Mayhem in the Morgue: Gator Bait

Content Warning: This episode contains graphic descriptions of autopsy findings, decomposition, and animal predation. If you’re sensitive to these topics, this episode may not be for you.

A fisherman’s disappearance, his empty boat, and circling alligators lead to a grim discovery. In a separate case, a family Labrador retriever trots home with her latest find, a human head. In this episode of Mayhem in the Morgue, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns investigates two extraordinary cases of scientific identification, showing that forensic science can reveal the truth in the strangest circumstances.

 

Highlights

• (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns
• (0:15) An introduction to scientific identification and how it helps solve difficult cases
• (2:15) Stomach contents, swamp water, and the first clues of what really happened
• (5:00) A second case: Carly the Labrador retriever brings home a human head
• (6:15) Mummified remains are tested, and DNA reveals the victim’s connection to the U.S. Marshals’ Most Wanted list
• (8:15) A press conference overshadowed by an unexpected star: the dog

 

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.

 

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today's episode discusses the death of individuals. If this sort
of thing upsets you, this is not the episode for you.
Welcome to Mayhem in the War with their host Doctor
Kindo crowns today's episode Gator Bait. When a body comes

(00:23):
into the medical examiner's office, one of the first things
we do is identify that individual, and there are two
methods for doing this, non scientific methods and scientific methods.
To day, we'll be discussing the scientific methods. Scientific methods
can be one of five things. It can be finger prints,
comparison of dental X rays, comparison of radiographic studies done

(00:46):
at hospitals, looking at serial numbers found on medical devices
that are implanted in the body, and finally DNA. The
dental X rays, the radiographic studies, and the serial numbers
all require you to have medical records of some sorts,
so you have to have a bit of a presumptive
id to get those in the first place. Fingerprints, of course,

(01:06):
everybody has them. Everybody's are different because they form when
you're a fetus, moving your hands around in the amniotic fluid,
touching your face, et cetera. Even if you're an identical
twin your fingerprints are different. DNA is incredibly helpful, but
it does take a long period of time. We try
to exhaust all the other options before we resort to DNA.
First case we'll be discussing today was that of a

(01:29):
sixty two year old male. He was retired and enjoyed
going fishing. He would often spend three to four days
off on a fishing trip all by himself. Usually on
these fishing trips, he would check in with his wife
or talk to other family members every day. He had
checked in late in the evening on the day before
his death, but the next day he did not call.
One whole day went by, and then on the second day,

(01:51):
his wife became worried. She tried to call him several
times without success, so she decided to drive to the
area where he was fishing at and look for him.
When she arrived at the boat ramp that he normally used,
she found his truck and trailer. She couldn't see his
boat out on the lake, so she decided to notify
the local police department. The police department arrived on the scene,

(02:11):
and then they notified the coast guard and the game wardens,
and then the search began. During the search of the area,
they found his boat still anchored in about two to
three feet of water. Inside the boat was as wallet
and cell phone, and near by was a ripped up
pair of jeans, a boot, and a fish string or
belt which is sometimes used to keep fish in a
line while a person wades in the water. When they

(02:35):
picked up the torrent jeans, they also found two bones
that looked like they were human, and they turned out
to be human. They were a tibbianphibula, which are the
bones of your lower leg. While they were searching the area,
they noticed three large alligators nearby. The alligators kept tracking
and watching the search party the entire time. The game
wardens decided that the alligators were somehow involved, and the

(02:56):
decision was made to shoot them. I know for all
you alligators lovers out there that this is a horrible moment,
but it is what it is. The three alligators were shot,
and an individual that was contracted through that county for
alligator removal came in and opened up the alligators and
pulled out their stomachs, kind of like that scene and Jaws.
They opened the three stomachs up and amongst all sorts

(03:18):
of debris, apparent soft tissue, and hair and bones that
appeared to be human. They bagged up the stomach contents
and brought them to the medical examiner's office. When we
opened the bags containing the stomach contents, the first thing
that hit us was an odd acid and swamp water smell.
It's hard to describe, but it was pretty bad. All
of the three bags contained mighty debris, grass, bits of frogs, rocks,

(03:42):
and other random watery debris, but two of the three
bags contained more. They contained hair, portions of skin with
bite marks in it, decomposed bits of muscle, crushed up bones,
some looking like ribs, and some just completely unidentifiable. There
was there's one intact bone, though, It was the hyoid bone,

(04:02):
which is the U shaped bone in your neck that
your neck muscles attached to. So these remains were definitely human.
The question was who is this individual? We had to
identify him somehow. We didn't have teeth or anything like that.
We couldn't get fingerprints, we couldn't get dental X rays
or radiographic studies because everything was so smashed up, so

(04:23):
our only option was DNA. There was enough left of
some of the bones to get bone marrow from it,
and we sent it off to a DNA lab. The
DNA lab got comparison DNA from family, and after a
little while they were able to determine that this person
was indeed the missing fisherman. Question is is how did
he die. Did he have a heart attack and fall

(04:46):
in the water and then the alligators ate him. Did
he purposely jump in the water and taunt the alligators
causing them to eat him. Did someone hit him over
the head of a baseball bat and then the alligators
ate him. There's infinite possibilities. You couldn't really determine how
he died, so we're only left with the cause of
death of undetermined and the manner undetermined. But at least

(05:06):
we were able to identify him. The next case of
scientific and identification that we'll discuss is again another DNA case.
In this case is a human head. The head was
found by a twelve year old Laprador retriever by the
name of Carly. It was early September and she was
out playing in a dry creek bed near her neighborhood,
as she routinely did. She returned home that night with

(05:28):
her new treasure and laid down on the front porch
to settle in for a good shoe. When her owners
came out to see what she was playing with, to
their horror, it was a human head. One of the
newspapers that interviewed the family after the human head was
found quoted, she gets out and is always bringing things home,
but this is the weirdest thing she has ever brought
home though. So once they saw the head, they called

(05:50):
the local police department. Police department came out and was like, well,
that's a human head, and they brought it to the
medical examiner's office. And when we did the examination, what
we found was early had found and intact partially skeletonized
human head. It had remaining dark brown mummifhiede skin on
one side. The jaw was still attached with dried tissue

(06:11):
and muscle, but just barely. Most of the teeth were gone,
the eyes were gone, the nose was gone, the right
ear was completely gone, and most of the left ear
was gone as well. There was still some attached, short
buzzed brown hair, and nothing else came with the head.
Everything from the neck down was not recovered at that time.
I was able to pull some of the hairs with
the root shaft, removed a tooth and cut out a

(06:34):
small portion of skull for submonthing for DNA. The DNA
lab went about their job extracting DNA from the recovered
tissues and they entered it into the National Missing and
Unidentified Person System, or NamUs. The DNA profiles put into
NamUs then can be matched against other databases, including COTIS

(06:56):
with a combined DNA index system run by the FBI.
And sure enough, once all this was done, they got
a match, and the match turned out to be that
of a forty one year old escape fugitive that was
on the US Marshals Service's Top fifteen most wanted list
at the time he disappeared. He was at a residential
re entry facility finishing up a thirteen year sentence for

(07:19):
child sexual assault and possession of child pornography when one
day he escaped out of an emergency exit and disappeared.
A few days after he escaped, there was a massive
rainstorm with intense flooding in the area he was in.
The theory was as he probably got swept away by
floodwaters and drowned. He had been missing for six months

(07:39):
when Carly found him, so he had had plenty of
time to decompose and become mummified and be pulled apart
by other scavenging animals or be washed away in the
creek bed that he was in. That's why no more
of them had been found. Law enforcement made an attempt
to find more of them, and they even put a
tracking collar on Carly to see if she would find more,
but in that time period, she didn't find any more

(08:01):
of him, and the law enforcement didn't find anything either.
Carly wasn't finding anything and the hazards were just too much.
In fact, all Carli found during that time period was
a kid's baseball club. The rest of the fugitive was
never found, but we at least had identified him since
he was on the US Marshall's Most Wanted List and
he had been featured on national TV on a show

(08:22):
called The Hunt. It was decided to have a press
conference announcing that he was found in what had happened
to him, and closing the case for the public. At
this point in my career, I had been a medical
examiner for over a decade, but I had never been
involved directly in a press conference. Always been kind of
on the periphery. But this time, it was going to
be me talking to the media. The day of the

(08:42):
press conference, I showed up in my suit, tie in place,
hair all combed, I was all ready to go. There
was the marshals, the local law enforcement, anthropology, the DNA analysts,
and myself. But the star of the show was Carly.
Her owners and Carly were there as well, and everybody
was excited to see her. Well, who wouldn't be. I
was excited to see her as well. Really, no one

(09:05):
cared that anybody else was there other than Carly. The
press conference began and each group came up and said
their portion of the story. And the one thing about
the medical examiner is we're always the end, you know,
because the guy died, the story ends with us. After all.
The final two people to talk was a local law
enforcement and then me. So the DNA analyst had already

(09:26):
talked about all that they had done to determine who
he was, so there wasn't much for me to say there.
So the local law enforcement was just supposed to talk
about their portion of the story where they had identified
it as a human head and then brought to the
medical examler's office, but the officer instead decided to also
tell what the Medical Examiner's Office found, including the cause
and manner of death, and what they recovered to give

(09:48):
to the DNA lab. So really he told my entire
portion of the story. I had nothing to say. I
was standing there listening to him talk, and I was like, hey,
you're telling my part of the story. What am I say?
I was already nervous, my mouth was dry, and I
was becoming increasingly cold, to the point of shivering, because
when I get nervous, I get cold. And I really

(10:10):
didn't have a script or anything to go by, so
I was just gonna wing it, which was already not
a good idea. So when I got up to the podium,
I really had nothing to say, nothing to add. I
could have literally said well, Dido and sat down, because
nothing was left for me to say. But instead I said, well,
law enforcement has already pointed out what the Medical Examiner's

(10:31):
Office has done, and I will further reinforce the fact
that the decedent's cause and manner of death is undetermined
and undetermined because there was not enough recovered of him
for us to make a scientific conclusion. The press conference ended,
my portion was edited out. I did get a small
quote in one of the newspapers basically saying it was undetermined, undetermined,

(10:54):
and that was it. Still, everybody was excited to see
the dog, and no one really cared about me, which
I'm I'm actually okay with. I would just have to say,
even if you're eaten and partially digested by alligators or
decompose mummified, and you've been turned into a dog toy,
we can still identify you. That brings us to the

(11:17):
end of the episode. I hope you learned something, and
I hope you were entertained until the next time.