All Episodes

October 19, 2025 • 10 mins

Follow Mayhem in the Morgue on all podcast platforms: https://link.podtrac.com/MayhemMorgue

What happens when a classroom of fourth graders learns that their guest speaker once autopsied a Star Wars actor? In this episode of Mayhem in the Morgue, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns recounts his career day presentations, the bizarre questions kids love to ask, and the one time he was derailed by a child named Monty. From explaining forensic pathology to grade schoolers to calming a room full of kids convinced that Darth Vader actually killed someone, this story shows that sometimes the toughest crowd is not in a courtroom, but a classroom.

 

Highlights

  • (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns
  • (0:15) Career days and the mission to spread forensic pathology
  • (1:00) How to make autopsy talk school friendly
  • (2:15) Spielberg, Jaws, and the art of showing just enough
  • (4:00) The bizarre questions kids ask
  • (5:00) "Who is the most famous person you have autopsied?”
  • (5:30) The Star Wars actor autopsy story
  • (6:45) Chaos breaks out in the classroom
  • (8:00) Monty vs. logic, round one
  • (8:15) “Darth Vader gave him cancer,” Monty strikes again
  • (9:00) Teacher to the rescue
  • (9:45) Lessons learned about grade schoolers

 

About the Host: Dr. Kendall Crowns

Dr. Crowns is the Chief Medical Examiner for Travis County, Texas, and a nationally recognized forensic pathologist. He las led death investigations in Travis County, Fort Worth, Chicago, and Kansas. Over his career, he has performed thousands of autopsies and testified in court hundreds of times as an expert witness. A frequent contributor to Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, Dr. Crowns brings unparalleled insight into the strange, grisly, and sometimes absurd realities of forensic pathology.

 

About the Show

Mayhem in the Morgue takes listeners inside the bloody, bizarre, and often unbelievable world of forensic pathology. Hosted by Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns, each episode delivers real-life cases from the morgue, the crime scene, and the courtroom. Expect gallows humor, hard truths, and unforgettable investigations, ranging from courtroom drama to deaths that even seasoned pathologists struggle to explain.

 

Connect and Learn More

Learn more about Dr. Kendall Crowns on Linkedin, catch him regularly on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace and follow Mayhem in the Morgue where you get your podcasts.

 

📣 If you liked this episode, don’t keep it to yourself—follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave us a review.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark as Played
Transcript

Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today's episode discusses the death of an individual. If this
type of information upsets you, this is not the show
for you. Welcome to Mayhem and the More with their host,
doctor Kindo Krans. Over a decade ago, I started doing

(00:22):
career days at my children's schools. I did this in
part to hang out with my kids and see them
at school and maybe go out to lunch with them,
But my other reason was to tell people about the
field of forensic pathology. Not a lot of people even
fully realize what forensic pathologists do beyond what they've seen
on TV, and they really don't know much about medical examiners.

(00:42):
When I tell people I'm a medical examiner, a lot
of people think I work in the meat industry, expecting
meat like for the FDA. Other people think I work
for funeral homes as m Bomber. People also think I'm
a coroner, and a lot of people don't even realize
I have a medical degree. I've had numerous career days
where students were shocked to find out how much education

(01:03):
they needed to become a forensic pathologist. I've even had
medical students tell me in their last year of medical
school that they had no idea forensic pathology existed and
wish they had known about it when they got into
medical school because they would have taken steps to go
into forensic pathology instead of the career that they had
chose to go into. The thing about it is is
there is a shortage nationwide a forensic pathologists. There are

(01:25):
only four hundred to five hundred board certified pathologists in
the United States, and every year more and more retiring
and not enough new forensic pathologists are graduating to keep
up with the loss. After four years of med school
is another three to four years of residency in a
year of sub specialization to become a friends of pathologist.
It takes longer to create a forensic pathologist than it

(01:46):
does a baby elephant. My intention with the Career Days
was not to just hang out with my kids, but
to spread the word about how wonderful a job forensic
pathology really is. And I figured by getting involved in
Career Days, I can inform kids about my job and
get them interested in it, and maybe someone would find
it interesting enough to pursue like I did way back
when I was in ninth grade and was introduced to

(02:06):
the field of forensic pathology. And my career day presentation
is a PowerPoint presentation full of pictures, so I have
different versions of it depending on what grade level I'm teaching.
I have one for grade schoolers, one for medal schoolers,
one for high schools, and finally one for college. Basically,
as the grade level goes up, the talk becomes increasingly
more graphic, and it is the most graphic once they

(02:28):
get into the college age range. Now with grade schoolers,
the most graphic thing they see as an X ray
of a head with a bullet in it. How I
went about deciding which pictures to use was partially based
on an interview I saw with Steven Spielberg. He was
discussing the movie Jaws in this interview, and he stated
that it built more tension and made the movie more
scary to give the perception of the monster in this case,

(02:51):
of course, the shark, than it was to show the
shark right from the beginning. The actual build up is
more frightening than the actual reveal of the monster. I
incorporated this concept in in my talk. I show an
X ray that shows a bullet, I show close ups
of wounds. I showed the actual bullets that were removed
from the bodies, but I never show the whole body,
faces or any identifying features, So in a way, I

(03:14):
give the perception of the injuries and the gore that
people associate with this career, but they actually never see
the whole thing. By doing this, it makes my talk
less frightening or horrifying, and the students think they have
seen something crazy, but in reality, it was very tame.
In the years I've done these presentations, I've never received
one complaint from teachers, parents, or children, so it must
have not been too frightening, right. I have been asked

(03:37):
back every year since I started doing this, and the
teachers would tell their friends, so I was going to
numerous different school districts, and I only recently stopped doing
these talks because my kids are all in college now
and it just isn't the same for me. Fortunately, I
have colleagues that have taken it over now, so the
information does continue to get out there, but for me,
I've kind of moved on. There's one other thing that

(03:59):
I I always enjoyed, which was the bizarre questions that
children would ask, and that's what we'll be talking about
for the rest of the episode. Is one of the
children's bizarre questions, my answer, and the ensuing hijinks that
my answer created. So on this particular day, I was
talking to a group of fourth graders. The talk went

(04:20):
reasonably well. I got my standard oohs and ahs and ooh,
that's gross statements and kids covering their faces. I got
my standard questions like what does it smell like? My
answer always is rotting trash mixed with blood. How much
do you get paid? My answer to that is I
would tell them my salary and some would be impressed
and some would say lame, we're just saying. Ever found

(04:42):
in the stomach ballpoint pins was actually probably over fifty
where this weapon used to kill someone a mini safe
like crushed in his head. Have you ever autopsied a baby?
My answer to this is I have autopsied a wide
age range of people, from fetuses to people over one
hundred and six years of age. Finally, when I got
to the end of my presentation, I asked if there

(05:05):
was any more questions, and one of the children asked,
who is the most famous person you have ever autopsy?
This is a question I get asked on almost every presentation,
and the answer often depends on who I am talking
to with a group of fourth graders. I felt it
would be best to discuss a movie star from a
popular movie. It would probably be someone they would know,
so I chose Richard Lapalmeittier. If you don't know who

(05:27):
he is. He was an actor in many movies, including
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? And Star Wars the original one,
not the prequels, not the sequels, not the TV shows,
but the very first Star Wars movie from nineteen seventy
seven that's now been rebranded is I think the New
Hope or Episode four or something like that. He played
a Mayan character in the Star Wars movie, but in
a very memorable scene. And when he dies years after

(05:49):
being in Star Wars, he was sixty six years old.
He was in town visiting family. I believe he was
going to a comic con to sign autographs. His cause
of depth was from an intestinal cancer that rode it
into a blood vessel that caused him to actually bleed out.
So his cause of death was complications of cancer, and
his manner death was natural. He was the famous person

(06:10):
I chose to tell the group. I told the group
of children that I autopsied Richard la palmeteer, and they
said who's that? And my reply, of course, was have
you ever seen Star Wars? The original Star Wars? And
most of them said, oh, I've seen that movie. I've
seen that movie. And I said, you know the guy
whom Darth Vader chokes with a force on the Death
Star and says, I find your lack of faith and

(06:30):
the force disturbing. And then one of the children screamed, wait,
you mean Admiral Maddy. At that moment, I thought in
my head, wow, I didn't know the character's actual name,
but I responded with sure. At that moment, one of
the children gas and he said, you mean Darth Vader
really killed him. A wave of shock and realization spread
through the room faster than life with kindergarteners. Several kids

(06:52):
excitedly exclaimed what really and more and more kids were
becoming excitable. While this was occurring, I was standing there
not responding. Granted it was only a few seconds, but
long enough for chaos to ensue. The thing is, I
have five children who are now all adults, but when
they were little, occasionally they would say something absurd that
I would get tripped up by. Logically, it made no

(07:13):
sense but they were sure it was real, and they
were sure they were right, and there was no convincing them. Otherwise.
You can't counter a young child with a logical argument
because they just wouldn't understand. And this was one of
those moments. I thought, in my head, no, no, he
didn't kill him. It was a movie. Plus it was
nineteen seventy seven, which was like over thirty five years ago,

(07:33):
and I was in grade school, so I would not
have done his autopsy if he had died in nineteen
seventy seven. But I thought that in my head. I
didn't come up with a good response. I was standing
there dumbfound it just uh well, and the chaos had
taken over the classroom. The children are all talking about
the murder committed by Darth Vader, and they couldn't believe
that he had actually killed that person. Thankfully, the fourth

(07:55):
grade teacher stepped in and she calmed them down and
got them to listen to reason. Explained how Star Wars
was just a movie, and the more logical children agreed
with her with a resounding yeah. I chimed in and
I said, that's right, your teacher's right, it's just a movie.
And he actually died of cancer. Then that same child,
whose name was Monty by the way, started the chaos

(08:16):
again when he said Darth Vader gave him cancer, and
again that same wave of chaos spread across the room.
This time I said, no, no, Darth Vader had nothing
to do with it, and Monty again exclaimed that it
must have been something in the Death Star, something made
him get cancer in the Death Star. And I thought
this was a reasonable assumption. If the Death Star was

(08:36):
a real working environment that did not follow OSHA's safety guidelines,
I mean, yeah, potentially he could have gotten cancer. But
again it was indeed false, and the teacher said, Monty,
that's enough, to which a chorus the girls said, yeah,
Manty enough. The thing about it is is I have
testified in court for years. I've testified in massive courtrooms,

(08:56):
in front of legislators, you name it, and I've never
been de raded like I was by that statement from
a fourth grader. After the teacher got the class calm
down again, she said, well, I think we're done asking
Doctor Crown's questions, so let's all thank Doctor Crowns with
a round of applause, and all the kids dutifully clapped
and thanked me, and that ended it. I was a

(09:18):
little relieved that it was finally over, because Monty really
had my number that day. So that incident happened probably
well over a decade ago. Now I don't really know
what happened to little Monty. He'd be in his early twenties.
Who knows what he's up to. He's probably getting ready
to become a lawyer and getting ready to derail medical
examiners across the country with his crazy logic. The one
thing I'd have to say, though, is thank goodness for

(09:39):
grade school teachers, because they actually understand the logic of
children somehow, and that teacher that day really saved me.
That brings us to the end of the story. And
I learned never to take too long to answer a
group of grade schoolers because they are like sharks with
chum in the water, and they will swarm in a
feeding frenzly with any opportunity. I hope you learned something

(10:07):
like Star Wars is just a movie. I know that's
difficult to believe, and I hope you were entertained until
the next time
Advertise With Us

Host

Nancy Grace

Nancy Grace

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

Dateline NBC

Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com

CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist

CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist

It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.

Music, radio and podcasts, all free. Listen online or download the iHeart App.

Connect

© 2025 iHeartMedia, Inc.