Inside the Forensics: Unraveling How Angela Craig Was Allegedly Poisoned — Maine Teen Charged in Sunny Stewart Murder

Forensic expert and host of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan, joins the show and dives deep into the case of Colorado dentist James Toliver Craig, who is accused of fatally poisoning his wife, Angela, and the homicide case of Mercedes Vega, a woman found dead the day before she was set to testify about being targeted. Luigi Mangione’s defense team shocks the court, accusing the Manhattan DA’s office of fabrication. Tune in for all the details.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This program features the individual opinions of the hosts, guests,
and callers, and not necessarily those of the producer, the station,
it's affiliates or sponsors. This is True Crime Tonight.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to True Crime Tonight on iHeartRadio. Yep, you guessed it.
We're talking true crime all the time. Guys. We made
it to Sunday. It is Sunday, June twentieth, and we
have a stacked night of headlines. So listen to this.
Luigi Mangioni he may actually have his charges dropped. We're
going to unpack that. There's also been an arrest in
this main Paddle border killing. We thought it was a

(00:42):
serial killer, but it turns out it was a teenager.
But then we have first and foremost Joseph Scott Morgan,
a host of Body Bags. He also appears on our
documentaries and all of our podcasts. He is the guy
to talk about all things forensics, and he's going to
be breaking down some of the latest developments in this
dentist case in Colorado he's been accused of killing his

(01:05):
wife allegedly with eye drops. And also the Mercedes Vega case,
so that's one that's very close to Joseph's heart, so
we'll be digging into that as well. I'm Stephanie Leidecker
and I head up KAT Studios, where we get to
make true crime podcasts and documentaries, and I am here
every night with Courtney Armstrong. Our host will recognize her
voice from so many of our podcasts and also she's

(01:27):
an extraordinary crime producer and body move in. You'll also
know her from Netflix's jonef with Katz, Emmy award winning
I might add. So we're here to break it all down.
First up, we're going to talk to Courtney. Courtney Armstrong
give us a little background information on our first case. Well,
if any of this is true, then this is one

(01:47):
dirty dentist. We Corporate Seedings are about to enter their
second week and it's for the murder trial of the
Colorado dentist. It's a guy named James Oliver Craig. He
is accused of fatally poisoning his wife. Her name was Angela.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
She was a forty three year old mother of six children,
and allegedly he did this poisoning with a little mix
of cyanide.

Speaker 4 (02:11):
And tetras hydrozolene.

Speaker 3 (02:14):
Good good better said over the counter eyedrops, and he
put this mix into her protein shape. And the further
allegation is that he did all this in order so
he could pursue a new romantic life and make things
easier for him and his mistress. So the defense challenges
this roundly, and they are saying that the warrants on

(02:38):
how large the scope was on the digital evidence is
way too big and needs to be pulled back on
the prosecution side, and they're also aiming to discredit forensic
and toxicology findings. So they're doing all that and the
last which if this man is guilty, I find it deplorable.

Speaker 4 (02:56):
He's also really casting.

Speaker 3 (02:58):
Doubt on his now deceased wife, Angela's character and suggesting
that she was suicidal.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
And wasn't the whole stick that she was feeling suicidal.
Therefore he was aiding to kill her because he didn't
want her to live without him. That was the first.

Speaker 5 (03:16):
Attempt, So this is the second time he's poisoned her. Right,
he poisoned her a while ago and she like caught
him and when confronted with this, what are you doing?

Speaker 2 (03:27):
Why are you trying to kill me?

Speaker 5 (03:29):
He was like, well, you know, I'm feeling suicidal and
I know you don't want to be without me, so
I was just going to take us both out.

Speaker 2 (03:35):
I'm paraphrasing and trying to be a little succinct, but yeah.

Speaker 4 (03:38):
That's the gist.

Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah, exist, And when we were talking about this, I
guess Thursday night. Yeah, you know, we had kind of
maybe thought why wouldn't she leave him? You know, six children,
you know, this is an attempt on your life and
you know it. And we sort of speculated that maybe
it was because of their religious beliefs. And actually April,
one of our Crime Crew listeners, called in and she

(04:00):
kind of gave us some clarity on that, which was, yes,
he was a member of the Mormon Church I believe right,
the Church of Latter day Saints. But you know, she
also said that they're not like against opposed one hundred
percent against divorce, but rather they do make every effort
to keep a family together in a marriage. You have
to respect that, of course, of course, So thank you

(04:21):
for that tidbit, April. We really appreciate you listening. And
then we have Joseph Joseph Scott Morgan, host of Bodybags.
Here you are live and in person, what do you
think about this case.

Speaker 6 (04:32):
Yeah, it's been one of those cases has been floating
about for some time. I'm intrigued by it because I've
had other cases where eye drops have been used that
I've covered, but to this extent. And I think the
foolishness that's involved in this is that this guy is
medical professional and dentists or it's not surprising he would

(04:55):
away from the eye drops that we're talking about snat
here with SINA testing sign on. There's a certain amount
of that they can use because over the years, because
it's been used for gold extraction, like if you're trying
to extract gold from or you can use it. But
those days of long since past, there was some kind
of dental association with that in the past. But he

(05:15):
was looking for something, and here's the keys, looking for
something that is going to give a sense that a
person just suddenly went into spontaneous cardiac arrest. One thing
he's not counting on is if she did, she would
be well within the parameters based on her age and
health to do an AUTOSSI. So you can just simply say,

(05:37):
you know, she had a heart attack and we're going
to move on with our lives. At this point, in time.
It was very fool party on his part.

Speaker 4 (05:43):
And Joseph, are these ingredients do?

Speaker 3 (05:46):
I have never tasted eye drops In my mind, I
feel like they would taste salty, and certainly to my knowledge,
I've never tasted cyanide.

Speaker 2 (05:53):
Is there a taste or his last words, Yeah, I
actually took a little taste of my eye drops today curiosity,
just to see if it had like a salty taste.
I don't recommend this at home just obviously we're hearing
a story about death coming from this, but I think
a little little drop isn't going to be the death
of me. And it had a salty no, it's not.

Speaker 6 (06:12):
Yeah, and it does have it's kind of a saline
kind of thing that's going on here, And I think
the problem was, or the idea was to kind of
slow off the thing. There's low dosages over a period
of time and building it up. Sinoid is an interesting element.
First off, you've got three different major forms of sinide.
He was using sinide potassium potassium cyanide, but there's also

(06:34):
a hydrogen sinide, which interestingly enough, I've had experience with
in the board. Did you know that it gives off
the smell of burnt almonds or bitter almonds, and only
forty percent of the population can actually smell it. I
worked multiple sinide cases involving hydrogen sinid. I'm blind to it.
I'm part of that population that can't smell it. But

(06:56):
physicians I've been around can so an interesting little world
that he's entered into. Here. Poisoners, to me are fascinating
because they have a very particular personality unlike any other
group of killers that are out there. Oh really, they're
generally major cowards.

Speaker 5 (07:11):
Because they don't want to have their hands on it, right.
They want to put it in something and walk away,
and I have nothing to do with it after that, right, Like,
they can't have the active in the.

Speaker 6 (07:20):
Killing, right, And they can put as much distance if
you go back to even the talent all poisonings, they
put as much distance as they can between themselves and
the poisoning itself, and that way they're kind of throwing
people off scent and nothing comes back to them. Of course,
modern forensics it often does.

Speaker 2 (07:38):
Wow.

Speaker 5 (07:38):
Well, you're listening to true crime tonight on iHeartRadio. I'm
body movin and I'm here with Stephanie and Courtney. We're
joined by the lovely and talented Joseph Scott Morgan, and
we are talking about the dentist murder in Colorado, and
I understand we have to talk back.

Speaker 2 (07:52):
Can we hear the talk about?

Speaker 7 (07:53):
Hey, ladies, love the show. I just want to get
your guys's opinion on what strategy you think the defense
is going to try to take for the dentist murders.
I just know that this man, being a healthcare professional,
knew good and well what poison could do to a
body and what it would do to this woman he
claimed to love. I just don't understand what his defense

(08:14):
attorneys are going to do, and.

Speaker 8 (08:15):
I really do feel for them.

Speaker 7 (08:16):
What are your fast thoughts?

Speaker 2 (08:18):
That's a good question.

Speaker 5 (08:19):
I mean, as Courtney pointed out, you know, they're basically
trying to paint Angela, the victim, the wife that he murdered.
They're trying to paint her as like emotionally unstable and suicidal.
The defense attorney, her name is Ashley Whitman, that's Craig's
defense attorney, kind of portrays Angela as like emotionally private,
distressed and deeply influenced by her faith, but potentially suicidal.

(08:42):
And they suggest that she might have even poisoned herself
rather than Craig doing it. They're also kind of using
a legal argument that the warrants were way too broad
and not you know, tailored to this crime. So they're
questioning the digital forensics because they found like a Gmail
account that Craig, the dentist had used to like search

(09:05):
for the cyanide and he was doing crazy search terms
like how much cyanide does it take to kill a person?
Or how to make a poisoning look like a natural death,
And so they're saying that the scope was just too large.
So they're attacking the police being so targeted on the
dentist kind of like they did with Karen Reacase in Massachusetts.

Speaker 2 (09:24):
And Massachusetts is called the Boden defense.

Speaker 5 (09:26):
I don't know what it's called in Colorado for you
even if they have it, but if somebody knows, give
us a call eight eight eight thirty one crime or
use the talkbacks on the iHeartRadio app. But thank you
for the talkback. On top of that body.

Speaker 3 (09:37):
So, in addition to all the defense, yeah strategy that
you just laid out, this dentist, James Tolliver, Craig is
really going to crazy lengths if you believe the testimony
of his child that he shared with Angela, the victim
that allegedly the dentist sent jailhouse instructions to his daughter

(10:00):
for how to create a deep fake video of the victim,
Angela asking for the chemicals.

Speaker 2 (10:06):
Like, that's sane, kid in a situation. I mean, obviously
we're dealing with a very deranged man. Right, people get divorced.
We even just heard from April. You know, if this
is not even a religious thing, it happens, it's devastating
for a family, anyone who's gone through a breakup of
that high and it's it's really difficult. So that aside
it happens, At what point do you think that murdering

(10:29):
the mother of your children, six of them? I might
add that that's the best route for you to have
an open path to a new relationship and at its
core is there money at its core? And then to
on top of that, involve one of your children to
create a deep fake video. I mean that in and
of itself is insane, Like can we throw away the
key on this guy?

Speaker 5 (10:50):
He's trying to do everything, Like didn't he try to
hire another inmate to kill the lead investigator in this case. Yes,
that's what's been imported. He's doing he's so extra, he's
doing way too much. Yeah, he might just put to sleep. Yeah,
and then I didn't know that he did this to
his daughter. That's crazy.

Speaker 6 (11:08):
To your point, doing too much, I think is key here.
He's taking, you know, because he's he's combining this through
these two agents together. The eye drops as well as
this poisons taking almost a shotgun approach, and it's kind
of a broad spectrum approach. And you know, there were
only traces of syanide that were found. So I really

(11:29):
am this is me projecting, so you can tell you
or leave it. But I'm wondering if he had been
dosing with the tetra for a period of time and
was meeting with no success, called no joy on that,
and then went in and decided to add this element
of cyanide over a period of time, hoping that the
two combined with one another would lead to this cardiac arrest.

(11:53):
And here's another bit to this. You really wonder if
it had gone on any longer, if he was going
to add some other element to this, wouldn't that be
a fascinating consideration? Unfortunately they you know, they didn't get
to her soon enough. She's dead now and there's nothing
anybody can say or do. It's smacks. It actually has
a little bit of Chad Davell in it. To me,
it does. Oh, I really want to think about what

(12:14):
he did to his wife. Yeah, Tammy dave Bell and
I think about that, Yeah, and kind of that, you know,
trying to get started on this new life and poor
Tammy wound up dead in bed with a frothy tone
issuing from her nose and her mouth.

Speaker 5 (12:30):
Well, we're going to dig into that, put a pin
in that for the next segment after commercial when we
come back, I'm going to be digging into Joseph's comment
about this being maybe Davel related.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
Right now, we're talking about that dentist in Colorado accused
of murdering his wife, mother of six, with eye drops
and maybe a little arsenic and cyanide. Later in the show,
we're also going to be unpacking the Mercedes Vega case,
one that's very close to Joseph's heart. And then, as
you guys know, the gag order in the Idaho student
murders trial or lack of trial has been lifted and

(13:13):
now we're getting some new information that we're going to
be sharing shortly. So back to the dentist, we have
a talkback.

Speaker 9 (13:20):
Hey, Gus, love your show. I have a quick question.
So the dentists allegedly sent a picture to his mistress
of his dying moth. Could this get her in trouble?
Could do something to her?

Speaker 2 (13:36):
Oh that's a good question, because I had seen an interview.
First of all, thank you for the question. I had
seen an interview of this air quotes girlfriend. I think
they had been texting and it wasn't super according to her,
it wasn't that close of a relationship just yet. Anyone
of you know differently correct me if I'm wrong. So
I don't think that she would be really held culpable

(13:57):
in any way because maybe she just didn't really know
the staff of his real life. I think he was
a liar, liar pants on fire.

Speaker 3 (14:05):
Yeah, it seems like this guy, this dentist, was involved
with multiple people over multiple.

Speaker 4 (14:12):
Times in his life.

Speaker 3 (14:14):
He's had a series of affairs and also he allegedly
used a website seeking dot Com oddly advertised himself as
quote Jim and Waffles.

Speaker 4 (14:27):
I don't know what that means.

Speaker 2 (14:28):
That sounds horrible. It sounds horrible, horrible, not so sexy.
But he also claimed that he had a net worth
of ten million dollars and was in search of some
sugar babies. Meanwhile, he was facing bankruptcy.

Speaker 3 (14:43):
They'd have had real, very serious financial struggles, and yet
here he was purporting to be worth you know, ten million?

Speaker 2 (14:51):
Are you kidding me? So somebody was actually dishonest on
their dating profile.

Speaker 4 (14:55):
That weird. He wasn't sixty one, he.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
Wasn't sixt o'donna's By the way, Jim and waffles a
bit of an oxymoron, but you know my own heart,
does it.

Speaker 5 (15:06):
Mean like he enjoys being healthy and eating or working out,
but also enjoys a dude or.

Speaker 3 (15:12):
Either it's not Jim that way, it's j I am oh, okay, so.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
Stranger waffles and that is Jim reference to Booze, No Jim,
j I am right.

Speaker 4 (15:26):
Oh, but Jim beam. I mean, honestly, if I had
a dating.

Speaker 3 (15:28):
Profile, but yeah, if Jim anything to you, Actually, this
is so bad, after all, I've.

Speaker 2 (15:38):
Never heard of it.

Speaker 5 (15:42):
I want to get back to something Joseph mentioned in
the previous segment. He had mentioned that the stentist murderer.
You know, he used as a summary real quick. He
used eye drops and he put a potassium cyanide and
arsenic in these eye drops and then put them in
his wife's pre workout shakes, and she, unfortunately she passed

(16:04):
away from being poisoned. And we were talking about it
looking like maybe a normal kind of death, and Joseph
had mentioned it kind of harkened him to Amy or
Tammy de Bell, and it made the hair in the
back of my next stand up, Joseph, when somebody dies
from arsenic and or cyanide or individually, does the medical

(16:27):
examiner or the corner whoever's doing the autopsy, does this
show up on like a standard box that they would run.
Is there signs that they look for? Is it standard
to look with these signs? I have so many questions.

Speaker 6 (16:40):
Okay, if you're thinking about heavy metals like arsenic, that
is something that can be searched for, is readily searched for.
We do it a lot in fire deaths actually, because
with fire it produces that's one of the byproducts of fire.
You'll find people that have have heavy metals in their
systems because they're around furniture and interior point they begin

(17:01):
to break down a lot of stuffs made up plastic
eye drops. No, no, but I got to tell you guys,
as prevalent as this has become, and if I'm not mistaken,
it's rooted. This whole theme is rooted in a movie
from years ago. And I can't remember which one. Maybe
somebody out there knows, but there was something in popular
culture where somebody used used this and now it's taken off.

(17:24):
I'm sure that wasn't their intention, and it's not ringing
a bell. I'm just having a little bit of a recall. Unfortunately,
little bits all I have. But the thing about it
is when we do a toxicology and this can apply
to any case, Okay, So in any case that we're
talking about, when a body goes in for autopsy, we
do what's referred to as a standard panel. So we
do a blood draw, we do a urine draw, and

(17:47):
we do a vitreous draw, which is fluid from the eye,
and we will run for things like cannabinoids, opiates, benzos,
coke mes, anything like that. It runs the gamut and
it gives us an indication as to what's there. That's
called quant qualitative amount, and then it gives us a

(18:09):
lethal level with quantitative because everything has a lethal level,
you know that's out there, any kind of agent. When
you're thinking about arsenic and cyanide essentially individually, what you're
going to need is probably about two hundred to three
hundred milligrams of either one of those agents. But if

(18:31):
he's just dosing it at a real low dosage, it
would be like I said, it's kind of a slow walk.

Speaker 8 (18:38):
You know.

Speaker 6 (18:39):
You might have somebody that's presenting with like shortness of breath.
Maybe they're dicretic, they're drowsy, they suddenly slip into a coma,
and that can mask any number of things that are
out there. And trust me, when a patient rolls into
an emergency room, and this is not to cast dispersions
on emergency personnel, God blessed for what they do. When

(18:59):
you got somebody going into cardiac arrest, they're not thinking
no drops right there, of course, not from a preventive
preventatives standpoint. They're not. That's not where their brain is.
That that rest with people in mind in mafield. To
try to ascertain that you're listening to.

Speaker 5 (19:14):
True crime tonight, I'm iHeartRadio, I'm Body Movin. And I'm
here with Courtney Armstrong and Stephanie Lydecker and were joined
by the lovely and smart and talented Joseph Scott Morgan.
And we're right in the middle of talking about the
dentist who killed his wife with the eye drops with
cyanide and arsenic and we're going into oh and Yogi
has something to say about that.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
Yogi has because we were just I was doing a
quick search because Joseph, I sort of remembered the same
thing in popular culture, hearing about something with vizine And
actually it wasn't even a scripted TV show, It was
real life. In twenty eighteen, Lanna Clayton. She was a
nurse who pled guilty to manslaughter and maliciously tampering with

(19:56):
food or drugs. She was basically taking vizine drops and
putting it in our husband's drink every day. And she
claims that she wasn't trying to kill him, she was
just trying to make him sick. And she's facing twenty
five years and was found guilty. Wow, you're thinking of
the same thing as I am, Joseph, because they did
I remember this now because they had actual video of her,

(20:17):
like on surveillance. She was like, I don't know what,
I don't know why he's not feeling well. Huh, So
he just seems to be taken ill.

Speaker 6 (20:24):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
Meanwhile, they have her on video taking vizine drops and
like punching them in her drink. And then they got
the surveillance video and you see her like going over
to like, I'm not laughing. It just sounds so outlandish.
So she go over to the blender and like pop
a little something something in there, and then she goes
and serves it up to her husband, who's like, where's
my drink.

Speaker 6 (20:42):
Pretty unbelievable, if I remember correctly, I've covered cases on
body bags. By the way, we're coming up on our
four hundredth episode of this upcoming week. We have done
cases like this before, and I could have sworn that
I've covered a case involved in Munchausen's Send her on
byprop See where the mother was poisoning a child wound
up killing a child. And these things are all over

(21:05):
the world. That's they're everywhere. And to your point earlier, Steff,
where you mentioned the taste of it, it's going to
have kind of a salty taste undertaste. But he put
this thing into a sports drink. You know you're not
going to detect it at all. It's just not going
to be on the radar. Again, this goes back to
how much was he applying at any given time and

(21:28):
other damning piece to this from a proscatorial standpoint directed
at him, he should have known better because he's a
medical professional. Okay, that cuts both ways. People say, well,
he's a medical professional, so he knows about it. You're
damn right. He does know about it, so that even
puts more responsibility on him. He knows what the typical

(21:50):
outcome might be going down this road.

Speaker 3 (21:53):
Well, it seems like the doctor Joseph or the dentist,
I know he's a medical professional, that he did take
to Google quite a bit.

Speaker 4 (22:00):
At least that's what the prosecution said.

Speaker 3 (22:03):
So I'm going to give you a couple of things
he said, and I'm curious what your take is on this.
So the dentist, he created a Gmail account that he
used specifically to order the arsenic and the cyanide, and
he searched for terms like undetectable poisons or how to
make murder look like a heart attack, and how many
grams of pure arsenic will kill a human? And the

(22:27):
last thing, this isn't a question he wrote in but
his wife Angela had over four hundred times the normal
level of the eye drops in her system.

Speaker 4 (22:40):
That seems like a wild amount.

Speaker 6 (22:42):
It is. It is a lot. And again going back
to you know, when I mentioned the standard panel that
we do, it's important for everyone out there to understand
that when we look at drugs in particular, and even
things that are non pharms SoCal agents, they have what
to refer to and kind of burn this into your

(23:03):
mind to have what to refer to as therapeutical levels.
There is for everything. You can even have therapeutic level
of cocaine. Cocaine is still used as an analogy that
comes in a liquid form, So you have what are
considered to be of therapeutic levels, which is kind of okay,
if I give this much, it's not going to kill

(23:24):
the person. This is what physicians are looking at when
they're trying to gauge all of this. When you begin
to get up above those levels, you start to get
into lethal, almost lethal, and then lethal levels where the
body just can't it can't maintain the chemistry is all
thrown out of whack at that point in time, and
unfortunately that's what happened with this foresol Wow.

Speaker 2 (23:55):
By the way we figured out the movie, the pop
culture reference producer t was nice enough to give us
some info on that. What was it again, Taha?

Speaker 9 (24:03):
That was the movie Wedding Crashers where Owen Wilson's character
spiked Bradley Cooper's drink with advising and eyedrops.

Speaker 2 (24:10):
Oh, well done, Taha, Well done, Taha. That was Taha's
big debut. We're so happy to have him. And also
we're going to talk later about the Luigi Mangioni update
that apparently the prosecution is saying that they have real
proof that hippo violations and other things should be the
reason for his charges to be dropped. So we want
to hear from you guys. Call us anytime eight eight

(24:32):
eight three to one Crime, or you could always leave
us a talk back on the iHeartRadio app, or you
could hit us up on our socials at True Crime
Tonight's show on TikTok at Instagram, or at True Crime
Tonight on Facebook.

Speaker 5 (24:44):
So where should we begin, ladies. I kind of wanted
to unpack this deep fake business. Yes, committed what a request?

Speaker 7 (24:52):
So?

Speaker 2 (24:52):
What a request?

Speaker 5 (24:53):
So just to summarize again briefly, the dentist accused of
killing his wife with poisonous eye drops which contained obviously
the eye drops, the arsenic and potassium cyanide.

Speaker 2 (25:06):
He has asked.

Speaker 5 (25:08):
Okay, First of all, he asked an inmate to help
take out the lead investigator of the case.

Speaker 2 (25:14):
That's number one.

Speaker 5 (25:15):
And number two which I find most shocking and just
absolutely deplorable, is that he wrote a letter to his
young daughter and asked his daughter gave actually pretty like
illicit instructions like, you know, do this to in step one,
step two, step three, to create like a deep fake
where this deep fake would represent his wife her mother

(25:37):
asking for the poison, which it is.

Speaker 2 (25:40):
Crazy to me that you would do this to your daughter.

Speaker 5 (25:43):
And he says like, I love you, I'm sorry to
even ask you this, but I need you to help
me out, and he starts telling her what he needs
her to do.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
Can you guys believe this?

Speaker 3 (25:51):
No, it's so deplorable. It's so deplorable. It's actually really
hard to make your mind to go there. And then
just further more, or I don't know why. I find
the details of what you're describing is so discussing on
its face, but then.

Speaker 4 (26:05):
The smaller detail.

Speaker 3 (26:07):
He's writing to his daughter and saying, oh, we're going
to use little code word. If you agree to do
this fake, then respond to me and say, quote, the
candy was good. If you don't agree to do it,
you're going to respond the candy was disappointing, and this
dentist James referred to everything in this as the Memories project.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
To his daughter's project.

Speaker 4 (26:31):
Wow, how disgusting.

Speaker 2 (26:33):
The letter also included like directions.

Speaker 5 (26:35):
He said, you need to buy a cheap laptop, install
a private network, and a dark web browser which would
be like an Onion or tore browser, and paying for
the project using a prepaid Visa gift card. The daughter
testified to all this, and he told her the video
must appear to have been made in the weeks before
she died, so he wanted her to alter basically the metadata,

(26:58):
which we've talked about before. But what metadata is? He
wanted her to modify this metadata like I just she
had to get up there and testify to this.

Speaker 2 (27:07):
This poor girl, Oh, like talk about losing your mother
in such a horrible traumatic way. She was in the
hospital for a very decent amount of time, I might add,
so that's traumatic in and of itself. Then having to
attend services, funerals, et cetera. And now you're dealing with
your dad trying to you know, run one over on you,
like emotionally speaking, there should be charges for that. Wow,

(27:28):
and he said he choked.

Speaker 1 (27:29):
Well.

Speaker 5 (27:30):
The letter said the second oldest daughter out of the
six was chosen to do this favor because she is
most like her mother, stoic and practical, and is the
most technology adept. She testified all this, I just I
feel so bad for her. She's twenty. I mean, she's
not a child, but it's still her dad. Yes, she

(27:51):
is their child's their kid. So not only do you
lose your mom in horrific fashion, now your dad is
asking you to cover up the murder.

Speaker 2 (27:59):
Basic.

Speaker 8 (28:00):
I don't know.

Speaker 5 (28:01):
I just my heart really breaks for that family. That's
really terrible. Yeah, it's I just don't know what to say.

Speaker 3 (28:06):
Now, there's a lot more of what was going on
in the trial. I think we'll probably get to it
later in the week because there is a lot to impact.
They're actually doing an incredibly expeditious job of coving through witnesses,
so we should go through them.

Speaker 4 (28:18):
But I have a question for you, Joseph.

Speaker 3 (28:22):
And my understanding is that the dentist is accused of
kind of putting the final nail in the coffin when
he went to visit his wife, Angela in the hospital.
Are you familiar with that, of giving an extra I'm
fairly certain. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:40):
They it's so interesting.

Speaker 3 (28:42):
So the prosecution alleges, and they said this in I
want to say, even they're opening statements that when the
dentist went into the hospital.

Speaker 4 (28:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (28:53):
The prosecutor is a guy named Ryan Brackley, and he
said he the dentist didn't go into that room to
save Angela's life. He didn't go into that room to
fight for her life or support her. He went into
that room to murder her, to deliberately and intentionally end
her life with a fatal dose of cyanide. So I'm curious, Yeah.

Speaker 6 (29:14):
Yeah, I got it. My first take on this, it
actually reminds me of the case from the fifties, which
is fast. I recommend to anybody that has never looked
into this case, look up the and Jet. That's one
one name. And Jet Lyles case out of making Georgia,
and she killed four or five people, and she was
actually taking care and these are family members. She was

(29:37):
taking care of them at the hospital. She would bring them.
She had a restaurant and she would make food and
take them, take the food to her family. And I'm
talking about even a daughter, her former mother in law,
two husbands, and she was putting hand poisoning in there
and the hospital couldn't figure out why in the world
are they not getting better? You know, hairs falling out,

(29:57):
all his skin rashes, and they finally go into chin
They all went into cardiac arrest finally. But anyway, it
reminds me of that, and you can get access to
an individual. Remember what I said earlier. Poisoners are cowards anyway.
They're not the type of people that are going to
go up and take a weapon and you know, brutally
murder somebody like we think, you know, an execution style thing.

(30:20):
They're not going to beat somebody to death. They're going
to do something that is as less of a burden
on them as they possibly can, where they can maintain stealth.
And the fact that he would do this is not surprising.
If what the prosecutor is a legending alleging is true?
Things like this have happened before. There's nothing new under
the sun, as they say. So yeah, if you just

(30:42):
look at the age at loss case, the smacks of that.

Speaker 4 (30:46):
And I have a question.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
I don't know if it's really an answerable one, but
if you are going to group kind of poisoners together
and it sounds like they are a specific type. By
the way, if you have as many questions for Joseph
Scott Morgan as we do on this particular dentist case,
or if you have some other forensic question burning your heart,
use this time to call eight eight eight three to one.

Speaker 4 (31:09):
Crime and Joseph will get it answered.

Speaker 3 (31:13):
But this guy, this dentist, also seemed to have a
very strange fascination with suicide, whether because he you know,
we already talked about the fact that he was alleging
at two different times that his wife was suicidal and
saying that he himself was suicidal, and then also while
he was in prison, was saying he instructed inmates to

(31:36):
plant fake suicide letters of in his garage and truck
to claim that Angela wrote them like I don't know
to suicide and poison.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
He was kind of time this guy, I know, these
kids and a job. He's a dentist. Why does he
have to be sex such a weirdo. He needs to really,
really really stop it and quit it because he is
up to no good in a many categories.

Speaker 4 (31:59):
Well hopefully he is.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
I mean, he is in jail on trial the streets.

Speaker 5 (32:04):
I know, it's just wild to be like he even
had the cyanide in the arsenic ship to his dental office.

Speaker 2 (32:12):
And wasn't he discovered because like his colleague.

Speaker 4 (32:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 5 (32:17):
Right, that's right, and realized his wife he was in
the hospital dying.

Speaker 6 (32:23):
I mean, what do I mean to talk about an
epistotal moment for that? Can you imagine being the office
at it seems so this guy could really care less
about collateral damage along the way. And of course, to
y'all's point about this precious twenty year old, she's this
suburden she's gonna to bear the rest of her life,
not to mention siblings are going to have to bear.
You know, they're going to know what dad did, mom,

(32:45):
and they try to drag Sissy into this thing as well.
And that's always going to hang in the air with
his family. Just like the coworkers. You know, what does
he expect? You know, you receive a shipment like this
and they what are they going to do? Remain Mama,
I don't think so, and so everything was collateral damage.
It would seem to me that he didn't necessarily have

(33:07):
an idea of killing him himself. He's obsessed with suicide,
but it's almost as if he assessed with suicide as
a means to commit murder.

Speaker 5 (33:15):
So do we know, you guys, I haven't really been
following on this all that closely. I'm kind of kind
of getting into it right now as we learn about it.
Do we know how did they find out that she
had been poisoned? Did it happen because this office staff
was like I do know the office staff recognized that
he was buying this stuff and then also that they

(33:38):
looked at his wife's symptoms and compared to and realized
it might be related. But did that happen long after
she was buried and they thought it was like a
suicide or do we know?

Speaker 2 (33:48):
Aionise?

Speaker 3 (33:49):
I know timeline wise that it was incredibly quick. So
March fifteenth, this is all in twenty twenty three, So
March fifteenth. It's Angela is third hospital visit. It's the
final time she collapsed, and it's when she took the
medicine that allegedly doctor Craig tampered with. And she's in
the er. Her brother brought her in. She feels terrible.

(34:12):
Two pm that day has a seizure. She has placed
upon life support. And also on this day, Craig's doctor
Craig's business partner learns of the cyanide delivery and notifies
medical staff.

Speaker 4 (34:26):
So this is on the fifteenth.

Speaker 3 (34:29):
The next day, the sixteenth, officers begin speaking with colleagues
and staff about doctor Craig, doctor dentist Craig's behavior. Two
days after that, March eighteenth, Angela is declared dead, and
one day later, doctor James Craig is arrested for first
degree murder.

Speaker 2 (34:46):
Okay, so this all happened while she was in the hospital.

Speaker 4 (34:49):
Why don't didn't you poison to your place of business?
How about that?

Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yeah, Courtney Armstrong, Yeah, listen, loud's say it clear for
the back of the room, everybody, do not send poisonous
to the workplace. Sounds like we're at the club talking crime,
doesn't it. Yes, we're going to go straight to a talkback.

Speaker 8 (35:07):
Hey, y'all, this is Stephanie Love y'all for real skis.
So pertaining to the grooming topic, coerceive control is aimed
more at the tactics used in ongoing domination and manipulation.
Grooming is a precursor to this because it focuses more
on the process to build trust, enabling future.

Speaker 4 (35:25):
Abuse and exploitation.

Speaker 8 (35:27):
So we need a word that relates the process of
grooming to the tactics of coercive control. Although researchers just
use adult grooming to differentiate.

Speaker 2 (35:37):
That's interesting. We are creating a swell here that is
so great. First of all, thank you Stephanie for that
talk back. We have the smartest listeners. Imagine we love
you for real ski soo yeah, for real Skis. I
haven't heard that in a hot minute. I hear it
for real Skis. That's an interesting point. So adult grooming
could be considered one variation of this.

Speaker 5 (35:57):
She said that course of control, the precursor to that
is the grooming. So the grooming is what gets you
to trust them, Right, You do all these things to
get them to in your good graces, and you start
you know, you can trust me, and you start, you know,
earning their trust by fulfilling promises and.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
You know, things like that. I'm assuming, and then what
comes next is the course of control. So we and then.

Speaker 5 (36:24):
Of course you know what she said at the end though,
is that what people are saying is there's grooming and
then there's adult grooming.

Speaker 2 (36:30):
So we still don't know like the Manson killers, for example,
would that be considered maybe people who were groomed to kill? Possibly? Yeah,
I would think so that course of control. So sorry,
I lost my mind just there. Sorry, that's like number one.
Stephanie's looking okay. Yeah, I don't know what just happened.

(36:51):
I always raised my hand and knock down my equipment.
I apologize.

Speaker 6 (36:55):
Well, it doesn't hurt. When you apply a sergic acid
to a great group of people and then talk to
your right you pretty much get them to do anything
you want them to do. So yeah, and that was
one of Manson's He would fade dosing and so you know,
you've got everybody else drop and ask and he's the
only same one in the bunch. Imagine that measure. He's
the only same one in the bunch for that moment.

Speaker 2 (37:17):
Tom, Wait, is that right, So I don't know that
I ever knew that as Joseph Scott Morgan. So we're
referring to the Manson killings that was, you know, many
many years ago, but infamously because of his teachings air quotes,
the women who followed him kind of did the killing
for him, and they would kill for him, and he
then got to keep his hands clean, although eventually you know,

(37:41):
behind bars for that. That's interesting, Joseph, can you say
that one more time? I don't know that I totally
absorbed that fully.

Speaker 6 (37:48):
Yeah, it has been a legs over the years said
he would dose the group, the family, if you will,
with LSD and then he would launch into these dodge
trops where he's preaching to these individuals and they've become
very vulnerable at that point in tom now, so they
would all be stuff they absorbed.

Speaker 4 (38:05):
Yeah, they would all.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
Be like tripping right on acid.

Speaker 5 (38:08):
And they're sitting at that you know a band that
you know, what is it, the ghost Town little Ranch
they had in the middle of the desert around a campfire,
and they're all tripping, right, they're all tripping in these
span ranch spawn ranch, Yes, and they're all tripping and
he's you know, the sober one there, which is you know,
he probably the only one sounding normal, which is insane

(38:31):
to think about Charles Manson being the only one that
sounds normal and putting in this helter skelter, this race
war is coming.

Speaker 2 (38:38):
We gotta do this. We got it, you know. Yeah.
I've heard that before too. I just don't know if
they've proven it.

Speaker 6 (38:43):
Jim Jones did the same thing though, yeah, only without
the acid, you know, but he did the same thing.
He drug a bunch of people away.

Speaker 2 (38:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 6 (38:51):
They didn't have their families, they didn't have their support system.
They believe anything. One most horrible things you can ever
listen to are those tapes when everybody's taking their life
and drinking poison.

Speaker 2 (39:01):
Yeah, unbelievable. That's scary. Well, listen, we're going to be
right back because we still have to get into the
Mercedes Vega case with you, Joseph Scott Morgan. So we'll
be back. Stay with us. This is true crime tonight.
We're talking true crime all the time. And listen, we're

(39:23):
breaking all things down around forensics. Joseph has been really
itching to talk about the Mercedes Vega case. So we'll
be getting to that very very soon. But first, Courtney
Armstrong has some new headlines for us.

Speaker 3 (39:36):
Yeah, this is kind of a shocking one. There had
been speculation that the woman, she's a marine bologist, Sunshine
Sunny Stewart, she was out paddleboarding on the second of July.
She was out by herself on a little pond, and
we didn't know until just very very recently why the

(39:57):
authorities said that she was murdered. They kind of declared
to a homicide quick, excuse me, not murder, homicide, and
it was thought maybe it was intertwined within an alleged
serial murderer, but a seventeen year old local suspect they've
been identified as Devin Young. They were arrested just a
couple of days ago, and Sonny Stewart died from strangulation

(40:21):
and blunt force trauma, which is just such an absolute
tragic waste strength.

Speaker 2 (40:28):
Kid that's up close to personals. Right.

Speaker 3 (40:32):
Yes, and it just seems that this guy is seventeen
year old. He was vacationing nearby with his family.

Speaker 2 (40:42):
So he wasn't even from the area. Wow, it doesn't
show he was on holiday at that same site with
his family. Can you imagine you're at this you know,
lovely vacation with your family. It's near this gorgeous lake,
and all of a sudden word spreads that there's been
you know, potentially am and there's a murderer on the loose,

(41:02):
and then you find out it's your seventeen year old son.
So he basically hit her over the head and strang
and she was beloved as crazy personal there is any.

Speaker 3 (41:12):
Connected Well, it's strangulation and blunt force trauma, So I
don't know.

Speaker 4 (41:18):
Yeah, what do you gain, Joseph.

Speaker 2 (41:22):
Stretching our heads like it if almost ethologist?

Speaker 6 (41:31):
Well yeah, so, and listen, it's not uncommon to have
have a combination of bludgeoning and strangulation at the same
time because they're both very handsy. You've got someone that
is utilizing and this is assuming that it's going to
be a manual strangulation as opposed to a literature strangulation.
So he would have put his hands around her neck.

(41:54):
There's also a high probability that when they did her autopsy,
it's one thing if you that's the things he's struck
in the head. Blunch force trauma is what they're talking about.
You can have blund force trauma anywhere on your body,
but if you have it to your head, there's going
to be hemorrhage there at various different levels. But in
the neck you also get hemorrhage and strap muscles where

(42:15):
you know, the little entertwined muscles that overlie the layernix
there and depend upon how much pressure you get, you'll
have more hemorrhage in those areas. And it goes to
this narrative of including the airway. And then of course
we look for the petiki, the little punk tate hemorrhages
and the salt tissues of the eyes, and that means

(42:36):
that they're under so much pressure when they're trying to
uptake oxygen and they're struggling, blood can't flow back and
so those little vessels burst. And you generally see it
with manual strangulation, that is, you know, in the eyes.
You don't see it in many other circumstances other than
childbirth and constipation most of the time. That's truth. So yeah,

(42:58):
that's those two things couple together and it sounds like
a frenzy killing, you know, because this is not something
somebody put a lot of thought into. I'm just going
to go and we don't know if he picked up
a rock or stick or whatever it was, but he
got his hands on it.

Speaker 5 (43:13):
I wonder if there was like an I'm just I
might immediately go to legal Why why would the seventeen
year old kill this woman in such a personal way?

Speaker 2 (43:21):
And I can't.

Speaker 5 (43:22):
I mean, obviously I'm never going to know unless he confesses, right,
But I mean maybe they got an argument or something
and he just raged out.

Speaker 2 (43:29):
I don't know, but like.

Speaker 6 (43:32):
Argument or lust murder. Argument or lust murder would be
my two. Uh, they were both on this, I would
think they.

Speaker 2 (43:39):
Were both on vacation.

Speaker 4 (43:40):
Yeah, and they might.

Speaker 6 (43:44):
If he's in an adjacent area and he's just kind
of washing her from the bushes. You never know what's
going on in the mind of someone. And Ollie Waits
is all he's got to do, isolated area for her
to beach that that paddle board and then come after her.

Speaker 5 (43:58):
Well, because she was found on that island right right
in the middle of the lake that she was on
that she knew very well.

Speaker 2 (44:04):
You know, she was a very trained person and she
knew those waters extremely well. She had many many friends.
I'm sure we've all seen them speaking out on the news. Locally,
et cetera, and the main state police haven't given any
sort of a motive to our knowledge.

Speaker 6 (44:19):
Interesting anticipate that they would release any information like that.

Speaker 2 (44:24):
Not the same yet, not yet at least.

Speaker 5 (44:27):
No, he's well, the kid's been named. He's seventeen years old,
but we know his name. His name is Devin Young.
He appeared in court, he's entered a denial, and he's
currently being held at the Long Creek Youth Development Center.
Prosecutors are seeking to try him as an adult. I
think they're going to get it too. He's close enough
in age.

Speaker 6 (44:47):
Yeah. Anytime you start to get up in that range
of seventeen, yeah, we see that happening with the case
in Georgia where the two parents were shot in the bed.
You know that happened when she was sixteen, she said, now,
and they just sepped her up on charges I think
last week, if I'm not mistaken, And she's being charged
as an adult as well. So yeah, you get that

(45:08):
seventeen year range.

Speaker 2 (45:09):
Yeah, Joseph is right.

Speaker 5 (45:10):
And that's Sarah Grace Patrick and she is alleged to
have killed her her mom and stepfather in Georgia, and
she was sixteen when it happened she had turned seventeen
and then they arrested her and she is being tried
as an adult. So I expect that they're going to
probably do the same for Devon here and wow, interesting.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
I'm looking at photographs of Devin right now. We can
post them on her website and again allegedly, allegedly allegedly,
but you know, he's sitting here on some posts that
I'm seeing, and he has, you know, a big rifle
staunchly in his hand. You know, he's a pretty nice
sized guy, so he could have probably taken her over
pretty quickly. So yeah, this could just be something that

(45:51):
was a random interaction. But enough is enough. It's really tragic,
Yeah it is. Wow, what else you got, Courtney.

Speaker 3 (45:58):
Yeah, We'll continue followollowing both the Sonny Stewart and the
Sarah grayce Patrick cases as they evolve. So Luigi Mangione
and listen, I have heard it split fifty to fifty, Luigimanngione, LUIGIMANGIONI, So.

Speaker 2 (46:12):
I know we say it's different each time. It kind
of works both ways, is how I think we should
land on it.

Speaker 3 (46:17):
So Luigi's attorneys have accused the Manhattan's DA office of
violating HIPPA by fabricating a court date and for issuing
a false subpoena to get his medical records.

Speaker 4 (46:32):
So this is really bad news.

Speaker 3 (46:35):
And I don't know if this would just be an
over a zealous prosecutor or what is happening, but apparently
the DA they made a fake court date to get
information sent straight to them for Mangione's medical records, which
is not good, I think.

Speaker 5 (46:56):
I mean it's and this is a second, I think,
the second one that I'm aware of, where they're alleging
that the prosecution has done something. Remember early on, right
after our show started, they started accusing the jail of
listening in on the conversations between Luigi Menngione and his lawyers,
and they said that it was because the lawyers were

(47:18):
using a phone number that they hadn't alerted the jail
was their number.

Speaker 2 (47:22):
Just crazy to me. So normally when you call somebody in.

Speaker 5 (47:26):
Jail, it's recorded, obviously, but if it's your lawyer, it's
not recorded. Well, those calls were recorded because they didn't
know it was the lawyer, and so they alleged. Anyway,
there's a lot of hanky panky going on with the
prosecution and defense.

Speaker 2 (47:40):
That's interesting. No, what I'm saying he didn't do it.
They're just saying, well, this is like culpable stuff based
on paperwork or lawyering. But no, one's saying he didn't
actually commit the crime. Right, No, but they are.

Speaker 3 (47:53):
The DA's office that the lawyers are pushing for court
sanctions against the DA's office and are seeking dismissal of
the murder charges or at a very minimum and evidentiary
hearing on the subpoenas legitimacy.

Speaker 2 (48:08):
So well, no, is it not because they didn't have
their claiming that there wasn't a proper warrant given and
that therefore the information with this Luigi Mangioni or Luigi
Mangione should be tossed out. Again, I don't know that
it's saying that the crime itself didn't happen.

Speaker 5 (48:29):
Now, they're not saying the crime didn't happen. I think
you're right, Stephan. I think they're saying that any information
that they've attained from his health insurance company shouldn't be
admissible in court because the search warrant was yeah, right
through the prices tree. It's like a Frank's hearing, like
a hearing.

Speaker 2 (48:43):
That's my understanding as well.

Speaker 6 (48:44):
So they're not gonna they won't be able to utilize that.
But I take you back. I have a baseball analogy everybody.
Most people understand the basic rules of baseball. You get
three strikes, you don't get four. And this is very
baseline stuff for Prosecutor's office that they should be fully
aware of. They should understand they don't have to go
a long way because look, they've got videography of this

(49:06):
person shooting this executive. This is not a real.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
Heavy murder weapon. Didn't they find the murder weapon with
them or none?

Speaker 6 (49:16):
Yeah, well they recovered it and so yeah, and you know,
I'm thinking, why do you need to color outside the
lines here relative to prosecuting this case? What's the end
goal here in doing this? Now, granted we don't know
everything that's going on behind closed doors, but when you're
talking about evidence, which in fact, these medical records are

(49:37):
evidence and they're going to be viewed or we're going
to be viewed. But now you know, this is a
wasted moment, and also it further blackens the reputation of
the prosecutor's office. And it's a it's not an enviable
position to be on because let me tell you something,
guys moving down the road. If you think the intensity

(49:59):
on some of these race recent cases we've had is
going to be and it was intense, ain't seen nothing yet.
When this thing drops, there are going to be the
hot lights of the media are going to be all
over this thing. It'll be wall to wall coverage.

Speaker 5 (50:13):
Well, and I think you're right, but New York Right,
New York doesn't allow filming in the from the courtroom,
so there's there's going to be intense media from the outside.
And then federally will be right, there's going to be intense,
intense media on this because people are really hot about
this case.

Speaker 3 (50:31):
Oh incredibly, and there is a lot of shenanigans going on.
I mean, we should diget into this later in the
week at a little more clarity, because I mean, Manngione's
attorneys they're arguing that pursuing both the state and federal
prosecutions concurrently violate both the Fifth Amendments double or violates

(50:52):
the Fifth Amendment's doublic jeopardy cause. And also we'll see
if this does get bigger that the actual the illegally
getting the records because yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:02):
They're calling for dismissal of dismissals. Yes, yeah, exactly where
the medical records.

Speaker 5 (51:06):
That's right, that's not going to happen, but they are
calling for I do think sanctions may be in order.
I mean, if the DA truly did make up this
court date, you can't be doing that too, Tana Warrant.
There's going to be a Frank's hearing about that, and
it's going to be dismissed, I would imagine, right.

Speaker 2 (51:21):
Yeah, and listen, we're going to be breaking down this
Mercedes Vega case product Joseph, but before we do, we
actually have a talk that Hi.

Speaker 10 (51:29):
My name is Mollie. I'm calling from Pennsylvania about the
fran Coburger case. First of all, it's very disgusting that
this man comes from my home state. I just have
this uneasy feeling and I won't feel like this is
all done until after I think the hearing is the
sweet woman twenty third after hearing that there's still a
chance he could take back his please. I just feel

(51:53):
like this man is not capable of any feelings or
emotions other than power and manipulation. So I'm not usually
in the conspiracy, but it was horrible feeling that he
likes calling the shots for the power, and I would
not be shocked if at the last minute he pools
back his plea to then try to have a trial gush.

Speaker 2 (52:15):
By the way I read to think about that is
such a good point. We were talking about this earlier,
and I think a lot of people are feeling uneasy.
And by the way, that wasn't even a talk back.
That was our first voice message. So if you call
eight eight eight three to one crime kind of like
an answer machine, you can leave a message and boom,
you're on the show. Yeah, that trial is happening on Thursday.
So I think a lot of people are having this

(52:37):
similar uneasy, unnerved feeling about this clown.

Speaker 5 (52:41):
Yeah, and I think a lot of people are also worried,
you know, to our voicemail or let Lever's point that
he's going to basically get you know, they're going to
do the victim impact statements, they're going to do the sentencing,
and at that point Brian coober can can turn to
Ann Taylor and say I want to appeal, and he
can appeal, even though the agreement is that he can't appeal,

(53:03):
but he can there you know, the judge said, not
everything is finite. So people are very, very very concerned.
And I think that our caller is spot on that
Brian Coberger has to have control and he's not gonna
go down so easy.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
But we'll see.

Speaker 5 (53:18):
We're going to see what happens on Thursday the twenty third.

Speaker 2 (53:21):
That's a sagary. Kaylee's father, Steve Gonzalvez, what would happen
if that happens to go book wild?

Speaker 5 (53:28):
He is, yeah, speaking of speaking of, we do have
an update from Steve Gonsalves. Actually the gag order was
listed and are lifted, and you know, more information is
starting to come out. And one thing that we learned
in its trigger warning, there was a dateline show an
episode a couple maybe two months ago where there were

(53:49):
a bunch of leaks and we've been talking about it
quite a while on this Well, we learned that in
these leaks that Brian Coberger was looking up specific sexual
kind of things and he was looking for unconscious women, right. Well,
we learned from Steve Colensalvus that it added to that
he was also looking for gagged women and that when

(54:13):
he came upon you know, Maddie and Kaylee laying in
bed that night that he happened upon part of his fantasy.
These women were unconscious, they were you know, they were
passed out. They had been drinking, and we learned that
poor Kaylee, lovely Kaylee had basically indents on her mouth.

(54:35):
And I'm using my hand. You can't see me, but
if you look at if you hold your hand up,
you have the wedge in between your your thumb and
your forefinger, and it's he implied that she was kind
of gagged with his hand between her the wedge, that
little web there, And that's pretty pretty sad, Joseph, what
can you tell us about that, Like what kind of
pressure would it take to leave those kind of indents

(54:58):
and what would the corner or the medical exam.

Speaker 6 (55:01):
What you see manifested with with pressure being placed directly
over the mouth, and it can be placed with a pillow.
I've seen it with a pillow. But also the bare
hand is that the person that is being restrained like this,
they're not willing to be restrained, so they're fighting back.
And just imagine if everyone at home will kind of

(55:21):
place your hand over your mouth and hold your hand
static and move your head back and forth, there's a
particularly forcefully you know, she's in the throes of fighting
for a lot. You'll have these little indents on the
interier of the mouth and also if folks at home
will take the tip of their tongue and feel for
that little connected tissue between your gum and your lift

(55:43):
that's called the fremulum. You've got one on the top,
one the bottom. And one of the things we look
for in suffocations is those little frimulum. They can lacerate,
and so you'll get lacerations from the teeth as well.
I would suspect I don't know this for a fact,
I suspect that that is what they were referring to.
So we have someone that is having pressure applied directly

(56:08):
to their mind, to their face while they're being attacked
with it not and you can just imagine the horror
show that that is.

Speaker 5 (56:14):
I don't even want to think about it, Like it's
just so devastating. And you know the fact that they
know this and repeating it to news has just got
to be really hard for them. And you know, we
hear it tru from tonight. Our heart goes out to
them and we definitely support, you know, their endeavors, and
it's my understanding that they have decided to go to sentencing.
You know, initially they weren't going to go, right we
learned that they weren't going to go, and I think

(56:36):
they've changed their mind. You know, I think there's a
lot of power in not going, and I definitely supported
them not going because even acknowledging his existence is giving
him some kind of power. And I think that the
Gunsalvest family kind of we're like, we're not going to
even address him. That was like taking their power back.
But I'm glad that they decided to go. I'm glad.

Speaker 3 (56:57):
Yeah, And listen, we'll be following along and you know,
hope that things go as they should and this was
all start.

Speaker 4 (57:05):
Yeah, we will keep following up.

Speaker 3 (57:07):
Listen, if you have questions about Brian Coburger or upcoming
we were about to be talking about Mercedes Vega, or
really any forensic questions, then you should call eighty eight
three to one Crime because we have expert Joseph Scott
Morgan here with us tonight, and the US is Stephanie Ladecker,

(57:29):
Body Mooven and I am Courtney Armstrong. And to add
to this party, we actually have a caller, Michelle.

Speaker 4 (57:37):
On the line.

Speaker 11 (57:39):
Hi, Joseph, this is Michelle. Longtime fans, and I'm curious
about your opinion. Hey, how are you and super excited
the Aaron Patterson case. I'm not sure if it's familiar,
but she is the mushroom poisoner out of all Familia
who was just recently convicted, right, what is your opinion
on that case? And like, look a profile would be

(58:01):
like Aaron Patterson.

Speaker 6 (58:03):
Yeah, thanks for calling. Thanks for asking the question, Michelle.
I actually did an episode of body Bags on this
case because I was fascinated. But the fact that well,
first off, I think they nailed it with this case,
you know, and what she did, what she put this
family through, because this is a horrible way to die.
I don't know if you have any members of your family.

(58:24):
I do that are mushroom hunters that go out and
they search for mushrooms out from Louisiana. One of the
most popular mushrooms down there are Chantline's and a very
hearty mushroom, great for cooking. She supposedly comes from that background.
And let me tell you something about the death cat mushroom.
It's green when you see it, it's almost like you

(58:45):
know those little Amazonian frogs that are orange or red
and they say stay away from them. Oh yeah, you
should do the same thing with a death cat mushroom.
And anybody that's worth their salt that spends their time
doing that would not collect these and used them to
cook with. So she's actually tasked this out by using

(59:06):
using the mushroom to add to beef wellington, which is
kind of this involved process. What's really interesting though, is
that the adults got dosed with this stuff, the kids
did not, So she actually targeted members of the family
with this mushroom. And again it goes back to what
we were talking about earlier with the mindset of poisoner.

(59:29):
Their stealth is the key to this, and also for knowledge.
Most of these people are pretty highly intelligent and they
know what combos to use. She seems like she was
more on point than the dentist was. And this lady
is not a healthcare professional, but she knows for fact
these things are highly toxic and she wanted to take

(59:49):
out the family and boy did she ever do a job. Yeah.
I think they got it right.

Speaker 2 (59:54):
Thank you for so much for calling Michelle. We really
appreciate it. Joseph. Do you think that she Aaron Patterson
on Australia that killed her in laws?

Speaker 6 (01:00:03):
Right?

Speaker 5 (01:00:04):
They were her in laws with these mushrooms. We were
talking earlier about the dentist in Colorado and how you know,
poisoning somebody is sort of like a coward's move and
it's a way to like kind of distance yourself from
the actual process of murder, right, because you're not really
actively participating in their death. You give it to them,
they take it, and you just kind of walk away.

Speaker 4 (01:00:24):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:00:25):
Do you think that this kind of played into her
as well.

Speaker 6 (01:00:28):
Yeah, with the Patterson thing, one of the things she
was saying initially was that, Yeah, I went out and
collected mushrooms, and you know, it was this kind of
innocuous thing. I do it all the time. And oh
I happened to get some bad mushrooms and put them
another Hell you did. You got a large batch of
these things, you mix them up, and you targeted specific members.
And yeah, it was her in laws, but she also

(01:00:48):
had people like her husband that were poisoned as well,
and he survived. And let me tell you something, the
medical course that he had to go through. They had
to pull them back from the edge of death multiple times.
It's a multi organ system failure event. It is a
horrible way to die, absolutely horrible. Does physicians, Yeah, it can,

(01:01:12):
it absolutely can't. Multiple systems the lungs delivered liver in particular,
because liver is like a big filter in the body.
It's always trying to filter out toxins. And boy, I'll
tell you what, she chose a hell of a hell
of a methodology in order to facilitate this.

Speaker 1 (01:01:29):
H Wow.

Speaker 5 (01:01:30):
I just kind of wonder like if there was some
kind of like guilt at play and that's why she
chose these mushrooms, or I happen to kind of believe
she chose the mushrooms because it's what she knew, right,
because she said that she was like always kind of
going mushroom hunting and you know, and it was just
a way for her to be like, oh, it was
an accident.

Speaker 2 (01:01:47):
I didn't mean to But even though.

Speaker 6 (01:01:48):
No, yeah, I think there's a touch of sadism here too,
because if she knows mushrooms, she knows how painful this is.
And this was not a quick death. This is not
a quick death. This is not something and these people
would have been in agonizing pain, and they would have
had an awareness of that. It's not like they just
kind of magically fall over when this happened.

Speaker 3 (01:02:08):
Right, And Joseph, you said that there were children at
the table.

Speaker 4 (01:02:13):
I had that detail had escaped me.

Speaker 6 (01:02:17):
Yeah, they were separate their food from the rest of
the group. Yeah they did. And so so again this
goes to a premeditative event. You've got specific intent here
to do grievous bodily harm, murder and you have targeted somebody. Okay,
that's what's fascinating about this case. And many people in

(01:02:38):
America hadn't heard about it or to anybody read up
on this because it's a wild case. It's not something
that I ever recall us having in America. I'm not
saying it hadn't happened, only there were very small slices
of things. But check it out. Check this case out
out of Australia.

Speaker 3 (01:02:54):
Well, thank you so much, Joseph, and thank you Michelle
for calling in.

Speaker 2 (01:03:07):
Welcome back to True Crime tonight an iHeartRadio. We're talking
true crime all the time. I'm Stephanie Leidecker here with
Courtney Armstrong, Body Move In and the host of Body
Bags Forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan, and he has a
close a case, rather very close to his heart, the
Mercedes Vega case. And we've been really wanting to talk

(01:03:28):
about this one for a while, so we're going to
get into it pretty quickly here, but again we will
be following this and kind of unpacking this, not just tonight,
but we're going to make sure that Joseph comes back
and also continues the discussion. So, Joseph, where should we
begin with this case?

Speaker 6 (01:03:43):
Well, I think the fact that you've got a burning
car is where, you know, because it really kind of
got into the conversation. Can you imagine going down the
road and you see a car that's on fire on
the side of the road, and I think that many
of us would be inclined to stop and go and
inspect it to a certain degree. But when you walk

(01:04:05):
up on the car, fully involved car, you see there's
a fellow human being inside of it. And the big
question that this begs is how and why? Because this
is not like an automobile crash where you have an
explosive event. You're talking about a fire that is set
within the cabin of the car and it's fully involved.

Speaker 5 (01:04:29):
Right so just to bring everybody up to spin on
what we're talking about. Mercedes Vega. She was a twenty
two year old dancer from Tempe, Arizona. She had previously
been a victim of armed robbery and was set to
testify against one of the suspects in this case on
the day she was found dead. And this happened back
in April of twenty twenty three. An autopsy had revealed

(01:04:49):
that she had blunt force injuries, a gunshot wound to
the arm and bleach in her throat, indicating torture before
she was set on fire, so of course in her car,
not her car. She was found in a car that
did not belong to her. She was found in a
burning car. Arrests happened in December of twenty twenty four.
There's been three men arrested, but the tail of their

(01:05:12):
arrest is kind of complicated and it's a little bit
too much to get into right now. So we're going
to table that, maybe do it another night, because it
is a tale to tell about the talent of itself.

Speaker 2 (01:05:22):
It's a tail in and of itself, a juicy big one.
While we have Joseph here.

Speaker 5 (01:05:27):
Like his time is so valuable and we really value
his input on this kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:05:31):
We want to talk about Yogi does too, my dog.

Speaker 5 (01:05:34):
We want to talk about the forensics in this case,
because you know, these are important things that also tie
back to the arrest, because they found fingerprints and the
bleach in her throat. Can we talk a little bit
about what kind of forensics they found, Joseph.

Speaker 6 (01:05:50):
Yeah, we Canada, And I'd love to start with this
gunshot wound because the gunshot woman that she is sustained,
which is actually in one of her arms, is a
non lethal angel And what was the term that you
guys are that has been thrown about relative to this torture.
I've seen so many times over the course of my

(01:06:10):
career people being threatened with weapons in order to maybe
give up information, and then to take it up to
another step where you're going to fire around into someone
in a non where you know, is a non lethal area,
and all the while the thing is escalating, you know.

(01:06:33):
And then the added thing here is the fact that
they had evidence that she had had bleach pouring down
her throat. This is not something it can happen in
one of two ways. Bleach will be applied many times
to eradicate evidence, particularly when you have a case of
sexual assault. This happens with some frequency because perpetrators think

(01:06:56):
that it's going to get rid of any kind of
evidence as far as semen or blood or whatever it
is they think may have been left behind. But it
can also be used as a methodology for torture. Bleach
is highly caustic. For anybody who doesn't believe it. The
next time you're cleaning with bleach, just pay attention to
the smell in the room. That's one of the reasons

(01:07:17):
they say, if you use bleach, you need been a
well ventilated area. And you know I've used it, you
know throughout my life. I've used in the more to
clamp with it's actually eye watering, and that was in
kind of a big open space. Can you imagine having
the stuff poured down your throat in the midst of
this escalating event where you've got people that are and
I think it's people, not a person, where you've got

(01:07:39):
people that are yelling and screaming at you. They've already
presented a weapon and they're trying to extricate information from you,
perhaps or trying to dissuade you from testifying against them.
But once it escalates to this point, I think that
all bets are off at that moment time. And the
thing that's so horrible about this is that I think

(01:07:59):
that she probably saw the end was coming. And the
fact that they recovered the forensic evidence that they did,
and there are a couple of vehicles that are involved
in this. They actually did, in fact find one of
the perpetrator's fingerprints in one area that tied one of
these individuals specifically back to this event. And there's also

(01:08:20):
this crazy thing where you've got these individuals who I'll
kind of give you their point of origin. Their point
of origin is around the Chattanooga, Tennessee area. Now they're
they're all the way out out west. Now, what the
hell are.

Speaker 2 (01:08:34):
You doing in Arizona?

Speaker 6 (01:08:35):
Right?

Speaker 2 (01:08:35):
This is an Arizona from ten c right. Yep.

Speaker 5 (01:08:39):
They found a fingerprint under like a cup in one
of the cars, and then another fingerprint of the other
suspect on a bloody bag in the car that she
was in.

Speaker 6 (01:08:50):
From my understanding, yeah, and this is the thing about
cars and fires, when fires are intentionally set, Okay, sometimes
I don't think we've talked about very much here together
but when you're talking about in arson, because this is
an arson. Anytime somebody maliciously sets a fire, that's arson,

(01:09:10):
even with a motor vehicle. Most of the time, I
think that people believe that just throwing the gallon of
gasoline on something that's striking a match, who it's going
to make all the evidence just period. It doesn't. As
a matter of fact, you create more evidence because you've
got a specific chemical signatures left behind by this accelerant
and gas. If gas is what was used was the accelerant,

(01:09:32):
it burns up really quickly. If you've ever been around
a gas fire where it just kind of goes like this,
it disspates really carefully, really quickly.

Speaker 4 (01:09:40):
It's not a fuel that is so terrifying. Joseph listen.

Speaker 3 (01:09:44):
If you have any questions for a forensic expert and
host of Body Bags.

Speaker 4 (01:09:49):
The podcast, give us a call. We're at eighty eight
three to one Crime.

Speaker 3 (01:09:53):
We are discussing the really abhorrent and brutal murder of
Mercedes Vega right now, jo Just I'm trying to picture
everything you're talking about, which is, first of all, it's
hard to picture.

Speaker 2 (01:10:06):
All of that.

Speaker 3 (01:10:08):
But in the planning, would the assumption be that the
perpetrator or in this case, potential perpetrators, before they left
the house, they had to get bleach, gasoline, a gun. Yeah,
like what goes on? Describe the preparation I suppose.

Speaker 6 (01:10:27):
Yeah, And you think the other thing that you have
to come equipped with is the will to do this
sort of thing, because this is not some kind of
light undertaking. You're talking about a fellow human being here,
this defenseless woman who's allegedly born witness to a bore
witness rather to a robbery that she was or that

(01:10:47):
she was robbed and she was set to test by
in it. You have to have a will of iron,
and not only you have to be pure evil in
or do this a fellow human being, because this is torture.
There many forms of torture. This is you're talking about
a really, really high level here. I think one of
the big questions is is that when she's placed into

(01:11:10):
this car, you know, is she still alive at that
point in time? Now, there are other injuries. I think
that she sustained blunt force trumps. She may have been strangled.

Speaker 2 (01:11:20):
Yeah, there found blood.

Speaker 5 (01:11:22):
So she exited her apartment and she's like in a
parking garage and there's video surveillance and she walks to
her I think she has a Dodge charger. And they
found evidence that she was attacked prior she was basically kidnapped, okay,
and they found blood at the scene of where her
car was right, so they think that there was some
sort of blunt force trauma that happened there to get

(01:11:45):
this blood. And then of course she was taken in
this Malibu, the Chevy Malibu that was caught on fire.
But yeah, so prior to this though, in twenty twenty,
she was a victim of an armed robbery and she
was set to testify against her the man she identified.
His name is cud Joe Young, and she was set

(01:12:06):
to testify against him because she had picked him up
out of a lineup, like, yeah, that's the guy who
robbed me. And apparently this cud Joe Young just very quick.
We'll get into it in other episodes a deeper dive.
But two other men were also arrested, and the common
threat that they all have is that they all use
the same credit card at one point. So there's this
unknown person according to the AFFI David, there's this unknown

(01:12:29):
person that I don't know the name of that. Let
all three of these men use this credit card, and
that's the ties that bind them and the other two men.
Since Sara Hayes and Jared Gray flew out from Chattanooga
to Arizona, so there's also evidence, you know, that came
out and they did this, and then they left the
day after she was murdered, so that was the time.

Speaker 6 (01:12:52):
You have a criminal conspiracy. This second place here, and
the fact that they're also in transit across state lines
and all these things I would imagine that might be
interested and that you mentioned. Listen, the area where the
FBI truly does dance is the area of kidnapping as well,
and that's certainly a federal offense, and so witness intimidation,

(01:13:16):
all these other things that they could enjoin in on this.
You know, it reminds me of another case that actually
originated out of Tennessee many years ago. And you know
that case was involving Channing Christian and Christopher Newsom and
that was up in Noxill and both those young people
were brutally sexually assaulted and also had bleach applied to

(01:13:38):
them and gasoline. Both those individuals and one of the
most horrific cases in the history of crime in the
state of Tennessee, and that was many years ago, but
it really sounds much like that case. I find it
very interesting that both these cases have Tennessee ties. Was

(01:13:58):
there some kind of pre knowledge of that and maybe
that he used as a template here. I'm not saying
there was any kinunt of sexual assault here, but the
level of torture that occurred in that case out of
Knox will rivals this and absolutely horrific stuff. The thing
about the fire though, is that, like I was saying,

(01:14:19):
cars are very poor fuel. If you're going to maintain
a fire, it'll burn cloth seats, it'll burn the headline,
or all these sorts of things.

Speaker 4 (01:14:26):
Right, unbelievable. Joseph, listen.

Speaker 3 (01:14:30):
We cannot thank you enough for the depth and breadth
of your knowledge.

Speaker 4 (01:14:34):
And listen.

Speaker 3 (01:14:35):
Yeah, if you love Joseph as much as we do,
which would be hard, but if you do, you should
be listening to his hit podcast Body Bags. Also catch
him in Katie's Studios documentary Idaho Student Murders.

Speaker 2 (01:14:48):
We want to go to a quick talk back.

Speaker 12 (01:14:50):
Hey, ladies, this is David in Massachusetts.

Speaker 9 (01:14:52):
Love the show.

Speaker 6 (01:14:53):
Great format.

Speaker 12 (01:14:54):
There's a new trial coming up a couple of weeks
to trial with Brian Walsh in Cohasset, mass He's been
acute stuff, murdering his wife a couple of New Year's
eaves ago. And guess who the lead investigator is in
that trial?

Speaker 4 (01:15:06):
You guessed it.

Speaker 12 (01:15:06):
Michael Proctor, the same bubbling idiot who watched the Karen
Reid trial and has already talked of not being able
to use evidence because he went.

Speaker 6 (01:15:14):
About it the wrong way.

Speaker 12 (01:15:16):
So, body, you got to dig into this.

Speaker 4 (01:15:17):
One called out, I direct call on the case.

Speaker 2 (01:15:21):
Yes, while on the scene.

Speaker 5 (01:15:23):
Well listen, I am prone to a Massachusetts person like
whatever people from Massachusetts have to say. I'm all listening
because I just love the way they speak. So yeah,
I'm in Let's dig into it, Brian Walsh. What do
we know about it?

Speaker 4 (01:15:37):
Very little? We got to dig into this.

Speaker 3 (01:15:39):
There's been multiple trials and I know in court it's
been a mess, and the tie to Karen Reid is listening,
The Karen Read effect is happening right now. Walsh's attorneys
are using the Read case and they're arguing that Proctor
he could have been biased, including in this case. They're
requesting access to all of his internal affairs. Oh yeah,

(01:16:02):
so it's really you know, you could say it appears
to be helping Walsh's defense, but Walsh is accused of
killing and just memorying his wife. There's a lot of
forensics that we will be getting into. There's a lot
of legalities. Honestly, we'll get into it and maybe we
even bring it back around next time. Joseph's here for

(01:16:24):
the forensic that's good idea. But yeah, there's a lot
to this case. So David from Massachusetts, thank you so much.
And body, I think you better.

Speaker 2 (01:16:32):
I better getective, Yester, get to it. I've heard of
this case before.

Speaker 5 (01:16:39):
I just don't remember the details, but the name sounds
like super familiar.

Speaker 3 (01:16:43):
Another listener had DMed us. So we were planning to
start this soon. So yeah, I think because there have
been several trials. But yeah, Stephanie, what do you think
of having something with a connection to Karen Reid?

Speaker 4 (01:16:58):
Is that comes up?

Speaker 2 (01:16:59):
HI find it this thumbs up. But you know, listen,
the days of being a dirty coop or a problematic
cop or a biased cop is you know they're listening.
It's over. And I think that's why that case specifically,
not that I'm saying all of the Canton Police Department
or dirty in any way. But you know, we're looking
up to our law enforcement not only to keep us safe,

(01:17:20):
but to be fair, honest, and to work with integrity.
And if that isn't being put into play, I don't
think any of us can stand for it. So yeah,
let the let the games begin.

Speaker 4 (01:17:31):
Well, that's for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:17:33):
In Procter specifically, like that's an alleged, alleged alleged, but
you know it was. It was a messy investigation the
Karen Read case. So if nothing else, I think we'll
hopefully see less of that as a result, fewer solo
cups and the Tita sander Birch Moartula.

Speaker 5 (01:17:50):
When you're talking about the Karen Read effect, you're not
joking around, right, Yeah, like the sander birchmore her, the
investigation into her death is being called into question because
of the people that we're investigating, and they're all tied together.

Speaker 2 (01:18:03):
Yeah, I'm killer was a cop exactly, And I'm not
convinced that some of the law enforcement associated with Karen
Reid's case. Again, I'm not convinced, And just make this
fact that there won't in fact be charges brought up
against them at a later date, and that some of
the things that we've been hearing in the press are
sort of pointing to that with a wink and a nod.
So I think we'll be following that very closely. But yeah,

(01:18:25):
thank you for the message, great talk back, and I'm
with body Massachusetts. Yeah, I have on the show man.
No one's getting away with anything in Massachusetts, that's for sure.
Thank you. So listen tomorrow we are back. Make sure
you join us last and PAP we're starting some new
cases this week as well. Also this dentist in Colorado,
that trial continues. So thank you for the incredible night.

(01:18:49):
This is true crime tonight. We've been talking true crime
all the time, and listen, have a great Monday morning tomorrow.
Stay safe.