body to try to stem that,
and eventually the body just it cannot it cannot function
to a point where it's a survival event. Survivable event,
and they're going to be They're going to die. And
(40:56):
many people I always have this question, and it doesn't
necessarily revolve around fire related death, but you have these
events where people will say, well, they were in the
hospital for a long time, why did you have to
do an autopsy? Well, yes, you're absolutely right. The injuries
(41:18):
are documented. Everything has been X rayed and photographed, and
you've got the treatment records, surgical records we've got in
case of burn victims, we've got every time a skin
graft has been attached. I mean, just it's voluminous. There's
always charting going on. But we're still going to do
the autopsy. The reason we're still going to do the
autopsy is that this is a homicide. This is a homicide.
(41:42):
And if you don't do the autopsy, even if a
person's been in the hospital for a protracted period of time,
when the thing goes to court, a defense attorney will
look at this and say, well, how do we know
what really killed this individual? You're se that just based
on the doctor's notes here that it's a you know that,
(42:04):
yeah they got burned, but yet you didn't do an autopsy.
How can you prove that? And you kind of head
that off at the past by having a forensic pathologist
look at not just the records, but actually taking a
look at the at the body, uh in total there
in the autopsy room. And for me, for me, it
(42:25):
was it. It stuck with me that first body that
I saw a lot of them after that but that
first body that I saw that came off of a
burn unit that had been treated for a protracted period
of time, it stuck with me, you know, it really
it made me think it was It was one of
(42:45):
those cases where when you look at the individual and
I don't think about this a lot where I go
around saying, I hope they didn't suffer. A lot of
families say that, and you don't really know if people suffer.
But I look at that and that's one of the
cases where you think, I hope they I hope they
weren't aware of this because it's so it was so
(43:08):
grotesque and horrible, you know, when you see this, and
I've that that part of me within me, and I
don't think I'm I'm not being sadistic when I say this.
That's one of the reasons I think that people that
have murdered others need to be present for autopsies. And
(43:28):
I know that it's not legally possible, you know, because
people are presumed innocent until proven guilty, But you want
people that have done great harm to individuals to understand
what happens to subjects. And when you see somebody that's
burned like this, subjected to severe heat, intense heat. It
(43:50):
really gives you pause. It's like you want that individual
to see what they have done because they're not going
to go through this. Their family is not going to
go through this. And it's really, you know, really throws
up the stops on in your spirit. You know, it's
so over the top. Dave.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
But Joe, what about the term burned to death.
Speaker 3 (44:10):
We've heard that said by people on you know, talk
shows that you know, on crime that the body that
the person burned to death.
Speaker 2 (44:19):
And that's not true, is it? In most cases?
Speaker 1 (44:22):
In most cases it's not. Now you have, like I
just gave you the example. I gave everybody example of
the person that's on the burn unit. They most of
the time when you have a homicide or let's just
say it's an accidental death, let's just don't let's don't
necessarily say homicides. Let's just say an accidental death as
(44:42):
related to to fire. Most people do not burn to
a crisp and die like that. Okay, that's not how
it necessarily works. It's not like the last scene in
the original Raiders Lost arc, you know, where people are
incinerating and that sort of thing. By the presence of
(45:03):
God coming out of the ark of the Covenant.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
So that was not a documentary, Is that what you're
telling me?
Speaker 1 (45:08):
That was not a documentary. Most people in our world
that are subjected to a fire an environment involving fire,
are going to die as a result of smoke inhalation
almost I'd say probably ninety nine percent, maybe not that many,
ninety five percent of those deaths. And it causes from
(45:33):
inhaling those bits that are in the air and you're
not it's not like you're just inhaling smoke. Most people
don't understand the component smoke is a product of things
burning up. It's actually this, it's actually one of the
sub components of fire. You're talking about when fuel is vaporized. Okay,
(45:55):
So when it's vaporized and extends out that if you're
in that vironment, you're you know, you're trying to get
your breath. What did they always tell us when we
were kids, if there was a house fire, you're supposed
to go. You're supposed to do what you're supposed to
go to the floor and crawl along the floor because
that's where the remaining oxygen is. All that stuff floating
up in the air, and they're absolutely right, is toxic.
(46:16):
So it's not and this is not if you're let's
just say you're in a house, or you could be
inside of a car. All of those elements within that
car which are man made, really let that hang there
in a second that our man made are going to
in dwell that environment and they're going to burn. And
(46:37):
remember how we said earlier on when I was talking
about an uninhibited chemical reaction. Well, if if you've got
like carpet, okay, you've got some kind of synthetic carpet
in a house and it's burning, did you know that
one of the major components of carpet is petroleum. It's
petroleum based, and so how do you how does all
(46:58):
that bound together? Well, it's very complex chemically, all right.
So once you once heat is subjected to that, you
kind of free all that stuff up that's in the
carpet and all of a sudden it's floating around the air. Dave.
You can find things like arsenic floating around, you know,
in this environment. So when you get when you get
you know, people breathing in and a fire, you'll see
(47:22):
these components on their toxicology that are coming back and
it's amazing. It's this litany, this list of stuff that's
kind of free floating around in their blood that they've
taken on. Not to mention the absence of actual breathable
oxygen in the environment. One of the main components that
we're looking for, though, you know that's going to lead
(47:43):
to death, is going to be you know, carbon monoxide asphyxiation.
It literally turns the body cherry pink. The skin is pink,
nail beds are pink, the eyes are pink. You open
up the body, the viscera, the organs have a pink hue.
(48:05):
The blood when you draw it out, it looks like
the only way I've been able to describe it to people,
think about a manufactured piece of candy that's like this
brilliant pink color that was created in a lab. The
first candy that comes to me. I used to love
these on us kids were not now laters or what
(48:27):
they're called, and they're kind of hard taffy, and there
was a pink one in there. That's what the viscera
looks like. Throughout the body. The blood is even that color,
and the carbon monoxide turns the blood absent the oxygen
that color. So if we see that color manifesting itself
just visually, we don't. We're going to run a test.
(48:47):
It's called a carboxy hemoglobin level. But when you see
that pink, automatically, the alarm bell goes off, and you
know that this person has inhaled carbon monoxide along with
this myriad of other things you know, in the environment,
and it's noncompatible with life. The balance gets so out
of whack because we require a certain amount of oxygen,
(49:10):
and you know, we don't live in a pure oxygen
environment anyway. You know, people talk about the oxygen air
and yeah, it's there, but you're breathing in these other components.
All you know, there's an ron out there, there's carbon
dioxide that you're rebreathing sometimes, you know, plants take up
carbon dioxide, they produce oxygen and that sort of thing,
and so all these elements are kind of floating around.
(49:30):
But it's sustainable with life when you get in that
closed environment like a home and you're literally swimming in
a chemical experiment at this point in time, and the
fire that's in there is like the bunting burner you
would have in a lab, only it's visible you're in
the midst of it, and you're trying to gasp for
air and there's nothing really left for you to grab
(49:52):
hold of to breathe, that sort of thing, And as
heat increases a around the body, most of the time
the person is going to die within a few minutes,
and there is an awareness if you don't, don't try
to shade yourself into this idea that there's no awareness
(50:14):
that you're dying. I mean, if anybody has ever struggled
with breathe, if you've ever had pneumonia or anything like,
you know what it's like to be shorter breath. If
you ever had a heart event, you know what it's
like to be shorter breath. Same principle here, there's an
awareness it's a horrible way to die because your body
is your brain is screaming, I need oxygen, I need oxygen.
So when they finally die, then comes to heat. And
(50:35):
I think that that's where this idea that people say, well,
they burn to death, and it's kind of convenient to
say that because you've got a fire, You've got this
event that occurs where the house is caving in around them.
They're surrounded by intense flames, and people think they burn
to death. There are cases where people have literally been
(50:58):
had gasoline thrown all over the Hey, there was just
a case, remember day back in Virginia last week, that
house and the representative in Virginia. The guy walks up
with a bucket a gasoline, throws it on the sky
and flips a match on him and strikes a lighter
or whatever this nut job does and set this guy
on blaze. This poor guy, I don't at this moment, Thomas,
(51:19):
we're talking right now. I don't know what his status is.
I pray for him and his family. I hope he's okay.
But he was talking, you know, when he left. But
you know, he's on the burn unit somewhere, and this
is a this is gonna be a long uphill battle
for him. But he But go ahead, David, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (51:35):
I was going to ask you about Mercedes Vega. Yeah,
out in Arizona, Americopa County. It was one of the
stories that you had sent and I thought, if we
could just briefly if she's an exotic dancer, right, yeah,
and they find her on the highway.
Speaker 1 (51:53):
Yeah, in the car. Yeah, a car in the car
is a blaze at that point.
Speaker 3 (51:57):
Right now, if you find a car where the body inside, yeah,
I'm going to assume that the person was not there
of their own free will.
Speaker 2 (52:06):
Yeah, wrong assumption if you're an investigator.
Speaker 1 (52:09):
But I'm not.
Speaker 3 (52:09):
I'm a journalist, So I'm just thinking out loud. How
do you go into that where as an investigator, you're
looking at a dead body in a car murder, suicide,
accidental death? I mean yeah, I mean, can you be
overcome with smokes that you couldn't get yourself out of it?
Can it happen that fast?
Speaker 1 (52:26):
I think that, Well, that's an excellent question. I think
that the circumstances would have to be just right. Say,
for instance, if you've got a fire that starts, let's
just say it's an accidental fire. There are people that
die in car accidents as a result of a fire
catching a car, a vehicle car fire, and it's like,
and this is really horrible. I didn't talk about these,
(52:47):
but you have what are called entrapment fires where a
person can't get free of the car. You've got like
maybe engine block intrusion, the line, the fuel line gets clipped,
it sparks off, and the is literally sitting there and
now in those cases, there have been those cases where
individuals literally do burn to death. But in her case,
(53:08):
where you have a body that's found in a car
and the car and the body are both burning, when
I hear hoof beats, I'm not gonna think camel Okay,
I'm pretty much gonna think that this individual has probably
sustained some kind of lethal injury and the people that
(53:29):
perpetrated this wanted to burn the car up in order
to get away with it. So with her her case
in particular, I think that it's important to understand that
when they would do an examination, the ideal circumstances to
do this examination would be not to remove her from
(53:50):
the car. Not to remove from the car, you would
the idea would be to take the car with her
body in it, put it onto the back of a
flatbed like a wreckord flatbed, tarp it up covered tarps,
and take it to the crime lab and process the
car with the body in it.
Speaker 3 (54:11):
Have yeah on side. Note, have you ever had a
tarp fall off? Let's see, I heard about it.
Speaker 1 (54:17):
No, I have not had that happen. I've never had
that happen. I have heard of cases non associated with
offices that I that I'm aware of where the flap
part of the flap came loose and it's like blowing
in the wind as it's going down. You have to
be very very careful because yeah, it would be There
have been cases. There was a famous case that I'm
(54:38):
aware of. I think it was in South Georgia where
delivery service actually failed to secure the rear door and
the body on the body gurney came out of the
back of the car and came out of the back
of it was a it was a hearse but it
was a van, a van Hearst, you know that was
operator as a private contractor, rolled out into the the
(55:00):
highway in turned over and then a car ran over
the body. It hit it. So you have to be
very very You have to treat not just from an
evidentiary standpoint, but for the dead and their family. You
have to make sure that you're treating these bodies with
the utmost respect. Particularly, I mean the body. The person
(55:20):
that that body represents has gone through enough. The family
will soon be going through enough once they're notified of this.
But we do know this, We do know that the
body holds a lot of evidence that you have to
be able to assess you want to get the body
into a prime, ideal set of circumstances. One of the
(55:44):
interesting things that we see with fire deaths. Have folks
asked me about this a lot. Had One lady tellm
asked me, She said, how was that? She phrased it
to me one time she said, what's boxing got to
do with fire? And I didn't I didn't register with
(56:04):
me what she was saying. And I was at a conference,
like a true crime thing, and we talked about it,
and she had said, I've heard that their bodies move
in fire. I was like, oh, you're talking about the
pugilistic position. And so as a body is subjected to fire,
(56:25):
and you can't really draw any conclusions of scientific conclusions
like were they alive versus dead when the fire started?
All bodies are going to do this, But the bodies
at the joints, even at the hip flexers, the knees,
the feet, the elbows, the hands, it's all going to
draw up and the back years ago when they began
(56:50):
to see this, the powers that be looked at this
and said, wow, that looks just like a pugilism. And
of course pugilism is the old term for boxing. And
so when you'll get these people that have their hands
that will clinch, their hands will clinch and they'll draw up.
I'm going to conclude this episode of body Bags with
(57:11):
something I don't normally do. I'm going to tell a
story real quick and you can actually see it. It's
in the first chapter of my book Blood Beneath My Feet.
And I was really at the end of my career.
I had had enough and was really struggling with PTSD
and these things that I was going through. And one
(57:36):
night I was in the middle of Georgia four hundred
and I worked a case of a young man that
was in a Ford ranger. He slammed into a bridge
abutment and it was pouring down rain. His car had
caught on fire and he was entrapped. As I'm trying
to work the case and examine his body, something happened
(57:57):
to me that changed the course of my life and
certainly my career that day. As the rain kind of
dripped down off of my face and down my glasses,
I couldn't see real well. I leaned into the cab
and this young man was entrapped and he had burned
to death. In his car, and as I reached over
(58:19):
tried to detect if his seat belt was buckled, his
left hand brushed my right cheek, and instinctively I reached up,
grabbed the wrist of this clawed hand, and it snapped off.
In mind, I stat there in the rain. No one
(58:40):
else is with me, cops are off doing their thing,
and I considered what I was holding in my hand,
just for a second, this burned claw that was left behind.
I walked off into the night. I sat beneath the
bridge and I wept, shaking uncontrollably, asking myself what the world,
(59:01):
what was I doing? Why was I here? That was
after a twenty year career, and that night my life changed.
It changed because I knew that I could no longer
do this. And fire played a big role in that
stop sign. We all have stop signs in our lives,
don't we, Those warning signs that pop up in a
(59:24):
case like this involving fire was my stop sign, and
pretty soon thereafter I had to give it up. I
had to hang it up. So fire will always be
part of who I am. It will always be part
of those things I talk about. It will always be
part of the stories of the Dead. I'm Joseph Scott
(59:48):
Morgan and this is body Backs.
Host
Nancy Grace
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