Mayhem in the Morgue | The Bully

Content Warning: This episode discusses the death of an individual, including details of electrocution and injury, which some listeners may find distressing.

 

Two burn marks on the chest. No sign of fire. A man collapses at work and is pronounced dead. In this episode, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns walks through a case that seemed straightforward until a witness came forward with a story that changed everything.

 

Highlights

• (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns
• (0:30) “We don’t autopsy in a vacuum.”
• (1:30) Middle-aged man collapses at work
• (2:00) Mysterious burn marks
• (3:45) Witness confession
• (5:00) Deadly misuse of a defibrillator
• (5:45) Actual cause of 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, performing thousands of autopsies and testifying 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 cases from the morgue, the crime scene, and the courtroom. With gallows humor and unflinching detail, Dr. Crowns shares investigations that range from decomposing feet with no bodies to deaths 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):
In today's episode, we talk about the death of an individual.
So if you find that type of thing upsetting, this
is not the episode for you.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
Welcome and mayhem the more with your host, Doctor Kendall Crown.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
Back when I was first starting out, one of the
senior pathologists said to me, you know, we don't autopsy
in a vacuum. And I said to him, well, what
does that mean, you know, nothing better than a cryptic
statement to start your day, And he said, well, you know,
the autopsy is not the only part of our investigation.
We can't come to a proper cause and man or
death without numerous things, and that includes a thorough death investigation,

(00:45):
crime scene photographs, crime scene investigation, medical records, EMS reports,
police reports, toxicology findings, microscopic findings. All these things come
together for us to make our final opinion of the
cause and manner of death. And without any of these
in just the autopsy, it could be hard to actually

(01:05):
get the right conclusions. And over the years I have
learned that that is very true. So one of my
best examples if we don't autopsyne at vacuum is the
following case. The case is that of a middle aged
male who worked on a janitorial crew. On the day
of his death, he was working with his crew at
a renal dialysis clinic and they were cleaning the cafeteria.

(01:26):
Two of the members of the crew were in the
cafeteria with him when one of them witnessed him to
drop his mob clutch, his chest, wobble and slump into
a chair. He quickly became unresponsive. They called emergency medical
services and when EMS arrived, they initiated CPR. They found
him to be in ventricular fibrillation, which is an irregular heartbeat.

(01:47):
They shocked him with an external defibrillator, but it didn't
work and he quickly deteriorated into pulselessness or a sistily
and died. He was brought to the medical Examiner's office
and the next day I was the one that performed
the audio topsy, so I started with the external examination.
He was nude, no clothing came in with them. He
was a middle aged male. No real external evidence of

(02:09):
injury except on each side of his chest. There was
one burn mark. They were kind of circular, not one
inch in diameter. They were the only injuries that were
on him. So I was looking at that and I
was like, these burn marks don't make sense, and I asked,
was he around electricity, was he a brown something with fire?
Anything to explain these burn marks. So the death investigators

(02:30):
looked into the scene a little bit more. No, he
was in a cafeteria. He was standing near some big
round tables. Nothing really going on, no electricity, no fire, nothing.
Police reports didn't say anything different. He did come in unclothed.
I asked about the clothing I was looked into. The
clothing had been cut away at the time he made
it to the er and had all been thrown away,

(02:53):
so there was no clothing available either. So I all
I had was these two regular birdmarks. So I did
an internal examination. The burn marks seems superficial, but what
he did have was a very enlarged heart. It was
about five hundred grams, which normal heart's around three forty
five somewhere in there. So he had a big heart,
thick and left ventricle of the heart or left entry lyropotrophy,
which is those two findings are very common with hypertensive

(03:15):
carriovascular disease. He had coordinary atherosclerosis, which is hardening of
the arteries. So these two findings are consistent with athriscrac
and hypertensive cardiovaster disease, or in other terms, he had
a heart attack. Using the information I had, I signed
him out as athriscrac and hypertensive cardiovasar disease and the
manner of death natural. When I moved on to my

(03:38):
next cases and didn't think anything more of it. A
couple weeks went by and one of the other janitors
came forward and said that the initial story was a fabrication.
He said, what really happened was one of the janitors
was a bully. The middle aged man that died had
learning disabilities, and the bully loved to torment him. He
would push him, he'd hit him, he'd call him names,
and one time he even fetish shirt into a paper shredder.

(04:01):
And on this particular day, the bully was playing around
with an external defibrillator he found in the dialysis clinic
and his pushing buttons, flipping switches, turning dials. When he
finally got it to make this high pitched wine, the
other guys and the crew told him, hey, quit messing
around with that, and he told him to shut up.
And then he saw the middle aged man, and he said, hey,
come here, dummy, come here, And the middle aged man

(04:24):
wandered over to him, holding his mop held at both
the defibrillator paddles, placed him on the middle aged man's
chest and discharged them. When they discharged, the middle aged
man dropped his mop, wobbled and fell into a chair
in the cafeteria and became unresponsive. So part of this
story was true. You know, he dropped his mop, he wobbled,

(04:44):
he fell into a chair, and became unresponsive. But they
left out the critical element of he had been shocked
with a defibrillator before all this happened. So with that
information now I had an explanation with the burn marks.
The thing about a defibrillator is is when they use
it on people in the hospital, it's to shock them
out of an irregular rhythm. So if your heart's gone
into an irregular rhythm from a heart attack, the defibrillator

(05:07):
can shock it out of that irregular rhythm and save
your life. If your heart's completely stopped, it cannot shock
your heart back into operation, which is kind of a
misnomber created by TV and movies, etc. All it can
do is take your heart out of an irregular rhythm
and try and jump start it back into a normal rhythm,
saving your life. But if your heart's in a normal

(05:29):
rhythm like the middle aged man's was, it'll put it
in an abnormal rhythm that can result in your death.
And that is what happened here. So that electricity crossing
his heart, causing the two burn marks on either side
of his chest, is what caused his death. So with
this new information, I changed the cause of death to electrocution,

(05:49):
and of course, since it was intentional harm done by
someone onto another, it changed the natural manner of death
to homicide, so electrocution homicide. And how that case ultimately
was signed out. So what happened to the bully. The
bully fully confessed to what he did and he was
given a prison sentence. I don't think it was very long,

(06:10):
but I don't know the whole final end of that
portion of the story. But this proved we don't autopsy
in a vacuum. Without that information, it totally changed the
cause and manner of death and made it a heart
attack and natural. But with the information it changed it
to electrocution and homicide, So we don't autopsy in a vacuum.

(06:31):
We're only as good as the investigation we received that
brings us to the end of the episode, and I
hope you learned something. I hope you were entertained until
the next time