Mayhem in the Morgue | Parts and Pieces (Part 1)

Content Warning: This episode discusses the deaths of individuals. If you’re sensitive to this topic, this episode may not be for you.

 

A leg on the shore, a hand with no body, and a pair of feet in yellow socks. Every fragment tells a story, and every story leads somewhere unexpected. In this episode of Mayhem in the Morgue, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns investigates the unsettling cases where only parts arrive in the medical examiner’s office, and the truth must be reconstructed piece by piece.

 

Highlights

• (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns
• (0:30) When the medical examiner’s office receives only parts of a body: heads, hands, and torsos
• (1:45) The case of the unclaimed pinky finger
• (3:30) A leg washes up on the shore of Lake Michigan, exposing the reality of what happens when bodies meet ship propellers
• (6:30) A pair of traumatically amputated legs discovered on the roadside in blood-stained yellow socks
• (7:45) Matching the legs to a hit-and-run victim discovered twelve miles from the point of impact

 

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.

 

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 discusses the death of individuals. If this sort
of thing upsets you, this is not the episode for you,
nor will any episode I ever do probably be the
episode for you, but it's your call. Welcome to Mayhem
in the Law with their host Doctor Kendo Crowns today's

(00:25):
episode Pieces and Parts Part one. Occasionally at the medical
Examiner's office, will receive part of a body, like a head,
a hand, a torso, something like that, and then over
the next few days and weeks and even months, possibly years,
will wait to see if we find more parts than

(00:46):
make up a whole body. We might receive more. We
might get a foot at the beach, head in a dumpster,
a torso at them all, a foot in a field,
and over time we might get enough of these parts
to form the whole body. And what we'll do is
will match up the injury patterns to make sure that
they are consistent with the other parts, and also get

(01:09):
DNA to make sure that they all come from the
same person and we're not dealing with multiple individuals, because
you never know if there is a serial killer lurking about,
cutting people into different pieces and throwing them about. Occasionally,
all you'll ever receive is one body part, and you
can wait years, even decades, and the rest will never

(01:32):
be found. In those particular cases, if there is enough
of the individual that we can try and determine causem
man or death, we'll do our best, and we'll do
our best to try and identify them that ultimately there
isn't much we can do. Today, we'll be discussing a
few of these type of cases. The first case is

(01:52):
a human remain that was recovered from a crime scene.
A homeowner had been woken up by their dog barking,
and when they went out into their living room, they
found that one of their windows was broken and there
was blood all around. It appeared that someone had broken
into their home, but was startled by the rather large
dog and made a hasty exit through the window that
they came in, and as they were trying to exit,
they broke the window and cut their hand. There was

(02:15):
a pool of blood at the scene, and in this
pool of blood there was what appeared to be human remains.
When the police arrived, they packaged up the remains and
sent it to the medical examiner's office. And when I
did the examination, I opened up the paper bag and
removed it, and it was about a half inch piece
of skin, subcutaneous tissue, a little bit of bone. It
looked to be that it was from the tip of

(02:36):
the finger and on the side because it had a
bit of a nail bed, but it had no fingerprints.
It did appear to be a fifth digit or pinky
finger due to its size, or it could be from
a person with very small hands. Thing about this one
is is you can lose your pinky finger and survive.
It's not that important. So with this case, I documented it.

(02:56):
I packaged it up and put it back in the
cooler and waited the sea of someone else would come
in missing that exact portion of their pinky. Because any
case that comes into the medical examiner's office, hands are evaluated.
We make sure there's five fingers on each hand, there's
no injuries or abnormalities or anything like that. We even
look at the nails because the nails can show evidence

(03:18):
of toxins or poor nutritional status. And over the next days,
two weeks, two months, to years, no one else came
in that was missing that exact portion of their pinky,
so the pinky remained unclaimed. Eventually, it was processed with
other human remains associated with the office. The next case

(03:39):
is that of a whole leg. It was the left
leg from just below the groin, so you had the thigh,
the knee, the lower leg, and foot. This leg had
washed ashore along a beach on Lake Michigan. The leg
exhibited decompositional change. It had a green disc coloration, skin slippage,
and all the toenails were gone. And we would get

(04:01):
parts from Lake Michigan like this occasionally, because what would
happen is when a body is dumped in Lake Michigan,
or a person jumps into the lake to commit suicide,
or alternatively they were swimming and drowned and never recovered,
or any other of a myriad of possibilities. But what
happens is after they die and begin decomposing, they float

(04:22):
back up to the surface. So on Lake Michigan there
are these large lake freighters. They're also called lakers. They
move back and forth along Lake Michigan, carrying a wide
range of goods, including iron ore, coal, and limestone things
like that. They typically run between March and mid January,
usually before Lake Michigan begins to ice over. They have

(04:45):
giant propellers or screws on the back that propel them
through the water. And when these giant propellers hit a body,
it's as if the person was thrown into a blender
and the body gets all chopped up and turned into
bits and pieces. And once a person is all all
chopped up or all blended, their pieces might sink, or
they might float and eventually wash ashore somewhere or be

(05:08):
spotted by someone sailing by. Usually, with the bodies that
got ran over with big ships, we didn't get much
more of them than the one part that was found
when I examined this lower leg. It was an intact
left leg, thigh, knee, lower leg, and foot. I documented it.
I got a DNA sample from the bell marrow and
we photographed it. There was no other evidence of injury

(05:29):
other than the fact that it had been traumatically amputated
at the level of the groin. You have to remember
in this area the femeral artery sits and you can
bleed out relatively quickly from that. So we knew this
person had to be dead. So, unlike the pinky, we
could issue a death certificate. In this particular case, the
death certificate would not have a name, on it because

(05:49):
the person was unidentified, but it could have a cause
of death of undetermined and a manner of death of
undetermined because we really didn't know what happened that caused
the person to go into the lake in the first place.
So once the examination was done, the leg was packaged
back up and put in the cooler and we waited
to see if any more the body came in. And

(06:11):
days became weeks, and weeks became months, and time passed
and no other parts came in the matched up with
this leg. Other parts came in, but they weren't the
ones that were associated with this leg. Finally, after a
long period of time, the leg was included with other
indigent burials and buried. But to my knowledge to this day,
over twenty years later, that leg has still not been identified.

(06:35):
That brings us to the last case. When the last
case came in, it was labeled as just human feet.
These body parts were discovered on a roadway by a
passer by. They saw what they thought were human remains
and called the local police department. The police arrived and
found two traumatically amputated legs. The legs still had on

(06:56):
their socks and there was a shoe found at the scene,
but no body. There was no body anywhere around there,
so they collected the remains and brought him to the
medical examiner's office. When I unzipped the body bag, what
I found were two human legs, appeared to be a
right and left leg, wearing blood stained yellow socks. They
were tramatically amputated about the level of the mid shin,

(07:19):
both roughly about the same size. There was lacerated torns, skin,
muscle and ligaments, and fractured bones, specifically the tibia amphibulous,
but that was all we had. You can't survive an
amputation like this unless you get immedia medical treatment. So
we knew we were probably dealing with a dead body somewhere,
but it just hadn't been found yet. And once again

(07:40):
we waited, and this time hours turned to days, and
two days later, an individual was driving down the highway
where the feever were originally found and twelve miles from
the point where the feever were found. They thought they
saw something. They thought they saw a body in the bushes.
They called police and when police arrived, they initially thought
it was a Halloween prank, but then they soon discovered

(08:02):
it was a body with two traumatically severed legs. The
police identified the individual quite quickly. They knew who he was.
He was a sixty year old male from the area
the routinely walked up and down the roadway. His body
was brought into the office and when I did the examination,
the fracture patterns of the tibbian fibula were at the
right locations to match up with the feet we had

(08:25):
from two days prior. Samples of DNA were taken. Testing
was done and it appeared that we had the right
feet with the right body. The decenon was also covered
in bruises, abrasions, and lacerations about his body. He had
a tornae order, numerous broken bones, and glass shards embedded
all over his skin. From the findings of the autopsy,

(08:46):
it was pretty obvious he had been hit by a
motor vehicle and this was a hit and run. Circumstances
were not known, but more likely than not it was
an accident. The cause of death of the case was
initially made pending police investigation. It was also made pending
this would give police enough time to do a thorough
investigation before the actual cause went out. The subsequent police

(09:07):
investigation found that an individual was driving down the highway,
did not see the decedent, and struck him with his automobile.
He was traveling at such a high rate of speed
it caused a traumatic amputation of both limbs, as we
already knew, and the body catapulted up over the hood,
through the windshield of the car, and into the passenger
seat next to the driver. The driver panicked, he drove

(09:31):
another twelve miles with a decedent next to him, dying,
pulled over and dumped the decedent some bushes along the
highway near a creek. He then proceeded to call his
girlfriend and her brother to help him dispose the car.
The car was a classic nineteen ninety eight Oldsmobile Ilina
that They then took the car to an abandoned area

(09:52):
and lit it on fire and hoped never to be caught.
But as usual, the police found this burned out car
in an abandoned lot with damage consistent with a hidden run.
They matched up the trace evidence recovered from the decedent
and determined that this was the vehicle that had killed him.
They traced the vehicle back to the owner and subsequently
arrested him. He was charged for the hit and run

(10:14):
accident and eventually convicted, and that brought this case to
a close and at least this time we were able
to match the parts back up with the rest of
the bottom. So that brings us to the end of
the episode. I hope you learned something like never goes
swimming in an area where there are lake freighters, and
I hope you were entertained until the next time.