Mayhem in the Morgue | Hoof Prints

Content Warning: This episode contains graphic descriptions of autopsy findings and the accidental death of an individual involving animal trauma. If you're sensitive to detailed accounts of injury and investigation, please proceed with caution.

In this episode of Mayhem in the Morgue, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns unpacks the strange case of a 75-year-old man found dead beside a horse trailer. What began as a question of accident or homicide quickly turned into a hoof-print analysis and a chaotic field investigation with the donkey named Arnold.

From pattern matching injuries to near misses in the pasture, this case shows that sometimes the truth really is in the hoof print.

 

Highlights

• (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns
• (0:15) A ranch hand goes missing and turns up dead
• (1:00) Strange pattern injuries and internal damage
• (1:45) Accident or homicide? The investigation begins
• (2:15) The case of the aggressive bull
• (3:45) The horse has an alibi, the donkey does not
• (4:45) Hoof print as evidence?
• (5:45) Cows, fog, and Arnold enters the scene
• (7:15) Donkey wrangling gets dangerous
• (8:45) A forensic near-miss and a smeared print
• (10:15) Match confirmed. Arnold did it
• (11:00) Innocent bull, roaming donkey, and one accidental death

 

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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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today's episode has graphic details about the death of an
individual and the subsequent investigation. If this type of information
upsets you, this is not the episode for you. Welcome
to Mayhem the More with their host Doctor Kendall Crown.

(00:23):
It was a beautiful summer day and a ranch hand
had gone missing. He had been lost for over twenty
four hours and his coworkers had become concerned about him,
so they looked about all the fields for him, and
they finally found him lying dead in a field next
to a horse trailer in some old no longer in
used stables. He was brought into the medical examiner's office
and an autopsy was performed, and at the time of

(00:44):
his autopsy, he was a seventy five year old male.
He exhibited modern decompositional changes, which consisted of a green
discolouration of the skin, skin slippage, and he was bloated
from decompositional gases. At the lower right side of his abdomen.
He had a pattern injury. It looked like an inverted
V with an irregular square at its apex. The V

(01:04):
was made up of multiple parallel little rectangles. The whole
abrasion was surrounded by a large purplition in coloration bruise,
and the internal examination under this area of abrasion, there
were fractures of his ribs, e laceration of his liver
which is kind of a bursting cut of his liver,
and a tear of the mesentary. The mesiary is a
fat that surrounds the intestines that's very vascular. These injuries

(01:27):
called bleeding into his abdomen, which is known as hemopareneum,
and that's why he died. He died from this injury
that resulted in blood loss and his subsequent death unassociated
with the injury. He did also have heart disease, so
the cause of deaths was easy to determine. It was
blunt Force's injuries. But the problem is what was the manner?
Was it an accident? Did he have some sort of

(01:49):
incident with machinery or something like that. Was it unnatural
that he have some sort of heart attack and fall
on something causing this abrasion. This was unlikely because from
looking at the injury, his heart was still pumping when
the injury occurred, so natural could be whirled out. So
that brings us to suicide and finally homicide. Did someone
come in and do something to him that resulted in
his death. So we were kind of left with was

(02:11):
it an accident or was it a homicide? And we
had this very odd pattern abrasion. When I was talking
to the investigating officers, which included a Texas ranger, we
discussed possible things that could be at the scene that
may have caused it, And so the ranger and the
officers went back out to the scene and looked for
something that could have caused this specific pattern injury. They
found old farm equipment, but none of it matched the pattern. Also,

(02:33):
at the scene, there was a lot of farm animals
milling about. There were cows, an old horse, a donkey,
and a large black bull. The bull was actually very
aggressive and kept charging at them, trying to injure them
while they were looking around. And because of this, the
officers and the ranger felt the bull could have been
involved in the death. They thought that it could have
headbutted the decedon, which wasn't really a possibility because the

(02:55):
bull doesn't really have a patterned head, and the bruise
would have been a lot bigger. Because the bl head
was huge, they thought he could have gored him, and
goring is the actual horn penetrating the body. It's kind
of a sharp force injury. And I had seen goring
desk before and this certainly wasn't it. And then they
also thought the bull could have knocked him over and
trampled him. Now this was an interesting thought. The injury

(03:17):
actually could have been a hoof print. I mean, it
had that kind of hoof like shape. So with that
information I went to the computer and started searching up
hoof shapes of all the animals that were at the scene.
I could easily rule out the cows and the bull
because they have cloven hooves, meaning that their hooves are
split into two, and the shape of the abrasion did
not fit this. It was more singular in nature. The

(03:39):
other two suspects were a horse and a donkey. Now,
horses and donkeys have singular hoofs, which would fit the
abrasion that was found onto the seaton. The horse evidently
had an alibi. He was not in the area of
the branch at the time of the incident. He was
in the company of other horses and ranch hands, and
they could vouch for his whereabouts. That left the donkey.
It was interesting in all the scene pictures. He was there.

(04:02):
He appeared in every picture giving side eye, looking at
the camera, and always in the background watching. People from
the ranch said Arnold was a nice donkey, a bit
of a loner, but was always friendly, and there was
no way he killed a man. In general, everybody still
felt the aggressive bull was a perpetrator. The ranch had

(04:22):
even taken measures to remove the bull from his property
and had sent him to be slaughtered. I still felt
that it couldn't be the bull, that the hoof shape
was wrong, it didn't fit the pattern. So I had
an idea how we could determine if it was actually
the donkey. The abrasion pattern on the decedent's abdomen should
match Arnold's hoof print, much like a fingerprint and a
murder weapon, and we could get this print in the

(04:45):
same way we print perpetrators with fingerprint ink. My idea
was I would put the fingerprint ink on the hoof
and in place a fingerprint ink cart on the ink hoof,
and then get the print and compare it to the
actual injury. I presented my idea to the rank and
the officers, and they looked at each other and they said, well,
it's unusual, but let's give it a try. So at

(05:06):
this point, there is one part that I didn't consider.
I grew up in a city, not around farm animals.
I had friends that had cows and chickens, but usually
never had been around horses or donkeys. I had seen
them in petting zoo, where they were always kind of sedate.
I didn't think about how we would get to the hoof.
In my mind, I thought the donkey would just offer
it up, like in a cartoon or something. I really

(05:28):
had that wrong. We called the rancher explained our plan
to him, and he had no problem with the plan.
He thought it was odd, but he said we could
go ahead and proceed. He told us what part of
the ranch that Arnold would be end on the day
we planned to be out there. We coordinated with the
officers and the rangers, and we had it on out.
When we arrived at the ranch around mid morning and

(05:48):
drove off road to where Arnold was supposed to be,
the cows were following us, and when we finally stopped,
we were at the scene of the original crime. The
morning sun was warming the dew covered grass us and
it had caused a steam to rise creating a low
lying fog around the area. The cows that had been
following us surrounded our vehicles. The cows were huge, bigger

(06:10):
than any cow I had ever seen. I swear they
were bigger and taller than the cars, which were large SUVs.
They probably weren't, but that is how I perceived it.
One of the officers said that they were looking for food.
They just assumed that vehicles were on the property and
we must have food. The officers and the rangers got
out of there at SUVs and showed the cows away.

(06:31):
Once they realized that we didn't have food, they weren't
really interested in us and kind of mosied off. The bull,
as I said, was already not there. He had been
rounded up and taken away for slaughter, but he wasn't
dead yet. The horse was there, but he didn't approach us.
He just stood about fifty yards away, looking us over,
not doing anything, but just standing off in the distance.

(06:53):
After a few minutes of standing about, one of the
officers said, there he is, and I turned and I
saw him. Arnold was about four three yards away. The
lower half of his body was obscured by fog, and
he seemed to be floating towards us slowly. He was
a large gray black donkey. It only took moments for
him to close the gap and then he was standing

(07:13):
next to us. He wasn't shy, he was actually very curious.
He was trying to figure out who we were and
swalking around us slowly. The ranger quickly walked up to
him and put a bridle over Arnold's head and adjusted
it into place. Arnold didn't have a problem with the
bridle being put into place, he did look a little
like he was in trouble. He dropped his ears and

(07:33):
his head was hanging down. One of the officers walked
over with a rope and snaked it through one of
the loops of the bridle, and the second he tied
it off, Arnold reared up his head and started pulling
back on the rope. The rangers and the officers quickly
got other ropes around him, and at that point Arnold
began bucking and spinning in a circle, with the officers
and the ranger holding on to the ropes. Arnold was

(07:55):
kicking in the air wildly. And that is the moment
I realized that I was way out of my mind. Element
the chaos of Arnold and the officers trying to control
them was not like anything in the Morgue by a
long shot. You could feel the breeze from his kicks.
I took refuge behind a car because I felt that
was probably the best place for me to be at
that point in time. I didn't witness what came next,

(08:17):
but somehow the ranger and the officers wrestled Arnold to
the ground, and when I came out from behind the car,
Arnold was on his side. They had last sewed his
front legs together and tied them off. One of his
rear legs was tied to a grill of one of
the SUVs, and his other rear leg was still free
on the ground. One of the officers was sitting on
him while the ranger and the other officer were controlling

(08:39):
his head in front legs. They yelled at me, get
in there, doc, and get this done. We can't hold
him forever. I ran up with my tube of fingerprint ink,
roller and paper and got up next to Arnold. Arnold
at that moment was not moving, so I placed the
fingerprint ink on his hoof and began rolling it over it.
Arnold did not like this activity, he drew back his

(09:00):
untied rear leg and kicked it aggressively back. It missed
my ankle by probably about an eighth of an inch,
or by a few millimeters for our European friends. I
felt the breeze go by me. This startled me. If
the kick had connected, it could have easily broken my ankle,
and if it had I would have probably fallen to
the ground crying. I thought in my head this would
have been most unfortunate because it would have gotten me

(09:22):
a really bad nickname from the officers and the ranger
for the rest of my career. I quickly stepped back
out of the range of the leg, and I said
to the officers and the ranger, hey, that donkey almost
kicked me. They looked up a little irritated and told
me to just get in there and get it done
and put my foot on the leg that was free
to control it. I said, okay, I can do that,

(09:45):
at least I thought I could, so I ran up
and stepped on the free leg kind of close to
the hoof with my left foot, and proceeded with trying
to get the print. I placed the finger of print
ink paper on Arnold's hoof and pressed it down quickly.
He pulled his leg out from under my foot. I
really never had him under control, and gave two swift kicks.
One then went right in front of my leg and

(10:07):
the other then went right behind it. He was pulling
up to do a third kick because he probably had
figured out exactly where I was and that this time
it was going to put me down. But before he
could follow through with it, I pulled the paper off
and jumped out of range. I looked at the fingerprint
paper that I was holding in my hand, and I
looked at the print. It was not a good print.
You could tell I was trying to do it quickly.

(10:28):
It was smeared, It was a mess. It was all
over the place. Didn't quite represent the shape of the hoof.
But what it did show was the pattern, the multiple
parallel rectangular pattern that I saw at the time of
autopsy on the decedent's abdomen. It was a perfect match.
The ranger yelled out, did you get it, Doc? And

(10:49):
I said I got it, and the ranger and the
officers untied Arnold and released him. He quickly stood up,
and when I turned around, it was like poof. He
was gone nowhere to be found, just disappeared. But it
didn't matter. I got what I came for. We knew
what had happened. It was Arnold who had killed the

(11:11):
decedent by kicking him with his rear leg And why
did Arnold kick this guy? Well, Arnold's hoves were in
very poor shape, and probably what had happened was when
the decedan was trying to clean his hooves, it probably
hurt and that's probably why Arnold kicked. Arnold didn't intentionally
mean to kill the man, but that is what ended

(11:31):
up happening. It's a case close cause of death, the
bloodfourth injury of the abdomen, manner of death accident. What
happened to the bull? He might be asking? Well, Unfortunately,
even though we had proved Arnold was indeed the murderer,
the bull was still sent to slaughter, wrongly convicted and
put to death. Nothing we could really do about it anyway. Ultimately,

(11:53):
that was probably going to be his fate in the
long run. It just happened earlier than expected. Lastly, where's Ourarnold?
Do you ask? When we told the rancher that it
appeared that the donkey had killed the man? He said,
oh well, and did nothing about it. So Arnold the
murderer was allowed to roam free, and he's out there

(12:13):
somewhere somewhere in the woods of East Texas watching, and
that brings us to the end of the episode. I
hope you learned something. I hope you were entertained until
the next time.