December 10, 2025 • 17 mins
Content Warning: This episode contains graphic descriptions of death, decomposition, and violence. If you’re sensitive to these topics, this episode may not be for you.
In this episode of Mayhem in the Morgue, Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns examines the fallibility of non-scientific identification and the consequences when it fails. The case of “Crackhead Carl,” remembered by a single tree, and the story of identical twins mistaken in death both reveal how clothing, jewelry, and circumstance can mislead even the most seasoned investigators. With his characteristic precision and dry wit, Dr. Crowns illustrates why science, not assumption, defines the truth.
Highlights
• (0:00) Welcome to Mayhem in the Morgue with Dr. Kendall Crowns
• (0:30) Non-scientific methods of identification: clothing, jewelry, and location as early clues
• (1:15) Why dentures, facial features, and decomposition make visual ID unreliable
• (3:00) Before digital databases: when family contact and fingerprints were the only available tools
• (3:45) “Crackhead Carl” and a small-town identification built on assumption
• (5:30) The twin mistaken for dead after his brother’s heroin overdose
• (11:30) The family’s reaction and the unsettling phone call that followed
• (13:00) A second twin story: the living sister stands before Dr. Crowns with the same face he autopsied the day before
• (16:00) The birthmark that confirmed identity and closed the case
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, FortWorth, 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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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Today's episode discusses the death of individuals, as well as
a graphic description of one of their deaths. If this
sort of thing upsets you, this is not the episode
for you. Welcome. You may have the more with your host,
Doctor Kendle Crowns. Today's episode twins. As I discussed in
(00:26):
a previous episode, when a body comes into the morgue,
one of the first things we do is identify them,
and there are two methods for identification, scientific and non scientific.
I discussed the scientific methods in a previous episode, so
today we're going to discuss the non scientific methods. Non
scientific methods of identification can be a number of things. First,
(00:48):
it can be circumstantial evidence like clothing like your color
of the clothing you had on when you die, the
type of clothing, like the name, brand, the size. Things
of that nature will read, especially distinctive jewelry or medical
alert bracelets. Those can be helpful. The location of the body.
Are they in their home, are they in the car
(01:09):
that's registered to them, or something of that nature. One
thing we can kind of use with dentures because dentures
actually have the individual's names stamped in the gum line area.
Problem with dentures is and old folks home. Sometimes the
demented patients will take another person's dentures and put them
in their mouth and die. And occasionally homeless people find
(01:32):
dentures in the trash or wherever, and they'll put them
in their mouths and start using them for themselves. So
dentures may have the name on them, but they're not
always in the right mouth. Another thing in non scientific
methods is visual. Visual is looking at the driver's license
or other photographic id, passports, inmate IDs, things of that
(01:54):
nature that we can use to look at that picture
and then look at the body. The problem with this
is is people can all and change quite dramatically from
when that picture was taken. Facial hair can be shaved off,
you can lose weight, you can gain weight, and with
decomposed bodies, the face can be distorted by the decompositional
gases bloating your face causing your eyes to bug out,
(02:15):
or mummification in which the face gets dehydrated and becomes
leathery and brown, totally distorting the facial features. And of course,
anytime there's animals scavenging, there could be complete destruction of
the face and there's just no way of comparing that
to a picture I'd found at the scene. Physical attributes
like height and weight, hair styles, hair color, especially if
(02:38):
it's some really bizarre hair color. And then if there's
any deformities or amputations, like you're missing a limb or
you have a congenital abnormalities, marks, scars, tattoos, weird piercings,
strange birthmarks can be very helpful because usually they're only
associated with you. Any of these physical findings can be
helpful for getting an identification on an individual. Scientific methods
(03:00):
of identification can be helpful, but we really prefer the
scientific methods to make sure the individual is really who
they are. But when I first started working, we didn't
have all the tools that we use nowadays for identifying people.
The Internet really wasn't a thing. We couldn't do family
searches looking for ancestry dot com or Facebook or Instagram
(03:23):
or any of that stuff that we use nowadays to
kind of get an idea who this person was and
find family. A lot of states now have fingerprints on
file when you get a driver's license, which they weren't
really doing twenty years ago. There is just a lot
more things that are used to make sure the person
is properly identified, whether they be living or dead. Nowadays,
(03:43):
we identify a lot more people than we did back
when I first started. Over the years, I've had several
cases that use circumstantial evidence to identify the individual. One
of the ones that I always remember the best is
the case of Crackhead Carl. Crackhead Carl loved his crack.
Loved him more than his pickup truck, his dog, and
his wife. He loved to go down to a certain
(04:05):
tree by a creek and smoke his crack. And he
lived in a small town, and everybody knew Carl's down
there smoking his crack, and they always knew that was him.
And when Carl finally overdosed, nobody checked on him for
like a week, And then his wife finally became concerned
and started looking for him, and she went right down
to that tree and she found his decomposed body. He
(04:25):
had also been scavenged by animals. The animals had torn
up his face, taken his hands, and ripped off a
lot of his flesh. Then he was also decomposing and
kind of green and blowd The corner that was involved
in that case had him brought into the medical examiner's
office and he had him identified. And when we called
him and said how do you identify this guy, what
(04:46):
did you use? And he said, oh, that's crack Carl.
He always smokes cracked down by the tree. I know
it's him. And we told him, well, you know it
could be someone else. No, no, no, no, nobody else
goes down there and smokes cracked by that tree. That
is Carl. I know it's him. Don't you worry about it.
We still identified him scientifically and it turned out to
actually be crackhead Carl. So the corner was right, and
(05:10):
circumstantially he got identified by location. Because no one else
smoke cracked by Carl's tree, it had to have been him,
and it was. I had several cases of circumstantial identification
in the early days, much like Crackhead Carl, but unlike
Crackhead Carl, some worked and some didn't work. The next
(05:30):
case we're going to talk about is one where it
didn't work. I was sitting in my office when I
got a call from the front desk. A family was
there to meet me. I didn't have an appointment with them.
They had just shown up and wanted to talk to me,
so I told the front desk person put him in
one of the family rooms and I'll be down in
a moment. These family rooms at the office I was
working at the time were small, square rooms. They had
(05:53):
the county tan walls, brown carpet, and orange furniture, and
in the room there was a table with a TV
on it, and the TV was hooked up to a
camera in the cooler that you could wheel the body
out under and show the family a close up of
the face and they could identify the body that way.
But this family wasn't here to identify a body. They
(06:13):
wanted to talk about a particular case. So when I
got there, I walked into the room and sat down.
The family that was there consisted of a father, a
mother who were probably in their late sixties, a son
in his mid to late twenties, and a daughter who
was probably in her early twenties. They looked upset, but
usually when families came to talk to me, they were
(06:34):
never happy, with good reason, of course, because obviously a
loved one had died. The sun began speaking first, and
he said, good morning, we're here to talk about this
death certificate, and he pulled out a file folder and
pulled out of it a death certificate and put it
down in front of me. I picked up the death
certificate and looked at it. The cause of death on
(06:54):
it stated that the individual had died of a heroin overdose,
so I figured they were there to talk about that.
I looked at the family and I said, so, what
are your questions, and the son answered, this death certificate,
the name on it, that's me, and I'm not dead.
I was taken aback. I was like, well, what do
you mean this is you? Because that's my name, I'm
(07:17):
not dead and I can prove it. He pulled out
his driver's license. The driver's license did look like him.
The name on the driver's license was the name on
the death certificate. His parents his sister both said, yes,
this is him. He isn't dead. So we had a problem.
I had brought the original autopsy file folder with me
before I went into the room. I opened it up
(07:37):
and pulled out the investigation sheet that listed that he
had been identified with the driver's license at the scene.
I told this information to the family and their response was, well,
that's not right. The twin that's alive is sitting in
front of you, and he is the one listed on
the death certificate. And the twin that's dead is our
other son. So I have to give you a little
(07:58):
context on this one. We had a common last name.
I don't remember what it was right now. This case
was like over twenty years ago, but it was something
like Smith. And because this case is so old, you
have to remember the Internet really wasn't a thing that
we could use to help us find families to identify
the bodies. Back then, circumstantial identification was more common. We
would always, of course, try and fingerprint the body, but
(08:21):
a lot of people didn't have fingerprints on file, and
when those would come back negative, we would switch to
visual and use the driver's license or some other form
of photographic ID that was available. If we had a
driver's license, we'd call the Department of Transportation see if
they had emergency contacts. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't,
and if they didn't, we'd have to go with what
(08:42):
was on the driver's license for a home address and
find that phone number and give it a call and
see if anyone would answer. If no one answered, they'd
try calling a few more times, and if no one
ever answered, they'd eventually have to move on and the
visual ID made from the driver's license would be the
best option because we'd be out of at that point.
And that's what happened in this case. We had an
(09:03):
ID and the decedent looked like the ID. There was
no hit on the fingerprints, we couldn't get anybody at
the house. Circumstantially, we identified him. The autopsy was performed,
a cause of manner death were determined, and no one
ever came forward to claim him. He was never listed
as a missing person, so eventually he was just an
unclaimed body and he was included with the unclaimed body
(09:24):
burials that were taken care of periodically at the Medical
Examiner's office. And that was the end of his case.
And then months later the family comes forward because the
wrong person was declared dead, and that brings us back
to where we were in the story. So they were
identical twins looking at the pictures, looking at the IDs,
I mean they were really identical. They had the same hairstyle,
the same build, same everything. The family even told me
(09:47):
growing up they would constantly get mixed up, and that's
what happened here. My question was why hadn't they reported
the one twin missing. The family told me the problem
was this, the dead twin had become addicted to heroin
and eventually parents had just given up on him and
he'd become as strained from the parents and the sister.
The brother, on the other hand, had really never given
up on his twin. One day, he showed up his
(10:09):
brother's apartment and asked if he could stay with him
for a little while, and of course, his brother let
him in like he always did, and let him stay.
He stayed for a few days. His brother went to
work like he always did, and one day when he
came home, he found that his twin brother had left,
and that was the last time he ever saw. What
the living twin didn't realize was the dead twin had
(10:29):
gone through the apartment before he had left. He had
found some cash in an old wallet that also contained
an old ID in it. This old I D had
an old address as well. He then took the cash,
went to a local drug house, pought some heroine, and
shot up and died. And after he was found dead,
law enforcement arrived. They found in his pocket an old identification.
(10:51):
He was taken to the medical Examiner's office finger printed,
no fingerprints were found, so he was identified with this
old identification with an old address. After a couple months,
the living Twin's power got turned off, his gas got
turned off, and he was denied alone all because he
was told he was dead. And he kept telling people,
(11:12):
I'm not dead, and he searched public records and he
found a death certificate with his name on it in
an old address. The death certificate also had my name
on it because I had signed the cause of manner
of death. So he knew he had to come to
the medical Examiner's office to try and sort this out,
because obviously he wasn't dead. And so they came to
the medical Examiner's office to find out what happened and
(11:33):
why he was declared debt. We showed him our documentation
and they realized it was the identical twin that had died.
And with the family vouching for the living twin and
then all the documentation that they had, we were able
to determine that we had identified the wrong twin as
being dead. The death certificate was changed and the living
twin was once again made alive. After this was all
(11:56):
sorted out, I called the parents and I got hold
of the mother, and I said to her, it was
unfortunate that this had all occurred, but at least now
they had known what had happened to their other son.
And I told her that their son had been buried
with our unclaimed bodies, and I would give her the
information on how she could go about claiming the body
so they could have a proper funeral for their child.
(12:17):
And she said, oh, h no, we're not going to
do any of that. He was a horrible son and
we don't want to have anything to do with him.
He can just stay where he's at and rot. We're
done with him, thank you, And she hung up, and
I thought, well, okay, Well, I guess that's how goes sometimes.
Ultimately we had fixed the problem, and the dead twin
(12:39):
was now dead, and living twin was once again alive.
Like I said, circumstantial isn't always the best. You can
have instances like this where you'd misidentify someone. You can
also have instances where someone's trying to cover up a
murder by substituting another body, lighting it on fire, or
something along those lines. So it's always good to get
a good scientific idea. The last case, we're going to
(13:01):
discuss was a homicide. This time. The family that came
in to identify the female decedent was the mother and
the decedent's sister. I initially met the mother. The sister
was in another room filling out some paperwork, and the
mother was just incredibly upset. She couldn't believe her daughter
was dead. She just kept saying to me, it can't
be her, It can't be her. We had gotten the
(13:22):
mom's name through the driver's license emergency contact. When we
called her, her daughter had been murdered, and it was
a particularly bad case. She had been hogtied naked by
her husband. If you don't know what hog tying is,
it's where they tie your hands and feet together behind
your back. So she's naked. She's hogtied. The husband sexually
assaults her, beats her about her body. Then he shoved
(13:45):
a sock in her mouth and then covered her mouth
with duct tape. He then proceeded to hit her in
the face multiple times, causing black eyes, chipping her teeth,
tearing her lips up, and he broke her nose. And
when he broke her nose, it started causing massive hair
into her nasal cavity. Problem was she already had her
mouths covered with duct tape and a sock shoved in
(14:06):
her airway, so when she started bleeding from her nose profusely,
she began sucking it in, swallowing it, breathing it in
and couldn't pass air, and eventually she drowned in her
own blood or suffocated from the lack of oxygen. After
she died, her husband pulled out the lower portion of
a couch, put her body in there, and covered it
(14:27):
with the couch cushions, and then he left, trying to disappear.
The eventual smell that was created caused people that had
lived around that apartment to call the superintendent. He got
police to come with them. They opened the door and
found her dead underneath a couch. At autopsy, her nose
is smashed, her eyes are swollen from being beaten, her
(14:49):
lips are cut up, her teeth are broken, and she
has bruises all over her body. And so this was
the day after I had completed the autopsy, when the
mom and the deceased sister had come into ADENTIFI and
the mother asked me, are you sure it's her? And
she pulled some pictures out of her purse and showed
them to me. I looked at these pictures. They were
just some general pictures of family get together as things
(15:11):
of that nature. And I couldn't really get a good
look at the deceitan in these pictures and make a
decision on whether I was looking at the right person
or not. But then the deceded sister walked in, and
when I saw her, it shocked me because the deceded
sister was her identical twin, and they are standing before me,
the same height, the same build. Was the person I
(15:33):
had spent hours autopsying the day before, but intact, not decomposed.
Her eyes were the same green eyes, Her hair was
the same long brown, curly hair that her face wasn't
beaten in, her lips, her teeth, her nose were all
still perfect. It was like staring at a ghost, but
she wasn't a ghost. She was her identical twin. I
(15:56):
couldn't say to the mother, she looks exactly like her.
I couldn't say that, because you know, you just can't
say that to someone. And then the mother said, through
her tears, she has a birthmark, a very distinctive birthmark
on her left buttock that looked like the United Kingdom.
She had a large bruise on her left buttock that
was shaped just like a hand with all the fingers
(16:17):
and the thumb and the palm from a hard slap,
and at the edge of that bruise there was a
birthmark that looked like the United Kingdom. And when the
mom said that, I said to her, well, I do
remember that birthmark. It was very distinctive, so it is
probably her. Again, I knew it was her. Looking at
that twin, I knew it was her, but I couldn't say, well,
(16:38):
she looks just like your living daughter. And the mom
began crying and sobbing, and the identical twin began crying,
and really there was nothing more I could do, so
I put it in the hands of the investigators to
continue on with filling out the paperwork and getting the
identification done, and I stepped away. The husband, of course,
was later arrested and convicted of murder. So, like I said,
(17:01):
circumstantial is not always the best method of identification, but
it can be useful in certain circumstances, especially when you're
a well known crackhead that everybody knows you smoke your
crack down by that tree by the creek, and that
brings us to the end of the story. I hope
you learned something like always be wary if you're identical twin,
(17:24):
and I hope you were entertained until the next time
Today's episode discusses the death of individuals, as well as
a graphic description of one of their deaths. If this
sort of thing upsets you, this is not the episode
for you. Welcome. You may have the more with your host,
Doctor Kendle Crowns. Today's episode twins. As I discussed in
(00:26):
a previous episode, when a body comes into the morgue,
one of the first things we do is identify them,
and there are two methods for identification, scientific and non scientific.
I discussed the scientific methods in a previous episode, so
today we're going to discuss the non scientific methods. Non
scientific methods of identification can be a number of things. First,
(00:48):
it can be circumstantial evidence like clothing like your color
of the clothing you had on when you die, the
type of clothing, like the name, brand, the size. Things
of that nature will read, especially distinctive jewelry or medical
alert bracelets. Those can be helpful. The location of the body.
Are they in their home, are they in the car
(01:09):
that's registered to them, or something of that nature. One
thing we can kind of use with dentures because dentures
actually have the individual's names stamped in the gum line area.
Problem with dentures is and old folks home. Sometimes the
demented patients will take another person's dentures and put them
in their mouth and die. And occasionally homeless people find
(01:32):
dentures in the trash or wherever, and they'll put them
in their mouths and start using them for themselves. So
dentures may have the name on them, but they're not
always in the right mouth. Another thing in non scientific
methods is visual. Visual is looking at the driver's license
or other photographic id, passports, inmate IDs, things of that
(01:54):
nature that we can use to look at that picture
and then look at the body. The problem with this
is is people can all and change quite dramatically from
when that picture was taken. Facial hair can be shaved off,
you can lose weight, you can gain weight, and with
decomposed bodies, the face can be distorted by the decompositional
gases bloating your face causing your eyes to bug out,
(02:15):
or mummification in which the face gets dehydrated and becomes
leathery and brown, totally distorting the facial features. And of course,
anytime there's animals scavenging, there could be complete destruction of
the face and there's just no way of comparing that
to a picture I'd found at the scene. Physical attributes
like height and weight, hair styles, hair color, especially if
(02:38):
it's some really bizarre hair color. And then if there's
any deformities or amputations, like you're missing a limb or
you have a congenital abnormalities, marks, scars, tattoos, weird piercings,
strange birthmarks can be very helpful because usually they're only
associated with you. Any of these physical findings can be
helpful for getting an identification on an individual. Scientific methods
(03:00):
of identification can be helpful, but we really prefer the
scientific methods to make sure the individual is really who
they are. But when I first started working, we didn't
have all the tools that we use nowadays for identifying people.
The Internet really wasn't a thing. We couldn't do family
searches looking for ancestry dot com or Facebook or Instagram
(03:23):
or any of that stuff that we use nowadays to
kind of get an idea who this person was and
find family. A lot of states now have fingerprints on
file when you get a driver's license, which they weren't
really doing twenty years ago. There is just a lot
more things that are used to make sure the person
is properly identified, whether they be living or dead. Nowadays,
(03:43):
we identify a lot more people than we did back
when I first started. Over the years, I've had several
cases that use circumstantial evidence to identify the individual. One
of the ones that I always remember the best is
the case of Crackhead Carl. Crackhead Carl loved his crack.
Loved him more than his pickup truck, his dog, and
his wife. He loved to go down to a certain
(04:05):
tree by a creek and smoke his crack. And he
lived in a small town, and everybody knew Carl's down
there smoking his crack, and they always knew that was him.
And when Carl finally overdosed, nobody checked on him for
like a week, And then his wife finally became concerned
and started looking for him, and she went right down
to that tree and she found his decomposed body. He
(04:25):
had also been scavenged by animals. The animals had torn
up his face, taken his hands, and ripped off a
lot of his flesh. Then he was also decomposing and
kind of green and blowd The corner that was involved
in that case had him brought into the medical examiner's
office and he had him identified. And when we called
him and said how do you identify this guy, what
(04:46):
did you use? And he said, oh, that's crack Carl.
He always smokes cracked down by the tree. I know
it's him. And we told him, well, you know it
could be someone else. No, no, no, no, nobody else
goes down there and smokes cracked by that tree. That
is Carl. I know it's him. Don't you worry about it.
We still identified him scientifically and it turned out to
actually be crackhead Carl. So the corner was right, and
(05:10):
circumstantially he got identified by location. Because no one else
smoke cracked by Carl's tree, it had to have been him,
and it was. I had several cases of circumstantial identification
in the early days, much like Crackhead Carl, but unlike
Crackhead Carl, some worked and some didn't work. The next
(05:30):
case we're going to talk about is one where it
didn't work. I was sitting in my office when I
got a call from the front desk. A family was
there to meet me. I didn't have an appointment with them.
They had just shown up and wanted to talk to me,
so I told the front desk person put him in
one of the family rooms and I'll be down in
a moment. These family rooms at the office I was
working at the time were small, square rooms. They had
(05:53):
the county tan walls, brown carpet, and orange furniture, and
in the room there was a table with a TV
on it, and the TV was hooked up to a
camera in the cooler that you could wheel the body
out under and show the family a close up of
the face and they could identify the body that way.
But this family wasn't here to identify a body. They
(06:13):
wanted to talk about a particular case. So when I
got there, I walked into the room and sat down.
The family that was there consisted of a father, a
mother who were probably in their late sixties, a son
in his mid to late twenties, and a daughter who
was probably in her early twenties. They looked upset, but
usually when families came to talk to me, they were
(06:34):
never happy, with good reason, of course, because obviously a
loved one had died. The sun began speaking first, and
he said, good morning, we're here to talk about this
death certificate, and he pulled out a file folder and
pulled out of it a death certificate and put it
down in front of me. I picked up the death
certificate and looked at it. The cause of death on
(06:54):
it stated that the individual had died of a heroin overdose,
so I figured they were there to talk about that.
I looked at the family and I said, so, what
are your questions, and the son answered, this death certificate,
the name on it, that's me, and I'm not dead.
I was taken aback. I was like, well, what do
you mean this is you? Because that's my name, I'm
(07:17):
not dead and I can prove it. He pulled out
his driver's license. The driver's license did look like him.
The name on the driver's license was the name on
the death certificate. His parents his sister both said, yes,
this is him. He isn't dead. So we had a problem.
I had brought the original autopsy file folder with me
before I went into the room. I opened it up
(07:37):
and pulled out the investigation sheet that listed that he
had been identified with the driver's license at the scene.
I told this information to the family and their response was, well,
that's not right. The twin that's alive is sitting in
front of you, and he is the one listed on
the death certificate. And the twin that's dead is our
other son. So I have to give you a little
(07:58):
context on this one. We had a common last name.
I don't remember what it was right now. This case
was like over twenty years ago, but it was something
like Smith. And because this case is so old, you
have to remember the Internet really wasn't a thing that
we could use to help us find families to identify
the bodies. Back then, circumstantial identification was more common. We
would always, of course, try and fingerprint the body, but
(08:21):
a lot of people didn't have fingerprints on file, and
when those would come back negative, we would switch to
visual and use the driver's license or some other form
of photographic ID that was available. If we had a
driver's license, we'd call the Department of Transportation see if
they had emergency contacts. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't,
and if they didn't, we'd have to go with what
(08:42):
was on the driver's license for a home address and
find that phone number and give it a call and
see if anyone would answer. If no one answered, they'd
try calling a few more times, and if no one
ever answered, they'd eventually have to move on and the
visual ID made from the driver's license would be the
best option because we'd be out of at that point.
And that's what happened in this case. We had an
(09:03):
ID and the decedent looked like the ID. There was
no hit on the fingerprints, we couldn't get anybody at
the house. Circumstantially, we identified him. The autopsy was performed,
a cause of manner death were determined, and no one
ever came forward to claim him. He was never listed
as a missing person, so eventually he was just an
unclaimed body and he was included with the unclaimed body
(09:24):
burials that were taken care of periodically at the Medical
Examiner's office. And that was the end of his case.
And then months later the family comes forward because the
wrong person was declared dead, and that brings us back
to where we were in the story. So they were
identical twins looking at the pictures, looking at the IDs,
I mean they were really identical. They had the same hairstyle,
the same build, same everything. The family even told me
(09:47):
growing up they would constantly get mixed up, and that's
what happened here. My question was why hadn't they reported
the one twin missing. The family told me the problem
was this, the dead twin had become addicted to heroin
and eventually parents had just given up on him and
he'd become as strained from the parents and the sister.
The brother, on the other hand, had really never given
up on his twin. One day, he showed up his
(10:09):
brother's apartment and asked if he could stay with him
for a little while, and of course, his brother let
him in like he always did, and let him stay.
He stayed for a few days. His brother went to
work like he always did, and one day when he
came home, he found that his twin brother had left,
and that was the last time he ever saw. What
the living twin didn't realize was the dead twin had
(10:29):
gone through the apartment before he had left. He had
found some cash in an old wallet that also contained
an old ID in it. This old I D had
an old address as well. He then took the cash,
went to a local drug house, pought some heroine, and
shot up and died. And after he was found dead,
law enforcement arrived. They found in his pocket an old identification.
(10:51):
He was taken to the medical Examiner's office finger printed,
no fingerprints were found, so he was identified with this
old identification with an old address. After a couple months,
the living Twin's power got turned off, his gas got
turned off, and he was denied alone all because he
was told he was dead. And he kept telling people,
(11:12):
I'm not dead, and he searched public records and he
found a death certificate with his name on it in
an old address. The death certificate also had my name
on it because I had signed the cause of manner
of death. So he knew he had to come to
the medical Examiner's office to try and sort this out,
because obviously he wasn't dead. And so they came to
the medical Examiner's office to find out what happened and
(11:33):
why he was declared debt. We showed him our documentation
and they realized it was the identical twin that had died.
And with the family vouching for the living twin and
then all the documentation that they had, we were able
to determine that we had identified the wrong twin as
being dead. The death certificate was changed and the living
twin was once again made alive. After this was all
(11:56):
sorted out, I called the parents and I got hold
of the mother, and I said to her, it was
unfortunate that this had all occurred, but at least now
they had known what had happened to their other son.
And I told her that their son had been buried
with our unclaimed bodies, and I would give her the
information on how she could go about claiming the body
so they could have a proper funeral for their child.
(12:17):
And she said, oh, h no, we're not going to
do any of that. He was a horrible son and
we don't want to have anything to do with him.
He can just stay where he's at and rot. We're
done with him, thank you, And she hung up, and
I thought, well, okay, Well, I guess that's how goes sometimes.
Ultimately we had fixed the problem, and the dead twin
(12:39):
was now dead, and living twin was once again alive.
Like I said, circumstantial isn't always the best. You can
have instances like this where you'd misidentify someone. You can
also have instances where someone's trying to cover up a
murder by substituting another body, lighting it on fire, or
something along those lines. So it's always good to get
a good scientific idea. The last case, we're going to
(13:01):
discuss was a homicide. This time. The family that came
in to identify the female decedent was the mother and
the decedent's sister. I initially met the mother. The sister
was in another room filling out some paperwork, and the
mother was just incredibly upset. She couldn't believe her daughter
was dead. She just kept saying to me, it can't
be her, It can't be her. We had gotten the
(13:22):
mom's name through the driver's license emergency contact. When we
called her, her daughter had been murdered, and it was
a particularly bad case. She had been hogtied naked by
her husband. If you don't know what hog tying is,
it's where they tie your hands and feet together behind
your back. So she's naked. She's hogtied. The husband sexually
assaults her, beats her about her body. Then he shoved
(13:45):
a sock in her mouth and then covered her mouth
with duct tape. He then proceeded to hit her in
the face multiple times, causing black eyes, chipping her teeth,
tearing her lips up, and he broke her nose. And
when he broke her nose, it started causing massive hair
into her nasal cavity. Problem was she already had her
mouths covered with duct tape and a sock shoved in
(14:06):
her airway, so when she started bleeding from her nose profusely,
she began sucking it in, swallowing it, breathing it in
and couldn't pass air, and eventually she drowned in her
own blood or suffocated from the lack of oxygen. After
she died, her husband pulled out the lower portion of
a couch, put her body in there, and covered it
(14:27):
with the couch cushions, and then he left, trying to disappear.
The eventual smell that was created caused people that had
lived around that apartment to call the superintendent. He got
police to come with them. They opened the door and
found her dead underneath a couch. At autopsy, her nose
is smashed, her eyes are swollen from being beaten, her
(14:49):
lips are cut up, her teeth are broken, and she
has bruises all over her body. And so this was
the day after I had completed the autopsy, when the
mom and the deceased sister had come into ADENTIFI and
the mother asked me, are you sure it's her? And
she pulled some pictures out of her purse and showed
them to me. I looked at these pictures. They were
just some general pictures of family get together as things
(15:11):
of that nature. And I couldn't really get a good
look at the deceitan in these pictures and make a
decision on whether I was looking at the right person
or not. But then the deceded sister walked in, and
when I saw her, it shocked me because the deceded
sister was her identical twin, and they are standing before me,
the same height, the same build. Was the person I
(15:33):
had spent hours autopsying the day before, but intact, not decomposed.
Her eyes were the same green eyes, Her hair was
the same long brown, curly hair that her face wasn't
beaten in, her lips, her teeth, her nose were all
still perfect. It was like staring at a ghost, but
she wasn't a ghost. She was her identical twin. I
(15:56):
couldn't say to the mother, she looks exactly like her.
I couldn't say that, because you know, you just can't
say that to someone. And then the mother said, through
her tears, she has a birthmark, a very distinctive birthmark
on her left buttock that looked like the United Kingdom.
She had a large bruise on her left buttock that
was shaped just like a hand with all the fingers
(16:17):
and the thumb and the palm from a hard slap,
and at the edge of that bruise there was a
birthmark that looked like the United Kingdom. And when the
mom said that, I said to her, well, I do
remember that birthmark. It was very distinctive, so it is
probably her. Again, I knew it was her. Looking at
that twin, I knew it was her, but I couldn't say, well,
(16:38):
she looks just like your living daughter. And the mom
began crying and sobbing, and the identical twin began crying,
and really there was nothing more I could do, so
I put it in the hands of the investigators to
continue on with filling out the paperwork and getting the
identification done, and I stepped away. The husband, of course,
was later arrested and convicted of murder. So, like I said,
(17:01):
circumstantial is not always the best method of identification, but
it can be useful in certain circumstances, especially when you're
a well known crackhead that everybody knows you smoke your
crack down by that tree by the creek, and that
brings us to the end of the story. I hope
you learned something like always be wary if you're identical twin,
(17:24):
and I hope you were entertained until the next time
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