April 27, 2023 • 44 mins
In this episode of the Body Bags we delve into the chilling case of Elizabeth Capaldi, who was murdered by her husband, Stephen Capaldi. Capaldi, 57, has been sentenced to 22 to 44 years in prison for the murder of his wife, Elizabeth "Beth" Capaldi, 55, in October 2022. Incriminating evidence was found on his cellphone, including internet searches on how to get away with murder.
Hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the unusual factors that contributed to the crime, including infidelity and a comic book obsession, the meticulous research Stephen conducted before the murder, the initial police response to Beth's missing person report, filed by her daughter Emma, and how inconsistencies during police interviews can raise red flags and lead to a suspect's downfall.
Time-codes:
00:00 - Introduction.
01:07 - Overview of Beth Capaldi's murder case.
02:00 - Joseph asks Dave about his experience with comic books.
03:10 - Joseph's childhood love for comic books.
05:00 - Driving factors in Stephen Capaldi's case: infidelity and comic book obsession.
06:20 - Alternative ways Stephen could have ended his marriage.
08:15 - Sinister research Stephen did prior to Beth's disappearance.
11:50 - Emma Capaldi involves the police after talking to her father.
14:50 - JoScott explains how investigators approach missing person cases.
16:30 - Significance of observing behavior patterns in missing person's cases.
17:40 - Police questioning spouses and detecting deviations from their stories.
20:11 - Suspicious internet searches made by Stephen Capaldi.
33:10 - Joseph describes the intimate nature of the murder.
35:10 - Methods researched to dispose of Beth's body.
36:20 - Bloody aftermath in the basement and timeline of murder.
38:30 - Emotional impact of the crime scene.
45:15 - Outro.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. It's a rare event
in the criminal justice system when you have an individual
that actually pleads guilty. It seems truly to be the
(00:33):
exception and not the norm. I would imagine when you're
standing before what seems like a mountain of physical evidence
and you still have a few synapses firing in your
brain that give you an indication that this is a
(00:53):
losing battle, you have no other choice. Today we're going
to talk about the murder of a lovely woman by
the name of Beth Capaldi and her husband who decided
that he was going to end not just their marriage,
(01:15):
but her life over something that is so utterly bizarre.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks. Dave mac
my good friend, senior crime reporter with Crime Online. Hey, Dave,
(01:37):
I got a question for you, man. I was just
curious when you were a kid, did you like comic books?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
I knew you were going to ask that. I knew
it and the right thing to say. Oh, I loved
him as a kid. I'm to be honest, I didn't
even really consider comic books as part of my life
until I started watching Big Bank you know, when it
was on all the time, and so when I saw
(02:04):
this article, it started digging in to the copalities and
it was like, I understand how that thinking is different
than what you and I might think about. But no,
I didn't get into the serialized comic books. The only
closest thing I'd come to with you the funny papers,
you know, Charlie Brown or a Mad magazine. I love
that one.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Oh, I love Man too. Listen, I have to admit
a weakness. I do love them. I love them as
a child. And it's interesting you said the comic strips.
What'd you refer to the mass the funny what papers?
The funny papers? Yeah? I know. And my granny she
would refer to comic books as funny books. Okay, I
guess it's rooted in this idea that you know that
(02:43):
it was escapism in order or it's perceived to get
a laugh.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Right.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
The stuff that I was interested in was always serious.
I was a huge Marvel comic book guy, you know,
when I was young. Spider Man and Captain America and
all that stuff. It was fascinating to me. I'm particularly
struck by how much money is involved in that industry.
And now today it's an area where people can go
(03:10):
and and trade these things. And these things are like
hermetically sealed, right, yeah, you get you don't touch it.
Don't touch it, you set it up on the shelf
because it's got this value to it. The beauty of
it is you used to can roll it up in
your back pocket, you know, and carry it and you know,
throw it all over the place, and no telling in
(03:30):
today's standards, there's no telling how many dollars I actually
threw away.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
I never mocked people for doing the comic book thing.
I just I don't because we all get into different things,
but we do. I will tell you this. I saw
Iron Man the first, you know, Robert Downey Jr. I
watched it because I like the work of John Fovro.
I've always been a cheerleader for Robert Downey Jr. And
I watched the movie and didn't know that this was
based on a comic book. I didn't know, really, I
(03:55):
just thought, yes, I had no idea, and I'm talking,
I had no idea, Joe.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
I totally stupid.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Afterwards, because I've got into the movie, I'm like, well,
maybe I'll be into the comics. So I got a book.
I got a comic book, not a book. We got
a comic book and open it went okay, yeah, and
still not my thing.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
You know, that just means that you were interested in
other things, and that's that's kind of cool. With Stephen Cabaldi,
I got, I gotta tell you, i'd we cover a
lot of cases on body bags that are driven by passion,
and I guess you can have passion in different areas,
and most of the time it's a romantic passion. You
know that you've got jealousy that rises up, or you've
(04:35):
got people that want to get out of a relationship
and go into something else. But Dave, I got to
tell you, in this particular case, we've got a combo
of both. We've got infidelity and wow, we got comic books.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Unbelievable that we could actually be at the center of
this and it was part of it. And I'm glad
you pointed that out. Many of the stories that we
cover in crime deal with the base sexual he needs
human beings team to have and the links they're willing
to go to break bonds that they stood in front of,
oftentimes their family friends and God Almighty and said for
(05:11):
better for worse sickness and health. I'm here for you
after thirty years. You know, I really want to open
up a comic book store with my brother, and my
wife just will not support this idea, and so he's
out trolling for somebody who will support that idea, and
he finds her. I can't think, Joe, that this is
all there is, but it is. It is that basic
(05:33):
stuff right there. He wanted to do something his wife
didn't have a thing for, and he became interested in
another woman. At fifty seven years old, thirty years of marriage.
You decide, you know what, I've had enough of you,
and so you get down to the nitty gritty here,
What do you do if your goal is to end
(05:54):
this marriage? Well, one pick up the phone, call an
attorney and have a meeting of what can I do
to extricate myself from this horrible situation I'm in with
my wife of thirty years, who, by the way, still
loves me.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Now, let's not do that.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Let me find a good way to put her out
of her misery and mind so that I can start
this new business with my brother.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
You sit back and you consider this, and is it
a matter I wonder of just being laser focused on
this thing that you think is going to satisfy this
urge that you have this long term goal of owning
a comic book store. Not that there's anything wrong with that,
(06:36):
but there's certain ways that you go about it. It's
certainly not as would be revealed down the road. You
think about, well, I'm going to go and I'm going
to go on and do a search for how is
it that I can get a great business loan. Now
you're going to go and do a search of what
does it take to pass a polygraph?
Speaker 2 (06:57):
If something happened to my wife and the police, I
would be the first one they'd look at. They would investigate,
and they would look at the books I have, look
at the shows and the research I do, and I'm
telling you, within about thirty seconds, I would be in
handcuffs being walked out to the car for an interrogation
just because I have all these things. Okay, I have,
(07:18):
but I have a reason for it. I do a
show with Joe Scott Morgan called body Bags. I'm a
crime reporter on other shows, so I have research on
my computer, like how to get away with murder? Can
you avoid police detection? By turning off your phone, how
to control your dark impulses. These are just some of
(07:38):
the things that Stephen Capaldi researched prior to his wife's demise.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
If you're taking this amount of intellectual power and applying
it toward that, and he even mentioned these things are dark,
so automatically from Jump Street, he's acknowledging what the path
that he's going down is very sinister, I mean very
very sinister. He is applying all of his efforts in
(08:06):
that particular area. And this is a guy that, along
with his wife, that's established a family. They've been married
thirty years now, and they kind of drift apart over
over years. They're not as intimate, they're not as close
as they once were. Why are you going to pick
up a brick and throw it through a stained glass window.
I don't understand that necessarily, but it's amazing to me
(08:30):
the way people will do these sorts of things, and
they I think from my perspective as a forensics guy,
we are so detailed in what we do from an
investigative standpoint that we get to go back and look
at things when there is a pause. Right, We're not
(08:51):
going into scenes in an urgent state of mind. We
try to be methodical, We try to be well planned
before we enter in because we've done this so many times,
and we try to be very accurate in our practice.
You got a guy who is looking completely to rip
(09:12):
apart his family and his wife's life. He did not
consider all of those fine details that are going to
wind up having you stand before a judge at some
point in time, and all of these things are going
to be elisted and you're going to eventually have to
(09:33):
stand and answer for what you've done. You think about
it just for a second, and if he had an
opportunity to go back in time and consider what he
had undertaken, I think that Stephen Capaldi may have chose
a different path. All that remains that's a term that's
(10:18):
been applied in forensics. I think there's certainly been a
fictional novel that has that title that falls back into forensics.
But all that remains is I think it's very appropriate.
In the case of Beth Capaldy. She occupies a home,
a dwelling that she's probably lived in for a goodly
(10:41):
part of her life, and suddenly she's absent from there.
What is it that remains of her. What is it
that's left behind that can help an investigate or try
to determine what's kurt? Did she just merely vanish into
thin air.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
That's exactly what they walked into, Joe. When Emma Capaldi,
that would be the daughter of Stephen and Beth, she
hadn't talked to her mother for a couple of days,
and she goes to her dad and says, hey, I
haven't talked to mom in a couple of days. What's
going on? And he doesn't really have a satisfying answer
(11:19):
for her. So she calls the police and says, I
can't find my mom. My dad's no help. Car is here,
her phone is here, but she's nowhere to be found,
and I don't know what to do. That's what police
came into in this particular story, that phone call, and
(11:40):
they came on scene and as they do, they took
a report. They talked with em about what her relationship
was with her mother and how often they talk to
establish kind of the boundaries that this is way out
of the norm for Beth Capaldi to not be in
touch with their daughter. And then two is, well, let's
talk to the husband's slash father here and Steven. Well,
(12:01):
Emma told the police, Hey, when I talk to my
dad about this and told him I was thinking about
calling you, he said, yeah, do what you have to do,
do what you think you have to do.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Well?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Does that phrase, do what you think you have to
do sound like something coming from a concerned husband wife
of thirty years is missing, and the best you can
come up with is, hey, do what you think you
have to do.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
I got to stop you right there, David. It almost
smacks of a response to a threat. I mean, I've
been in situations before where I've been unseen as an investigator,
and I've had people say keep doing this, I'm going
to sue. My flippant response is do what you gotta do.
You think about the relationship between a husband and wife
(12:45):
and their daughter too, right, Who's actually going to say
that to their daughter? Who is looking that's concerned about her? Mama?
You know what what's occurred? Where is she? I want
to talk to mama? Well, I don't know. I'm going
to reach out and do what I have to do. Well,
do what you got to do? Who says that.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
That's the thing he never bothered to call that's the
thing his daughter is like, why didn't you call? He
didn't and so boom, there's your phone call. And that's
why Joe. When I first saw this, my thought was,
what would you do? You get the call later on?
Usually they don't call you into this first meeting, do they.
When the police are they're taking their notes, they call
you up later on say hey, man, this woman's missing.
(13:26):
It's started here in this house, but we don't know
anything else. Do you come into that environment, Joe and
start sniffing around with luminol and black lights or what
do you do?
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Well, if you're talking about a missing person's case, which
you would think that that's kind of the starting point,
and there's any number of examples of this throughout the
years that we could certainly revisit. But you think about
someone is summoned to a location and they say, hey,
my child is missing or my spouse is missing. You
(14:01):
don't begin to work that case as if it is
a homicide. Okay, that's just not that's not your that's
not your response as an investigator. You know, you begin
to try to piece things together when you look at
the scene and knowing that, let's face it, Beth worked
from home. This was not only her home, it was
(14:21):
her office as well. So most of her life is
spent in his home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and so
you would think that there would be evidence of her
having lived a daily life there everything that comes along
with that. If she leaves the house, you'd expect to
find an absence of certain things wallet or phone, or
(14:44):
car keys and all of that. That's where you start
in a missing person's case. And then of course you've
got this digital signature she's using a cell phone. And
going back to what she had said earlier regarding their daughter, Emma, look,
I can only I can only state in my life
that my wife and my daughter they talk probably twice
(15:09):
daily at least, and then I will talk to my daughter.
And if she hasn't heard from us, or we haven't
heard from her, we're going to be concerned at that
point in time. And if one of us hasn't heard
from from my wife, we're going to be calling one another.
If you talk to mom lately, no, when did you
last talk to you? And you kind of go back
(15:29):
and forth, and there's kind of an urgency, nothing necessarily
to get worried about, but you you want to you
want to have contact because it's absent the norm. You
know what I'm saying, right, it's it's not it. We
look for these patterns that develop in a person's life,
and once those patterns are being broken in some way,
(15:50):
when people begin to act outside those normal ranges that
they work within on a daily basis, then that's that's
kind of that's a tough thing, it really is. And
then I think that it's at that point that police,
after they question you had mentioned those individuals that are
in that intimate circle, you know, who's more intimate than
(16:11):
a spouse. You begin to see how they behave, how
they react. You begin to kind of dig in, look
beneath the surface and try to understand is the story
they're telling you, does it marry up with what you're
seeing evidenced before you? And can they maintain the same
narrative over and over again. That's why when police question people,
(16:34):
many times you will see them ask the same question
over and over again, and sometimes they'll rephrase it. But
they want to see if what you're saying in the
present marries up with what you said two hours ago,
or an hour ago, or even thirty minutes ago. They
want to see if there are any deviations from that standard.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
One way they do that is while they're interviewing you.
But I hate to call somebody assessed right off the bat,
but you know, when a spouse is missing, the other
one is pri he's the immediate concern.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Absolutely, absolutely, they'll.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Break him down.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
They'll ask questions, Hey, what did you do last night?
And in this case, that's how we know that. In
one of the first interviews, talking to him, what were
you guys doing last night when you were last with her?
And he said, we watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sitting
on the couch and we were holding hands. Okay, that's
what he said they did at the last time they
were together. Now, the reason they know that is because,
like you said, they'll use that later to trip him up.
(17:30):
What they probably said during the course of this interview
about what time was that really? When did you start
watching it? About eight eight fifteen? Well was it eight
or eight fifteen? Was it closer to eight ten? Yeah,
eight twelve. Now it seems innocuous, but if you're telling
the truth, you know what time you did something, and
(17:51):
when they get that information from you, Okay, it was
about eight twelve, you have a reason for thinking that
way and remembering it that way. So an hour later
when they ask you the same question, they won't throw
it out as what time. They will say, Okay, you
said you guys were watching TV around A fifteen or so, right,
and then you write that down. Well, all of a sudden,
when you say, yep, that's right, they know that isn't
(18:11):
the truth because you narrowed it down to a twelve earlier.
Now you're saying a fifteen. It's just a little red flag.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, yeah it is. And let me give you an
even bigger red flag. With Stephen Cabaldi Dave, he went
from we were watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer sitting on
sofa together holding hands, to well, she may have taken
off on a solo fishing trip. Yes, who says that?
And I think that there was even at one point
(18:38):
in time he used the phrase, well she's she's on
a beach somewhere, somewhere.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
Warm, someplace warm on the beach.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
How broad do you have to be within the spectrum
when you begin to you know, these provid questions that
the investigators kind of digging into to try to find
out what happened to Beth in this period of time.
And why would this is the other question, what would
be your purpose for deviating from your narrative that you've
(19:07):
already created. When we have asked you this over and
over again, you talked about going through the house and
spraying with luminol and all these sorts of things. Yeah,
I mean, that's certainly something that we eventually do. But
can I tell you something else that's very curious about
Stephen Paldi his interesting searches that he's done on the internet.
(19:31):
Not only not only did he search for things that
we talked about, he also searched out things like reciprocating
saw and black light, which if you've never seen a
black light utilized at crime scene, it will cause biological
(19:52):
samples to kind of luminous in that environment. You can
use it with semen, you can use it to a
certain extent with blood. And it's kind of an interesting thing.
You know, why are you searching these things out? You
begin to couple that with this kind of deviation that
he has from the story that he's providing early on,
and certainly it raises a red flag for the investigators.
(20:15):
And that's all the more reason that the investigators would
go out at this point in time.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Okay, now let me ask you him. You pointed this out,
and I just want to go back to it. Very quickly.
He said that they were holding hands on the couch
watching Buffy the Vampires Layer. But then in the same conversation,
my wife just told me about an affair she's been
having for three years. She's been having a three year
long affair. We've been married thirty years. She just admitted
to a three year long affair. But we're sitting on
(20:40):
the couch holding hands watching Buffy. That doesn't fit my
picture of a healthy, happy, thirty year marriage.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
No it doesn't. And listen, this is a thing. You
can say anything that you want to say, and you're
talking to police, and the dead aren't there to defend themselves,
and of course at this point they don't know if
you know where Beth is, if she's still among the living,
or if she's passed on. But when you're in control
(21:09):
and you're kind of driving a boat at this point
in time, you can put any type of information that
you want to out there to mislead the police, you know,
And that's when you start to get into areas like
you're attempting to obstruct an investigation. They begin to add
these little charges to things as the narrative develops, moving
(21:30):
on down the line. Because if there's one thing that
will frustrate an investigator, it's that they have been given
bad information. It makes the entire team take two, three
fifty steps backwards and have to go back to that
original point. Now that's a good thing in one sense,
(21:54):
is that now you're beginning to understand that this individual
is being deceptive and that's part of thevestigation. But it can,
trust me, it can get very frustrating. Preeminent among everything
here is his wife's safety. Where is she? We've got
a woman that has gone missing. We want to be
able to find her intact. But of course in best
(22:17):
case that's certainly wasn't the story. So where do you go?
(22:42):
Where do you go with an investigation when the person
that is most intimately involved with the missing person is
giving you all kinds of deceptive answers and they're leading
you down these past that lead to nowhere. It's tough
(23:03):
thing to kind of measure as an investigator. But as
I stated earlier, you have to understand that this is
part of what investigators do, and it's almost a built
in expectation that you are going to be deceived in
some way. That's what always strikes me as funny, Dave,
when people say investigators are so jaded. Yeah, you're right.
(23:24):
When you've been lied to a lot, you tend to
be jaded. You suspect everybody, and I'm chief among sinners.
I'm guilty of it.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Well, in this particular case, we have the adult daughter.
She calls police because she hasn't been in touch with
her mom in two days. And there's an interesting side
part of this show. None of the family or friends
had talked to her in two days, and they pointed
out that at fifty five years old, Beth Capaldi was
a homebody. She had never actually stayed away from her
(23:53):
own home overnight by herself. Not a very common thing
among an adult that's in her mid fifties, but absolutely
truth here. So now you've got a fifty five year
old woman who is gone for a couple of days
and she's never ever done this in the history of
her world. She left behind her car. Okay, how did
she get to wherever she is? He her keys, her iPad,
(24:14):
cell phone. Plus you know what, Beth Capaldi has an
elderly mother in a nursing home, so they have their
work cut out for them to figure out what exactly happened.
But it does start with her husband, Stephen Capaldi, who
claims they're watching Buffy on the couch holding hands and
then wait a minute, I don't know where she went
(24:36):
and I don't even bother to look for. That's a big,
big red flag to me. So you come in. You're
the investigator, Joe. How do you begin to find out
what happened to Beth Capaldi? And was it explainable in
an innocent way or not? Is the house going to
reveal what exactly happened to her? Am I going to
(24:58):
find a forensic look at his phone or computers or
other things like that and dig through that and find
out what was going on? These are the questions I
have right now. You're the investigator, Joe. You're coming into
a house that you don't know as a crime scene
right now.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
No, you have no idea, And so you're walking through
this dwelling where you know, for all you know, some
of the most horrible things imaginable could have occurred. But
yet you're walking into something that is set up to
deceive you. Let me kind of expand on that and
tell you what had occurred. You'd mentioned her cell phone,
(25:32):
her keys, or car were all there, okay, but what
was not there was her purse, her wallet and thirteen
thousand dollars gone gone. You consider that that bit of
information well as an investigator thinking, well, why would you
(25:54):
need that much cash? What are you going to do
with that volume of cash? Well, travel, You're going to
get away, You're going to go somewhere and disappear. And
sometimes people have certainly done that over the years. People
have just said it's just too much. I can't go on.
I'm going to bury myself in the midst of time
and no one will remember me anymore. But fortunately the
(26:16):
police continue to press relative to the timeline, relative to
what had been said and done prior to and following.
And also when the investigators begin to get in to
the digital life of Stephen Capaldi, they found very disturbing things.
(26:37):
These searches that he had conducted to what would seem
at least to give them an idea of what he
had planned out. And here's the thing, you know how
I'd mentioned if you get into this kind of back
and forth with the police when they're trying to find
(26:58):
somebody that's missing, and suddenly they realize that you've led
them on a goose chase, a wild goose chase that's
going to wind up being charged, which he eventually was,
with obstruction of justice. And also you begin to think
about has he done anything at the scene that could
potentially deceive or was meant to deceive law enforcement, and
(27:22):
he had, and that's where he's eventually charged with tampering
of evidence. Because if you create a narrative by adjusting
the scene at all, like for instance, where you're going
to take this thirteen thousand dollars in her purse and
these sorts of things and take them away, take them
(27:43):
out of the scene, and it changes the context of
everything that can be construed as tampering as well, and
it leads the police to begin to dig deeper. And
when they do, after he had gone back and forth,
fails a polygraph examination, and that gives them enough information
(28:04):
in order to develop a warrant Dave, And when they did,
they found some pretty gruesome things.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
Stephen Capaldi, as you pointed out, I had told many,
many lies from the very beginning with his daughter having
his inner in two days to the point where he
actually is taking a polygraph test, which he failed miserably.
As they were developing their information. As the investigation rolled on,
they found out that it was in fact Stephen Capaldi
that had been having an affair, not his wife. Stephen
(28:32):
Capaldi actually had all these searches done. As we mentioned
right at the top of the show, he had actually
searched just to give you an idea, how to get
away with murder. He searched this on his phone or computer.
How to delete Facebook messages, another one, can you avoid
police detection by turning off your phone? How to disappear
(28:52):
and Never be found? And the FBI Handbook of Crime
Scene Forensics.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
I've got this book on my shelf day in my
office at the university, and it's something that I've referred
to over the years. It's there, and I was shocked
I saw that this was in the in his preferred
reading list. Not that there's anything wrong with being in
possession of the book, but when again, when you're trying
to understand what the mindset of somebody is that's attempting
(29:22):
to get away with something that's going to be a
big indicator, at least from a circumstantial standpoint that it's
a and you have to look at the approximation, you know,
timelines when did these things begin to bubble up in
your mind? And that goes to a premeditative state of
mind as well. You know, how long has perhaps he
been considering doing these sorts of things. And eventually, with Capaldi,
(29:48):
he rolls over on this and it admits to it,
I mean absolutely admits to it. He actually pleads guilty.
He went in and gave testimony in a grand jury hearing,
and I can only imagine that the DA was just
shocked eventually, but in the interim when it came down
(30:10):
to it, he had taken time to First off, I
think it was back on October tenth of twenty twenty two.
He suffocated her. He suffocated her while she was in
bed sleeping, And you've got two stories here. And with
the suffocation, it's kind of an interesting dynamic. You think
(30:34):
about suffocation versus asphyxia. Most of the time when people
say suffocation, you think of maybe placing a bag over
someone's head. And that's what's called a oxygen deprivation event,
where you're literally shutting out all supply of oxygen for
the individual and they die as a result of not
(30:56):
having access to breathable air. But with suffocationation someone's in bed,
what do you automatic? What's your default position there? Dave?
What do you think happened?
Speaker 3 (31:05):
Going to use a pillow?
Speaker 2 (31:06):
But I got a question for you, Joe, because I'm
thinking he using a pillow to suffocate someone that's on
a bed.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
There's a lot of gift on a bed, yeah, there is.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
How do you get the force necessary, the weight necessary
to actually cause someone to suffocate with a pillow and
a mattress in between.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
They've done studies over the years with oxygen deprivation with
kind of the primal reaction that people have to this,
and even the weakest among us will fight back. If
you're laying on a surface like this, a soft surface
like a mattress, and you're having direct pressure applied to
the face, the individual will fight back. And I think
that that's why, and they were able to see evidence
(31:49):
of this, and certainly he admitted to this, is that
he transitioned now to a different form of oxygen deprivation.
He went from suffocation to strangulation at this point in time.
So you just think about this. You're over your wife Beth.
In this case, you apply, say, for instance, a pillow
(32:11):
to her face, and you realize that this isn't going anywhere.
She's in a deep sleep. Suddenly she has this awareness
that she's being deprived of oxygen. She begins to fight back.
You toss the pillow side and then you essentially wrap
your hands around her throat at that point in time
and squeeze life out of her. And that's these types
(32:32):
of events. It's a very intimate, intimate occurrence in this environment.
And after this deed is done, remember this is on
the tenth Dave, he admits that he removed her remains
from the master bedroom down into the basement and he
left her down there for essentially two days.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
In the paperwork has said he killed her in the
master bedroom. He suffocated and strangled her in their master bedroom.
Then it says in his statement to police he actually
took her to another bedroom first and then took her
down to the basement. What does that mean to you?
Speaker 1 (33:12):
It goes to a disordered mindset. It's always fascinated me
relative to people that engage in homicide and they're trying
to understand what has occurred years ago when Bill Clinton
won the presidency, famously said, well, I'm like the old
dog that was sitting on the porch and was chasing
(33:34):
cars all the time. I finally caught one. They know
what to do. And so you begin to think about
this situation that you're in. What do you do at
that point in time, Well, you begin to migrate things around.
You're thinking about you're trying to work this out logically
in an illogical situation because you're overwhelmed. I mean, just
(33:55):
imagine just for a second. You've certainly never been in
a position where you're having to deal with the dead,
how much more so your wife, and now you've got
to figure out a way to get rid of her body.
He'd explore all kinds of things on the internet. We
talked about a reciprocating saw, which comes into play. But
addition to that, he had actually sought out quick drying concrete.
(34:18):
His mind is going to a variety of things, and
you see it kind of in a nutshell, initially with
the master bedroom, the secondary location, and then finally in
the basement. Waits two days, waits two days, and he's contemplating, right,
He's contemplating well, what's the best way to get my
(34:40):
wife out of the house and dispose of her so
that I can put as much a distance between myself
and her remains. And that's one of the things about
a perpetrator like this, they want to try to put
as much distance between themselves and evidence of what they
have done. Many times is through those actions that you
can find clues that lead back to the act itself
(35:04):
because they're handling evidence, they're manipulating the body, they're trying
to dispose of the remains. And as it turned out,
you know, that basement turned into an absolute horror show, David.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
So you've got a basement that is covered in blood
and tissue. But it hit me that he kills his
wife on October the tenth. On October the twelfth, he
then begins the process of dismembering her. And you mentioned
the reciprocating saw. So tell me how that works to
dismember a body, because most of us don't understand, rigormortiz
(35:37):
what kind of state the body would be and would
we have a lot of odor, would we have a
stiff body, what would we have two days after the fact.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
At this point in time, Dave her remains. Let's just say,
for instance, you've got a forty eight hour window here,
and I'm being kind of generous because you never know
specifically about these times. But if you've got an individual
who was murdered on the tenth, now she's been in
a state of post mortem change. Now let's say top
(36:06):
end forty eight hours. If we're to believe the timeline,
the body will be going through changes that could be appreciable,
certainly by somebody in my field that's skilled at it.
After about thirty six hours, the body is coming out
of ryger. So then the body goes back into what's
referred to as a flaccid state. That's one of the
ways that we actually measure post mortem interval because if
(36:29):
you've got a body that is where you've got post
mortem lividity, which is the settling of blood where it's
fixed if you press it, the skin color doesn't change
because the little capillary beds have exploded and the skin,
for lack of a better term, is kind of stained
beneath that surface. And then you've got a body. In
addition to that, the body would be flaccid coming out
(36:52):
of riger Morris. Then you know that you're out beyond
that thirty six hour marker at that point in time,
and that's one of the things that we'll look for.
Or of course you can do body temperature, but after
about twelve hours, that data for body temperature is completely worthless.
People put so much stock in what's referred to as
algor mortis, which is the body temperature, but after about
(37:14):
a twelve hour window, that data is pretty much worthless.
So in a case like this, you would you can
only imagine what he was faced with. And there's a
human side to this too, beyond just this technical forensics.
I was thinking contemplating this a bit and thinking about
this place that they lived in. You're talking about the
(37:35):
most intimate space of all that you share with your spouse,
the bedroom, and you migrate to another bedroom, and then
you remove them to the basement, maybe a place where
you've done work together as a couple, Maybe a place
where you've hidden the Christmas presents from the kids. Maybe
(37:56):
a place where if you have a family room where
you watch sports together, maybe you have game night together,
and then suddenly it turns into a slaughterhouse. Just think
about that from the perspective of how this individual's mind
would be working at this moment time. All those things
that you see are reminders of a life that has
(38:20):
been lived. And now you've got your precious wife, and
she is precious. She's precious in the sense that she's
been with you all of this time. You've got a
daughter that loves her mama. The daughter can't get in
touch with her. Oh and by the way, do what
you've got to do. And that what he famously said.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
That's what drives me crazy. That just really does.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Yeah, and he's doing what he thinks he has to do.
Any Dave, he's literally taking his wife's body apart in
this place. Now he's faced with this herculean task trying
to dispose of her remains. Many people, I think, enter
into this sort of thing and they think, oh, yeah, yeah,
I could do it. Could you really you think you
(39:04):
could do it? Well, maybe you could, I don't know.
And then, given the emotion of it, you're emotionally bonded
with this person and here you are taking them apart.
There's only so much rage and anger that you might
have that you might hold to somebody. At some point
in time, you would think that something would click and
you realize what you're in the middle of at this
(39:25):
point in Tom and I think that he probably did.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
I'm wondering, Joe, if you, as the forensic expert, when
you find the body, can you tell if the person
was in a fit of anger as they cut this
person up, or if they had time to calm down.
And now we're surgically doing it just now is self preservation.
I'm trying to get rid of the evidence here so
I don't get caught.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
And that's an excellent question. How much time and skill
was involved? Well, first off, what's your tool set? What
have you brought? What are you purposing in order to
facilitate this with Do you have a bunch of sharp
instruments or are you showing up with an axe? Does
it look like the hesitancy, because we can find those
sorts of things, say, for instance, when it comes to
bone in particular, we have what are referred to as
(40:07):
stop starts, where you get these scratches on the bones.
There are tool marks on the bones where you can
see and I'll give people a word picture so that
you understand if anybody in our audience has ever used
a carpenter saw where you begin to saw and it
jumps out of the groove and you have to start over.
Same thing happens with bone. When you're faced with having
(40:29):
to take a part of human remain, you're not just
simply dealing with bone. You're dealing with all manner soft tissue,
dealing with connective tissue. So you're going through layers of skin, fat,
and muscle in order just to get to the bone.
And that requires a bit of skill there, because yeah,
you're using a reciprocating saw in order to facilitate the dismemberment,
(40:51):
but you have to get down to that very solid
area of bone in order for it to function at
its peak for what it's created for going through solid
surfaces like this. In order to do that, you'd have
to cut through the tissue with a sharp knife perhaps.
And there's the problem because if you're using a saw
(41:14):
such as this, remember the reciprocating saw, it kind of
goes up and down. It pumps up and down very rapidly.
Obviously it's got a limited space or a limited surface
area that it can go, so it's going to be
very frustrating to utilize this thing. You'll use a saw
like this to cut through drywall. You can cut two
(41:35):
by fours with it. It's easy to kind of manipulate.
But in a circumstance like this, where you're having to
deal with not just bone, but you're having to deal
with all of these other layers of tissue. The mess
that you're creating relative to not just tissue going everywhere,
but the deposition of blood that's still there, it's going everywhere.
(41:56):
It will actually inhibit the blade and the functioning of
this tool. But on top of that, you're staring down
at this body that in life you spent all these
years with as you're taking her apart. Stephen Capaldi admitted
(42:29):
to killing his wife. He also admitted to dismembering her.
But you think about, well, after you've dismembered her, what
are you going to do with these dismembered remains of
your wife. You can't leave them at the house. It's
not like I guess you could. You could go dig
(42:50):
a hole in the backyard put them back there, but
people are going to notice. And again going back to
the idea of trying to get as much distance between
yourself and the body, what are you going to do? Well,
in Capaldi's case, he decided that he would deposit remains
in various locations. When he headed out from home, he
(43:13):
made a stop along the way in a town called Lansdale,
where he went to an apartment complex and took some
of her remains and placed them in an apartment complex dumpster,
and then continuing to kind of drive along, he went
to the edge of the Delaware River, an area that's
(43:36):
referred to as Hog Island, which is right adjacent to
a little township in Delaware County. That's where he deposited
the rest. Some of the remains to this point in
time have not been recovered. But what they did do
once they found this deposition of remains, they were able
(43:58):
to conduct DNA testing and they did, in fact determine
that these are the mortal remains of Basketbality. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is body bags
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. It's a rare event
in the criminal justice system when you have an individual
that actually pleads guilty. It seems truly to be the
(00:33):
exception and not the norm. I would imagine when you're
standing before what seems like a mountain of physical evidence
and you still have a few synapses firing in your
brain that give you an indication that this is a
(00:53):
losing battle, you have no other choice. Today we're going
to talk about the murder of a lovely woman by
the name of Beth Capaldi and her husband who decided
that he was going to end not just their marriage,
(01:15):
but her life over something that is so utterly bizarre.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks. Dave mac
my good friend, senior crime reporter with Crime Online. Hey, Dave,
(01:37):
I got a question for you, man. I was just
curious when you were a kid, did you like comic books?
Speaker 2 (01:43):
I knew you were going to ask that. I knew
it and the right thing to say. Oh, I loved
him as a kid. I'm to be honest, I didn't
even really consider comic books as part of my life
until I started watching Big Bank you know, when it
was on all the time, and so when I saw
(02:04):
this article, it started digging in to the copalities and
it was like, I understand how that thinking is different
than what you and I might think about. But no,
I didn't get into the serialized comic books. The only
closest thing I'd come to with you the funny papers,
you know, Charlie Brown or a Mad magazine. I love
that one.
Speaker 1 (02:21):
Oh, I love Man too. Listen, I have to admit
a weakness. I do love them. I love them as
a child. And it's interesting you said the comic strips.
What'd you refer to the mass the funny what papers?
The funny papers? Yeah? I know. And my granny she
would refer to comic books as funny books. Okay, I
guess it's rooted in this idea that you know that
(02:43):
it was escapism in order or it's perceived to get
a laugh.
Speaker 3 (02:48):
Right.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
The stuff that I was interested in was always serious.
I was a huge Marvel comic book guy, you know,
when I was young. Spider Man and Captain America and
all that stuff. It was fascinating to me. I'm particularly
struck by how much money is involved in that industry.
And now today it's an area where people can go
(03:10):
and and trade these things. And these things are like
hermetically sealed, right, yeah, you get you don't touch it.
Don't touch it, you set it up on the shelf
because it's got this value to it. The beauty of
it is you used to can roll it up in
your back pocket, you know, and carry it and you know,
throw it all over the place, and no telling in
(03:30):
today's standards, there's no telling how many dollars I actually
threw away.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
I never mocked people for doing the comic book thing.
I just I don't because we all get into different things,
but we do. I will tell you this. I saw
Iron Man the first, you know, Robert Downey Jr. I
watched it because I like the work of John Fovro.
I've always been a cheerleader for Robert Downey Jr. And
I watched the movie and didn't know that this was
based on a comic book. I didn't know, really, I
(03:55):
just thought, yes, I had no idea, and I'm talking,
I had no idea, Joe.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
I totally stupid.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Afterwards, because I've got into the movie, I'm like, well,
maybe I'll be into the comics. So I got a book.
I got a comic book, not a book. We got
a comic book and open it went okay, yeah, and
still not my thing.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
You know, that just means that you were interested in
other things, and that's that's kind of cool. With Stephen Cabaldi,
I got, I gotta tell you, i'd we cover a
lot of cases on body bags that are driven by passion,
and I guess you can have passion in different areas,
and most of the time it's a romantic passion. You
know that you've got jealousy that rises up, or you've
(04:35):
got people that want to get out of a relationship
and go into something else. But Dave, I got to
tell you, in this particular case, we've got a combo
of both. We've got infidelity and wow, we got comic books.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
Unbelievable that we could actually be at the center of
this and it was part of it. And I'm glad
you pointed that out. Many of the stories that we
cover in crime deal with the base sexual he needs
human beings team to have and the links they're willing
to go to break bonds that they stood in front of,
oftentimes their family friends and God Almighty and said for
(05:11):
better for worse sickness and health. I'm here for you
after thirty years. You know, I really want to open
up a comic book store with my brother, and my
wife just will not support this idea, and so he's
out trolling for somebody who will support that idea, and
he finds her. I can't think, Joe, that this is
all there is, but it is. It is that basic
(05:33):
stuff right there. He wanted to do something his wife
didn't have a thing for, and he became interested in
another woman. At fifty seven years old, thirty years of marriage.
You decide, you know what, I've had enough of you,
and so you get down to the nitty gritty here,
What do you do if your goal is to end
(05:54):
this marriage? Well, one pick up the phone, call an
attorney and have a meeting of what can I do
to extricate myself from this horrible situation I'm in with
my wife of thirty years, who, by the way, still
loves me.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
Now, let's not do that.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
Let me find a good way to put her out
of her misery and mind so that I can start
this new business with my brother.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
You sit back and you consider this, and is it
a matter I wonder of just being laser focused on
this thing that you think is going to satisfy this
urge that you have this long term goal of owning
a comic book store. Not that there's anything wrong with that,
(06:36):
but there's certain ways that you go about it. It's
certainly not as would be revealed down the road. You
think about, well, I'm going to go and I'm going
to go on and do a search for how is
it that I can get a great business loan. Now
you're going to go and do a search of what
does it take to pass a polygraph?
Speaker 2 (06:57):
If something happened to my wife and the police, I
would be the first one they'd look at. They would investigate,
and they would look at the books I have, look
at the shows and the research I do, and I'm
telling you, within about thirty seconds, I would be in
handcuffs being walked out to the car for an interrogation
just because I have all these things. Okay, I have,
(07:18):
but I have a reason for it. I do a
show with Joe Scott Morgan called body Bags. I'm a
crime reporter on other shows, so I have research on
my computer, like how to get away with murder? Can
you avoid police detection? By turning off your phone, how
to control your dark impulses. These are just some of
(07:38):
the things that Stephen Capaldi researched prior to his wife's demise.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
If you're taking this amount of intellectual power and applying
it toward that, and he even mentioned these things are dark,
so automatically from Jump Street, he's acknowledging what the path
that he's going down is very sinister, I mean very
very sinister. He is applying all of his efforts in
(08:06):
that particular area. And this is a guy that, along
with his wife, that's established a family. They've been married
thirty years now, and they kind of drift apart over
over years. They're not as intimate, they're not as close
as they once were. Why are you going to pick
up a brick and throw it through a stained glass window.
I don't understand that necessarily, but it's amazing to me
(08:30):
the way people will do these sorts of things, and
they I think from my perspective as a forensics guy,
we are so detailed in what we do from an
investigative standpoint that we get to go back and look
at things when there is a pause. Right, We're not
(08:51):
going into scenes in an urgent state of mind. We
try to be methodical, We try to be well planned
before we enter in because we've done this so many times,
and we try to be very accurate in our practice.
You got a guy who is looking completely to rip
(09:12):
apart his family and his wife's life. He did not
consider all of those fine details that are going to
wind up having you stand before a judge at some
point in time, and all of these things are going
to be elisted and you're going to eventually have to
(09:33):
stand and answer for what you've done. You think about
it just for a second, and if he had an
opportunity to go back in time and consider what he
had undertaken, I think that Stephen Capaldi may have chose
a different path. All that remains that's a term that's
(10:18):
been applied in forensics. I think there's certainly been a
fictional novel that has that title that falls back into forensics.
But all that remains is I think it's very appropriate.
In the case of Beth Capaldy. She occupies a home,
a dwelling that she's probably lived in for a goodly
(10:41):
part of her life, and suddenly she's absent from there.
What is it that remains of her. What is it
that's left behind that can help an investigate or try
to determine what's kurt? Did she just merely vanish into
thin air.
Speaker 2 (10:59):
That's exactly what they walked into, Joe. When Emma Capaldi,
that would be the daughter of Stephen and Beth, she
hadn't talked to her mother for a couple of days,
and she goes to her dad and says, hey, I
haven't talked to mom in a couple of days. What's
going on? And he doesn't really have a satisfying answer
(11:19):
for her. So she calls the police and says, I
can't find my mom. My dad's no help. Car is here,
her phone is here, but she's nowhere to be found,
and I don't know what to do. That's what police
came into in this particular story, that phone call, and
(11:40):
they came on scene and as they do, they took
a report. They talked with em about what her relationship
was with her mother and how often they talk to
establish kind of the boundaries that this is way out
of the norm for Beth Capaldi to not be in
touch with their daughter. And then two is, well, let's
talk to the husband's slash father here and Steven. Well,
(12:01):
Emma told the police, Hey, when I talk to my
dad about this and told him I was thinking about
calling you, he said, yeah, do what you have to do,
do what you think you have to do.
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Well?
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Does that phrase, do what you think you have to
do sound like something coming from a concerned husband wife
of thirty years is missing, and the best you can
come up with is, hey, do what you think you
have to do.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
I got to stop you right there, David. It almost
smacks of a response to a threat. I mean, I've
been in situations before where I've been unseen as an investigator,
and I've had people say keep doing this, I'm going
to sue. My flippant response is do what you gotta do.
You think about the relationship between a husband and wife
(12:45):
and their daughter too, right, Who's actually going to say
that to their daughter? Who is looking that's concerned about her? Mama?
You know what what's occurred? Where is she? I want
to talk to mama? Well, I don't know. I'm going
to reach out and do what I have to do. Well,
do what you got to do? Who says that.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
That's the thing he never bothered to call that's the
thing his daughter is like, why didn't you call? He
didn't and so boom, there's your phone call. And that's
why Joe. When I first saw this, my thought was,
what would you do? You get the call later on?
Usually they don't call you into this first meeting, do they.
When the police are they're taking their notes, they call
you up later on say hey, man, this woman's missing.
(13:26):
It's started here in this house, but we don't know
anything else. Do you come into that environment, Joe and
start sniffing around with luminol and black lights or what
do you do?
Speaker 1 (13:37):
Well, if you're talking about a missing person's case, which
you would think that that's kind of the starting point,
and there's any number of examples of this throughout the
years that we could certainly revisit. But you think about
someone is summoned to a location and they say, hey,
my child is missing or my spouse is missing. You
(14:01):
don't begin to work that case as if it is
a homicide. Okay, that's just not that's not your that's
not your response as an investigator. You know, you begin
to try to piece things together when you look at
the scene and knowing that, let's face it, Beth worked
from home. This was not only her home, it was
(14:21):
her office as well. So most of her life is
spent in his home in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and so
you would think that there would be evidence of her
having lived a daily life there everything that comes along
with that. If she leaves the house, you'd expect to
find an absence of certain things wallet or phone, or
(14:44):
car keys and all of that. That's where you start
in a missing person's case. And then of course you've
got this digital signature she's using a cell phone. And
going back to what she had said earlier regarding their daughter, Emma, look,
I can only I can only state in my life
that my wife and my daughter they talk probably twice
(15:09):
daily at least, and then I will talk to my daughter.
And if she hasn't heard from us, or we haven't
heard from her, we're going to be concerned at that
point in time. And if one of us hasn't heard
from from my wife, we're going to be calling one another.
If you talk to mom lately, no, when did you
last talk to you? And you kind of go back
(15:29):
and forth, and there's kind of an urgency, nothing necessarily
to get worried about, but you you want to you
want to have contact because it's absent the norm. You
know what I'm saying, right, it's it's not it. We
look for these patterns that develop in a person's life,
and once those patterns are being broken in some way,
(15:50):
when people begin to act outside those normal ranges that
they work within on a daily basis, then that's that's
kind of that's a tough thing, it really is. And
then I think that it's at that point that police,
after they question you had mentioned those individuals that are
in that intimate circle, you know, who's more intimate than
(16:11):
a spouse. You begin to see how they behave, how
they react. You begin to kind of dig in, look
beneath the surface and try to understand is the story
they're telling you, does it marry up with what you're
seeing evidenced before you? And can they maintain the same
narrative over and over again. That's why when police question people,
(16:34):
many times you will see them ask the same question
over and over again, and sometimes they'll rephrase it. But
they want to see if what you're saying in the
present marries up with what you said two hours ago,
or an hour ago, or even thirty minutes ago. They
want to see if there are any deviations from that standard.
Speaker 3 (16:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
One way they do that is while they're interviewing you.
But I hate to call somebody assessed right off the bat,
but you know, when a spouse is missing, the other
one is pri he's the immediate concern.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
Absolutely, absolutely, they'll.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
Break him down.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
They'll ask questions, Hey, what did you do last night?
And in this case, that's how we know that. In
one of the first interviews, talking to him, what were
you guys doing last night when you were last with her?
And he said, we watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, sitting
on the couch and we were holding hands. Okay, that's
what he said they did at the last time they
were together. Now, the reason they know that is because,
like you said, they'll use that later to trip him up.
(17:30):
What they probably said during the course of this interview
about what time was that really? When did you start
watching it? About eight eight fifteen? Well was it eight
or eight fifteen? Was it closer to eight ten? Yeah,
eight twelve. Now it seems innocuous, but if you're telling
the truth, you know what time you did something, and
(17:51):
when they get that information from you, Okay, it was
about eight twelve, you have a reason for thinking that
way and remembering it that way. So an hour later
when they ask you the same question, they won't throw
it out as what time. They will say, Okay, you
said you guys were watching TV around A fifteen or so, right,
and then you write that down. Well, all of a sudden,
when you say, yep, that's right, they know that isn't
(18:11):
the truth because you narrowed it down to a twelve earlier.
Now you're saying a fifteen. It's just a little red flag.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Yeah, yeah it is. And let me give you an
even bigger red flag. With Stephen Cabaldi Dave, he went
from we were watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer sitting on
sofa together holding hands, to well, she may have taken
off on a solo fishing trip. Yes, who says that?
And I think that there was even at one point
(18:38):
in time he used the phrase, well she's she's on
a beach somewhere, somewhere.
Speaker 3 (18:44):
Warm, someplace warm on the beach.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
How broad do you have to be within the spectrum
when you begin to you know, these provid questions that
the investigators kind of digging into to try to find
out what happened to Beth in this period of time.
And why would this is the other question, what would
be your purpose for deviating from your narrative that you've
(19:07):
already created. When we have asked you this over and
over again, you talked about going through the house and
spraying with luminol and all these sorts of things. Yeah,
I mean, that's certainly something that we eventually do. But
can I tell you something else that's very curious about
Stephen Paldi his interesting searches that he's done on the internet.
(19:31):
Not only not only did he search for things that
we talked about, he also searched out things like reciprocating
saw and black light, which if you've never seen a
black light utilized at crime scene, it will cause biological
(19:52):
samples to kind of luminous in that environment. You can
use it with semen, you can use it to a
certain extent with blood. And it's kind of an interesting thing.
You know, why are you searching these things out? You
begin to couple that with this kind of deviation that
he has from the story that he's providing early on,
and certainly it raises a red flag for the investigators.
(20:15):
And that's all the more reason that the investigators would
go out at this point in time.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
Okay, now let me ask you him. You pointed this out,
and I just want to go back to it. Very quickly.
He said that they were holding hands on the couch
watching Buffy the Vampires Layer. But then in the same conversation,
my wife just told me about an affair she's been
having for three years. She's been having a three year
long affair. We've been married thirty years. She just admitted
to a three year long affair. But we're sitting on
(20:40):
the couch holding hands watching Buffy. That doesn't fit my
picture of a healthy, happy, thirty year marriage.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
No it doesn't. And listen, this is a thing. You
can say anything that you want to say, and you're
talking to police, and the dead aren't there to defend themselves,
and of course at this point they don't know if
you know where Beth is, if she's still among the living,
or if she's passed on. But when you're in control
(21:09):
and you're kind of driving a boat at this point
in time, you can put any type of information that
you want to out there to mislead the police, you know,
And that's when you start to get into areas like
you're attempting to obstruct an investigation. They begin to add
these little charges to things as the narrative develops, moving
(21:30):
on down the line. Because if there's one thing that
will frustrate an investigator, it's that they have been given
bad information. It makes the entire team take two, three
fifty steps backwards and have to go back to that
original point. Now that's a good thing in one sense,
(21:54):
is that now you're beginning to understand that this individual
is being deceptive and that's part of thevestigation. But it can,
trust me, it can get very frustrating. Preeminent among everything
here is his wife's safety. Where is she? We've got
a woman that has gone missing. We want to be
able to find her intact. But of course in best
(22:17):
case that's certainly wasn't the story. So where do you go?
(22:42):
Where do you go with an investigation when the person
that is most intimately involved with the missing person is
giving you all kinds of deceptive answers and they're leading
you down these past that lead to nowhere. It's tough
(23:03):
thing to kind of measure as an investigator. But as
I stated earlier, you have to understand that this is
part of what investigators do, and it's almost a built
in expectation that you are going to be deceived in
some way. That's what always strikes me as funny, Dave,
when people say investigators are so jaded. Yeah, you're right.
(23:24):
When you've been lied to a lot, you tend to
be jaded. You suspect everybody, and I'm chief among sinners.
I'm guilty of it.
Speaker 2 (23:31):
Well, in this particular case, we have the adult daughter.
She calls police because she hasn't been in touch with
her mom in two days. And there's an interesting side
part of this show. None of the family or friends
had talked to her in two days, and they pointed
out that at fifty five years old, Beth Capaldi was
a homebody. She had never actually stayed away from her
(23:53):
own home overnight by herself. Not a very common thing
among an adult that's in her mid fifties, but absolutely
truth here. So now you've got a fifty five year
old woman who is gone for a couple of days
and she's never ever done this in the history of
her world. She left behind her car. Okay, how did
she get to wherever she is? He her keys, her iPad,
(24:14):
cell phone. Plus you know what, Beth Capaldi has an
elderly mother in a nursing home, so they have their
work cut out for them to figure out what exactly happened.
But it does start with her husband, Stephen Capaldi, who
claims they're watching Buffy on the couch holding hands and
then wait a minute, I don't know where she went
(24:36):
and I don't even bother to look for. That's a big,
big red flag to me. So you come in. You're
the investigator, Joe. How do you begin to find out
what happened to Beth Capaldi? And was it explainable in
an innocent way or not? Is the house going to
reveal what exactly happened to her? Am I going to
(24:58):
find a forensic look at his phone or computers or
other things like that and dig through that and find
out what was going on? These are the questions I
have right now. You're the investigator, Joe. You're coming into
a house that you don't know as a crime scene
right now.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
No, you have no idea, And so you're walking through
this dwelling where you know, for all you know, some
of the most horrible things imaginable could have occurred. But
yet you're walking into something that is set up to
deceive you. Let me kind of expand on that and
tell you what had occurred. You'd mentioned her cell phone,
(25:32):
her keys, or car were all there, okay, but what
was not there was her purse, her wallet and thirteen
thousand dollars gone gone. You consider that that bit of
information well as an investigator thinking, well, why would you
(25:54):
need that much cash? What are you going to do
with that volume of cash? Well, travel, You're going to
get away, You're going to go somewhere and disappear. And
sometimes people have certainly done that over the years. People
have just said it's just too much. I can't go on.
I'm going to bury myself in the midst of time
and no one will remember me anymore. But fortunately the
(26:16):
police continue to press relative to the timeline, relative to
what had been said and done prior to and following.
And also when the investigators begin to get in to
the digital life of Stephen Capaldi, they found very disturbing things.
(26:37):
These searches that he had conducted to what would seem
at least to give them an idea of what he
had planned out. And here's the thing, you know how
I'd mentioned if you get into this kind of back
and forth with the police when they're trying to find
(26:58):
somebody that's missing, and suddenly they realize that you've led
them on a goose chase, a wild goose chase that's
going to wind up being charged, which he eventually was,
with obstruction of justice. And also you begin to think
about has he done anything at the scene that could
potentially deceive or was meant to deceive law enforcement, and
(27:22):
he had, and that's where he's eventually charged with tampering
of evidence. Because if you create a narrative by adjusting
the scene at all, like for instance, where you're going
to take this thirteen thousand dollars in her purse and
these sorts of things and take them away, take them
(27:43):
out of the scene, and it changes the context of
everything that can be construed as tampering as well, and
it leads the police to begin to dig deeper. And
when they do, after he had gone back and forth,
fails a polygraph examination, and that gives them enough information
(28:04):
in order to develop a warrant Dave, And when they did,
they found some pretty gruesome things.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
Stephen Capaldi, as you pointed out, I had told many,
many lies from the very beginning with his daughter having
his inner in two days to the point where he
actually is taking a polygraph test, which he failed miserably.
As they were developing their information. As the investigation rolled on,
they found out that it was in fact Stephen Capaldi
that had been having an affair, not his wife. Stephen
(28:32):
Capaldi actually had all these searches done. As we mentioned
right at the top of the show, he had actually
searched just to give you an idea, how to get
away with murder. He searched this on his phone or computer.
How to delete Facebook messages, another one, can you avoid
police detection by turning off your phone? How to disappear
(28:52):
and Never be found? And the FBI Handbook of Crime
Scene Forensics.
Speaker 1 (28:58):
I've got this book on my shelf day in my
office at the university, and it's something that I've referred
to over the years. It's there, and I was shocked
I saw that this was in the in his preferred
reading list. Not that there's anything wrong with being in
possession of the book, but when again, when you're trying
to understand what the mindset of somebody is that's attempting
(29:22):
to get away with something that's going to be a
big indicator, at least from a circumstantial standpoint that it's
a and you have to look at the approximation, you know,
timelines when did these things begin to bubble up in
your mind? And that goes to a premeditative state of
mind as well. You know, how long has perhaps he
been considering doing these sorts of things. And eventually, with Capaldi,
(29:48):
he rolls over on this and it admits to it,
I mean absolutely admits to it. He actually pleads guilty.
He went in and gave testimony in a grand jury hearing,
and I can only imagine that the DA was just
shocked eventually, but in the interim when it came down
(30:10):
to it, he had taken time to First off, I
think it was back on October tenth of twenty twenty two.
He suffocated her. He suffocated her while she was in
bed sleeping, And you've got two stories here. And with
the suffocation, it's kind of an interesting dynamic. You think
(30:34):
about suffocation versus asphyxia. Most of the time when people
say suffocation, you think of maybe placing a bag over
someone's head. And that's what's called a oxygen deprivation event,
where you're literally shutting out all supply of oxygen for
the individual and they die as a result of not
(30:56):
having access to breathable air. But with suffocationation someone's in bed,
what do you automatic? What's your default position there? Dave?
What do you think happened?
Speaker 3 (31:05):
Going to use a pillow?
Speaker 2 (31:06):
But I got a question for you, Joe, because I'm
thinking he using a pillow to suffocate someone that's on
a bed.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
There's a lot of gift on a bed, yeah, there is.
Speaker 2 (31:15):
How do you get the force necessary, the weight necessary
to actually cause someone to suffocate with a pillow and
a mattress in between.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
They've done studies over the years with oxygen deprivation with
kind of the primal reaction that people have to this,
and even the weakest among us will fight back. If
you're laying on a surface like this, a soft surface
like a mattress, and you're having direct pressure applied to
the face, the individual will fight back. And I think
that that's why, and they were able to see evidence
(31:49):
of this, and certainly he admitted to this, is that
he transitioned now to a different form of oxygen deprivation.
He went from suffocation to strangulation at this point in time.
So you just think about this. You're over your wife Beth.
In this case, you apply, say, for instance, a pillow
(32:11):
to her face, and you realize that this isn't going anywhere.
She's in a deep sleep. Suddenly she has this awareness
that she's being deprived of oxygen. She begins to fight back.
You toss the pillow side and then you essentially wrap
your hands around her throat at that point in time
and squeeze life out of her. And that's these types
(32:32):
of events. It's a very intimate, intimate occurrence in this environment.
And after this deed is done, remember this is on
the tenth Dave, he admits that he removed her remains
from the master bedroom down into the basement and he
left her down there for essentially two days.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
In the paperwork has said he killed her in the
master bedroom. He suffocated and strangled her in their master bedroom.
Then it says in his statement to police he actually
took her to another bedroom first and then took her
down to the basement. What does that mean to you?
Speaker 1 (33:12):
It goes to a disordered mindset. It's always fascinated me
relative to people that engage in homicide and they're trying
to understand what has occurred years ago when Bill Clinton
won the presidency, famously said, well, I'm like the old
dog that was sitting on the porch and was chasing
(33:34):
cars all the time. I finally caught one. They know
what to do. And so you begin to think about
this situation that you're in. What do you do at
that point in time, Well, you begin to migrate things around.
You're thinking about you're trying to work this out logically
in an illogical situation because you're overwhelmed. I mean, just
(33:55):
imagine just for a second. You've certainly never been in
a position where you're having to deal with the dead,
how much more so your wife, and now you've got
to figure out a way to get rid of her body.
He'd explore all kinds of things on the internet. We
talked about a reciprocating saw, which comes into play. But
addition to that, he had actually sought out quick drying concrete.
(34:18):
His mind is going to a variety of things, and
you see it kind of in a nutshell, initially with
the master bedroom, the secondary location, and then finally in
the basement. Waits two days, waits two days, and he's contemplating, right,
He's contemplating well, what's the best way to get my
(34:40):
wife out of the house and dispose of her so
that I can put as much a distance between myself
and her remains. And that's one of the things about
a perpetrator like this, they want to try to put
as much distance between themselves and evidence of what they
have done. Many times is through those actions that you
can find clues that lead back to the act itself
(35:04):
because they're handling evidence, they're manipulating the body, they're trying
to dispose of the remains. And as it turned out,
you know, that basement turned into an absolute horror show, David.
Speaker 2 (35:16):
So you've got a basement that is covered in blood
and tissue. But it hit me that he kills his
wife on October the tenth. On October the twelfth, he
then begins the process of dismembering her. And you mentioned
the reciprocating saw. So tell me how that works to
dismember a body, because most of us don't understand, rigormortiz
(35:37):
what kind of state the body would be and would
we have a lot of odor, would we have a
stiff body, what would we have two days after the fact.
Speaker 1 (35:44):
At this point in time, Dave her remains. Let's just say,
for instance, you've got a forty eight hour window here,
and I'm being kind of generous because you never know
specifically about these times. But if you've got an individual
who was murdered on the tenth, now she's been in
a state of post mortem change. Now let's say top
(36:06):
end forty eight hours. If we're to believe the timeline,
the body will be going through changes that could be appreciable,
certainly by somebody in my field that's skilled at it.
After about thirty six hours, the body is coming out
of ryger. So then the body goes back into what's
referred to as a flaccid state. That's one of the
ways that we actually measure post mortem interval because if
(36:29):
you've got a body that is where you've got post
mortem lividity, which is the settling of blood where it's
fixed if you press it, the skin color doesn't change
because the little capillary beds have exploded and the skin,
for lack of a better term, is kind of stained
beneath that surface. And then you've got a body. In
addition to that, the body would be flaccid coming out
(36:52):
of riger Morris. Then you know that you're out beyond
that thirty six hour marker at that point in time,
and that's one of the things that we'll look for.
Or of course you can do body temperature, but after
about twelve hours, that data for body temperature is completely worthless.
People put so much stock in what's referred to as
algor mortis, which is the body temperature, but after about
(37:14):
a twelve hour window, that data is pretty much worthless.
So in a case like this, you would you can
only imagine what he was faced with. And there's a
human side to this too, beyond just this technical forensics.
I was thinking contemplating this a bit and thinking about
this place that they lived in. You're talking about the
(37:35):
most intimate space of all that you share with your spouse,
the bedroom, and you migrate to another bedroom, and then
you remove them to the basement, maybe a place where
you've done work together as a couple, Maybe a place
where you've hidden the Christmas presents from the kids. Maybe
(37:56):
a place where if you have a family room where
you watch sports together, maybe you have game night together,
and then suddenly it turns into a slaughterhouse. Just think
about that from the perspective of how this individual's mind
would be working at this moment time. All those things
that you see are reminders of a life that has
(38:20):
been lived. And now you've got your precious wife, and
she is precious. She's precious in the sense that she's
been with you all of this time. You've got a
daughter that loves her mama. The daughter can't get in
touch with her. Oh and by the way, do what
you've got to do. And that what he famously said.
Speaker 3 (38:39):
That's what drives me crazy. That just really does.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
Yeah, and he's doing what he thinks he has to do.
Any Dave, he's literally taking his wife's body apart in
this place. Now he's faced with this herculean task trying
to dispose of her remains. Many people, I think, enter
into this sort of thing and they think, oh, yeah, yeah,
I could do it. Could you really you think you
(39:04):
could do it? Well, maybe you could, I don't know.
And then, given the emotion of it, you're emotionally bonded
with this person and here you are taking them apart.
There's only so much rage and anger that you might
have that you might hold to somebody. At some point
in time, you would think that something would click and
you realize what you're in the middle of at this
(39:25):
point in Tom and I think that he probably did.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
I'm wondering, Joe, if you, as the forensic expert, when
you find the body, can you tell if the person
was in a fit of anger as they cut this
person up, or if they had time to calm down.
And now we're surgically doing it just now is self preservation.
I'm trying to get rid of the evidence here so
I don't get caught.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
And that's an excellent question. How much time and skill
was involved? Well, first off, what's your tool set? What
have you brought? What are you purposing in order to
facilitate this with Do you have a bunch of sharp
instruments or are you showing up with an axe? Does
it look like the hesitancy, because we can find those
sorts of things, say, for instance, when it comes to
bone in particular, we have what are referred to as
(40:07):
stop starts, where you get these scratches on the bones.
There are tool marks on the bones where you can
see and I'll give people a word picture so that
you understand if anybody in our audience has ever used
a carpenter saw where you begin to saw and it
jumps out of the groove and you have to start over.
Same thing happens with bone. When you're faced with having
(40:29):
to take a part of human remain, you're not just
simply dealing with bone. You're dealing with all manner soft tissue,
dealing with connective tissue. So you're going through layers of skin, fat,
and muscle in order just to get to the bone.
And that requires a bit of skill there, because yeah,
you're using a reciprocating saw in order to facilitate the dismemberment,
(40:51):
but you have to get down to that very solid
area of bone in order for it to function at
its peak for what it's created for going through solid
surfaces like this. In order to do that, you'd have
to cut through the tissue with a sharp knife perhaps.
And there's the problem because if you're using a saw
(41:14):
such as this, remember the reciprocating saw, it kind of
goes up and down. It pumps up and down very rapidly.
Obviously it's got a limited space or a limited surface
area that it can go, so it's going to be
very frustrating to utilize this thing. You'll use a saw
like this to cut through drywall. You can cut two
(41:35):
by fours with it. It's easy to kind of manipulate.
But in a circumstance like this, where you're having to
deal with not just bone, but you're having to deal
with all of these other layers of tissue. The mess
that you're creating relative to not just tissue going everywhere,
but the deposition of blood that's still there, it's going everywhere.
(41:56):
It will actually inhibit the blade and the functioning of
this tool. But on top of that, you're staring down
at this body that in life you spent all these
years with as you're taking her apart. Stephen Capaldi admitted
(42:29):
to killing his wife. He also admitted to dismembering her.
But you think about, well, after you've dismembered her, what
are you going to do with these dismembered remains of
your wife. You can't leave them at the house. It's
not like I guess you could. You could go dig
(42:50):
a hole in the backyard put them back there, but
people are going to notice. And again going back to
the idea of trying to get as much distance between
yourself and the body, what are you going to do? Well,
in Capaldi's case, he decided that he would deposit remains
in various locations. When he headed out from home, he
(43:13):
made a stop along the way in a town called Lansdale,
where he went to an apartment complex and took some
of her remains and placed them in an apartment complex dumpster,
and then continuing to kind of drive along, he went
to the edge of the Delaware River, an area that's
(43:36):
referred to as Hog Island, which is right adjacent to
a little township in Delaware County. That's where he deposited
the rest. Some of the remains to this point in
time have not been recovered. But what they did do
once they found this deposition of remains, they were able
(43:58):
to conduct DNA testing and they did, in fact determine
that these are the mortal remains of Basketbality. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is body bags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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