In this episode of "Body Bags," we unravel the harrowing story of Shaye Groves, a woman consumed by her obsession with serial killers and ultimately implicated in the brutal murder of her boyfriend, Frankie Fitzgerald.
Delving into the chilling fascination that permeated her life and relationships, the hosts uncover the disturbing evidence that led to the gruesome crime.
Hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack explore the challenges investigators face when encountering an unfamiliar crime scene and the unsettling environment they discover including a macabre collection of serial killer images and the couple's history of violent, videotaped sex acts. They discuss Shaye Groves' possible premeditation of the murder, her manipulation and blackmail of previous partners through recorded sex acts, and her meticulous execution of the crime, such as using bleach to clean up the scene.
Shownotes:
00:20 - Intro to case.
02:10 - Dave Mack gives background and overview of case.
04:10 - What impact did having serial killer images in her home have on Shay Groves and her mindset?
05:25 - The disturbing nature of Shay Groves' obsession and how it relates to the crime and her life.
07:10 - Shay Groves and Frankie Fitzgerald's romantic relationship and Shaye's controlling nature.
09:25 - Challenges investigators face when entering an unfamiliar crime scene and disturbing evidence and how their first impressions can impact their investigation.
11:50 - The couple's history of violent sex acts captured on video and how this escalated.
14:00 - The use of bleach in morgue cleanups and how the smell of bleach can linger, connecting it to the crime scene.
15:10 - Possibility of Shea Groves planning the murder and the use of bleach to clean the crime scene.
19:50 - Shea's obsession with serial killers, dark imagery, and the types of knives used in the murder.
21:55 - JoScott talks about the differences between single-edged and double-edged knife wounds.
24:40 - The catastrophic loss of blood that led to Frankie's death and Shaye’s possible motives and methods during the attack.
26:40 - Determining if any wounds were inflicted post-mortem and whether the crime was a torture event or a dark fantasy acted out by Shaye.
28:54 - Outro.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. My wife likes to
say that she loves love, and I think that all
of us have this kind of romanticized view of what
it means to love somebody. But for some, I guess
(00:31):
their perception of love or the way love is expressed,
is in a different atmosphere from many of us. I've
never thought of integrating the term knife play into an
expression that even remotely resembles romantic love. But the case
(00:51):
I'm going to lay on you today is beyond anything
I've covered. Really, it doesn't occur here in the you
as it's actually in Great Britain, England specifically, which I've
traveled too many times and that I have an incredible
affection for. But what happened in this little town, in
(01:12):
this space is absolutely beyond the pale. Today I'm going
to talk about the murder of Frankie Fitzgerald and his
girlfriend that perpetrated this crime, Shacrobes. I am Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is body Bags. Dave mac my good buddy,
(01:35):
is a senior crime reporter for Crime on One. I
want to apologize to you in advance or springing this
case on you. There's no saying on the South that
some people say you get something in your mind it's
so horrible they'll actually say, well, thanks, I'm going to
have to slaughter a hog get that image out of
my mind. And in this particular case, I gotta tell you,
it ranks right up there all the stuff that we
(01:56):
cover on body bags. I need some more reorientation here.
Perhaps maybe you can offer that up, Dave. I don't know.
I don't think I have a degree in psychology or
sociology that could help break this down, Joe. But I
will tell you this. There's an old saying pretty is
as pretty does, and this twenty seven year old Shay
Groves is physically attractive on the outside. When you get
(02:20):
down to the nitty gritty of who that an individual
is not very pretty a matter of fact, it's pretty disgusting,
and Shay Groves is kind of the definition of that.
When we were looking at this story, big big story
in Great Britain, not so much here. He did get
some play in the US, but a huge and great Britain.
And he goes back to all the photos. Young people
(02:40):
now live their lives online, and that means a lot
of pictures, a lot of stories and things like that.
Oftentimes we can see somebody over the years either devolve
or evolve in their thinking and how they look at
themselves in the world. But in her case, just to
throw it out there, Shay grows, even by our best
estimation from her friends, was always a bit of a
(03:02):
weirdo even as a child. She grows when she was younger,
how little girls dress up in colorful outfits and things.
She didn't go full on goth look at five years old,
but she was bending that way. But the thing that
really catches the attention for this case in particular is
the fact that she is quote unquote obsessed with serial killers.
(03:27):
I don't know how you go past it when somebody
is obsessed with serial killers and has pictures of them
framed in their home. I'm going to tell you what, Joe,
If you're that person and somebody in your world dies
of island death, who do you think the cops are
looking at? First? There's this fond line that is easy
to cross, perhaps where there is this fascination with the morbid,
(03:49):
and certainly we explore many of these horrible events that
have occurred and try to put some sense to it
if you will. From a scientific standpoint, I don't know
that there's a necessarily way you can take the measure
of it day in and day out. And what is
it in your life to get you to the point
where you're going to frame a picture of Ted Bundy
(04:10):
and hang it on your wall, and so that every
day when you get up to start your day, maybe
to have a cup of coffee or as the Brits say,
have a cup of tea to get the day rolling.
There you are eye to eye with a person that's
arguably a monster. I've seen the pictures of her apartment.
(04:32):
If you're looking at Ted, you look to the left.
Oh my gosh, there's Richard Ramirez, the night stalker who
does this. There's even a charcoal of Jeffrey Dahmer hanging
on the wall of this home. Say what you will
about the impressionist went about reproductions, But if I had
a choice, I think I'd much rather look at lily
(04:53):
pads by Monet, you know, to be created with, TOI
to sit my morning, my morning off you with and
meditate on things. So this is what you're filling your
mind with day in and day out. And people make
light of this, there's any number of memes out there,
little clips that are floating about on social media, you know,
where they'll say what my husband thinks I'm listening to
(05:15):
as opposed to what I'm actually listening to. And then
you hear this narrator's voice that says, this person murdered
her husband or whatever it is. And it's quite comical.
But now you kind of have a touch of reality
with this when you entered the space. This is her
private space, this is her home, and yet it is
festooned with all manner of these images that are quite chilling.
(05:39):
And if you take the totality of what each one
of these monsters has done, and you were to kind
of calculate that, pile it up, and you think about
all of the sorrow and the misery and the horror
that's associated with each one of these people that hangs
on her wall. It's quite staggering to think that an
(06:02):
individual could in fact become this obsessed with these individuals
who are arguably some of the most evil people that
have ever entered our mind's eye. You know, I'm glad
you pointed out what these pictures represented inside the home.
You actually alluded to Monet and Lilies of the Fields,
which is a beautiful painting, has sold many times over
(06:24):
from multiple millions of dollars. So you've got your choice.
So I get a reproduction of that, or do I
frame photos of the nice stocker, Ted Bundy and others
On top of all that, Remember this just goot Morgan.
Shay Groves has a daughter. So as you're trying to
raise a child, do you think it's in the child's
best interest for you to surround that child with happy, wonderful,
(06:47):
colorful pictures of beautiful things and love or of the
most evil, darkest things you can find. Because what we're
seeing in the life of Shay Grows is that after
having her daughter, her life did not turn around and
start becoming more focused on happy thoughts and a happy place,
but actually continued to go deeper and deeper and darker
(07:09):
and darker. To set this table very quickly, Shay Groves
and Frankie Fitzgerald were in a romantic relationship for about
six months on and off, is what it says. But
in six months time to have a relationship, there are
going to be a few ups and downs, but that's
really the limit here. I thought they'd been together much longer.
According to her friend, Shay Groves was a very controlling person.
(07:31):
She had very few friends, but the friends she did have,
she was able to control them, manipulate them. She had
power over them. And one of the things that did
come up about Shay Groves is even as a little girl,
she loved the Chucky doll, the crazy redheaded killer Chucky
that spawned a number of movies. She loved Chucky. Look,
it's one thing for a doll to be kind of funny.
(07:53):
You know, a horror movie with a doll named Chucky.
It's funny. Fine, But she started referring to some of
her friends as Chucky. That was like her thing. She
was always limited to a small group of friends, although
she was close to them, and she would manipulate them
and their situations. And she and Frankie Fitzgerald for about
six months, on and off, they had a very sexual relationship.
(08:17):
I say that because everything about what we found out
in this case it seemed to be centered on their
sex life. She was obsessed with her sex life with
Frankie Fitzgerald and even used his prowess in the bedroom
against him. Later on, as the police were zeroing in
because one has to remember, if somebody you're close to
(08:40):
dies and the police come to talk to you and
they find pretty much a museum for the worst criminal
killers of all time in your house, you're going to
be a suspect. Here we go back to back. The
Shay Groves story starts with her and Frankie Fitzgerald, in
a very active sexual relationship, has videos that she is
(09:01):
sending to friends to try to set it up that
she's a victim Joe actually saying that he was raping her,
he was abusing her. But even her best friend at
the time saw these videos she was using to try
to manipulate her friends and said, this is a really
bad editing job. She tried to edit it to make
it look like he was raping her. Winning fact, it
(09:21):
was all a stage. The health thing was a big setup.
If you're an investigator and you walk into this environment
and you're trying to take the measure of it relative
to what's going on, Because as investigators, we walk into
a location where a death has occurred and we come
in cold. There's a high probability that you've never met
(09:44):
the person that you're about to look into their life
unless you're in a very small location, you're not going
to know the victim most of tom you're not going
to know the perpetrator. Every now and then, you'll have
police that have particularly uniform police officers that will have
gone out to a scene where there is domestic instability
and they'll have to calm things down. I've had this
(10:05):
happen a number of times where I'll arrive at a
homicide scene and There'll be a young patrol officer there
and I'll go up and talk to them. Do you
come to this address very frequent? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I've been here several times. They love to break glass
and bust furniture and yell at one another. There's been
a couple of punches thrown over the years, but we
(10:26):
could get them settled down. Or there's a domestic violence
issue that has come up. They've both gone accord on it,
once had restraining orders, but yet the other one chose
to move back with the individual, and you'll get this
kind of long serial history that goes along with it.
But for investigators, when you show up the scene, there's
a high probability you're not going to know either one.
So first impressions. Right, you walk in to a location,
(10:49):
and trust me, if you're an investigator, you've been to
enough seminars over the years, Even if you don't follow
a true crime, the stuff that we learn about, the
things that we read, the old cases that we review
to try to understand how an earlier generation of the
investigators worked a case. You're going to be familiar with
some of these images hanging on the wall, and I
(11:09):
hate to use the word iconic, but you begin to
think about you can't go anywhere without seeing a picture
of Dahmer or John wick Gacy or Hillside Stranglers or
even the night Stalker. They're gonna be there. In your mind,
you're gonna see that. But then when you walk into
this kind of domestic situation and you've got these images
(11:31):
hanging all about, and you're thinking, what what does this
say about the individual that lives in this environment, that
exists within this environment. It kind of denotes that their
mind is focused in one particular area. And then when
it comes to these two you had mentioned the manipulation
of the video, how do you do that? Well? She
(11:52):
had a camera that was set up in her bedroom
where she would tape all of her sex acts with Fitzgerald,
and for whatever reason, she'd go back and review them.
The sex life that they had had a level of
violence to it. They were into bondage, they were into
sado masochism, and maybe retrospectively, they would go back take
(12:15):
a look at the videos and it would sexually excite
them or arouse them, or whatever the case might be.
So she apparently had a whole catalog. You had mentioned
a relationship that had taken place over six month period.
Just think about this for a second. You're with someone,
for let's face at a very short period of time,
(12:37):
six months, and your situation has evolved or devolved to
the point where you're engaged in dangerous behavior in the bedroom.
I'd mentioned earlier she was famously into knife play. Now
what does that mean. Well, knife play generally is where
(12:59):
individuals will tie an individual up, and after they've tied
them up, they'll take out an edged weapon, perhaps, and
while they're in the midst of having sex, the blade
is placed against the throat, or maybe it's placed just
adjacent to the eye in a threatening manner, and this
(13:22):
causes arousal. So this is being taped over and over
and over again, And you really wondered, Dave, you really
wonder what was it that, of all the times, out
of all the times that they've engaged in this behavior
over a six month period, what actually led her to
(13:42):
cut his throat? Dave? When I smell bleach, I guess
(14:03):
I could think of our laundry room here at home.
But one of the things I always think of is
the time that I spent working in the morgue. For
all of those years. Bleach was central to what I
would use in order to clean with. And that's after
I'd applied detergent to the surrounding area to scrub things down,
(14:24):
and then as a final kind of exclamation point on
the morgue and kind of the finishing touches, I would
wipe everything down with bleach. And that smell lingers, doesn't it.
Can you imagine when the police show up at a
scene and you have someone that is deceased, that smell
of bleach hits you full force in the face. I
(14:47):
would think that you would begin to wonder what has
occurred in here. I'm telling you this is a freaky
story that I've had trouble of just getting past. But
you said something a minute ago and it kind of
caught my attention and throwing this out here for you
because it is Bodybags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I wonder
if Shay Groves actually determined she was going to commit
(15:12):
this murder before she ever met Frankie Fitzgerald. And the
reason I say that is in six months time, she
went from meeting in a pub to putting him in
the ground. And we have her best friend saying that
Shay Groves used these videotapes of sex in previous relationships.
(15:33):
She used these videos of her having sex with boyfriends
as a way to manipulate them. She used it for
blackmail of previous boyfriends. So she was actively filming her
sex acts for many months, maybe years, before she ever
met Frankie Fitzgerald. Then brings him in and immediately they're
down the sado masochism path that included in writing that
(15:56):
he Frankie was allowed to wake Shay up with violent sex.
This is in writing in their contract. Okay, the pre
planning that went in it was to actually be able
to videotape this act taking place and then use it
against him later on saying it was rape. Yeah, and
(16:18):
I'm going back to this pre planning. Here did she
actually find her victim after she decided I need these things,
because again we've got a woman obsessed with serial killers,
obsessed with murder, obsessed with the idea of killing somebody.
Then she did. So you mentioned bleach that cover up
as much a part of the murder as any part
(16:39):
of the crime, because she knew she would beat the suspect.
Maybe you're right, Dave. Maybe she had thought about these
things for so long where she had contemplated doing this,
had kind of toyed around with it. As it turns out,
she was thinking about how to get away with crimes
based upon things that she had seen in true crime
(17:02):
that she could certainly have videography, and as you had mentioned,
the fact that she presented as a piece of evidence
if you will. There's no shame here, by the way, either.
See look at this video that I've created, and you
can see him clearly here being aggressive towards me sexually.
He's attempting to rape me. I was in fear of
(17:23):
my life and all of this sort of things. So
that takes some bit of planning to do, and not
just the planning, but the execution of just that bit there.
She had also considered the idea that maybe after she
perpetrates this horrible crime against mister Fitzgerald, that she's going
to need bleach to clean up afterwards. You think about that,
(17:45):
just for a second. What did she absorb from watching
true crime documentaries perhaps or reading about the exploits of
serial killers that, by the way, many of these individuals
had gotten away with crimes for a protracted period of
time before they were ever caught. And here's one more
I'll throw at you if you like that one. What
(18:08):
if this was just going to be an attempt at
killing for the first time, with maybe thoughts extending out
into the future. If I can do it one time,
maybe I can do it again. And she's got a
child living in the house with her. Think about that.
When you consider what this place is populated with, it's
(18:30):
absolutely and totally pure evil. Day investigators walk into an
(18:53):
environments that I've often made comments about, we're always have
to understand the abnormal in the context of the normal.
And when I say this, this is not a battlefield,
this is not a slaughterhouse. This is a home. Think
(19:14):
about what home means, and then you look at what
has occurred in this home and what occurs in so
many other places that you're having to detect the measure
of as an investigator and trying to make sense of
it all when you see a young man whose life
has just been drained out of him, literally, and you
(19:37):
think about what has to occur, What was it that
brought them to this point that such violence would be
exacted upon someone like Frankie Fitzgerald. You mentioned a couple
of things during the course of the program today, and
one of those was knife play. We know that Jake
gros was obsessed with serial killer's murder. She had gone
(20:01):
down a path of darkness on the outside. The image
she projected to the outside world was of a tattered
up young woman with a lot of piercings, and they
were not happy hollygo lightly type of piercings and tattoos.
These were really dark. I'm really curious here because you
mentioned knife play and the fact that Shay Groves actually
(20:25):
killed Frankie Fitzgerald, her boyfriend air quotes in bed and
everything I'm seeing is that she sliced his throat and
stabbed him multiple times, like what twenty five to forty times?
But there are multiple different knives here at play four
specific types of knife, but one was referred to as
(20:46):
a dagger. Others were referred to as bladed cutlery. I'm
looking at this going okay, help me understand, Joseph Scott Morgan,
what we were actually dealing with here in terms of
the knives and the actual slicing or blunging. When you
throw up the word dagger, it has a very Shakespearean
(21:06):
ring to it because daggers were carried by people for
their utility. It wasn't just merely an implement that was
used to protect yourself with. The Romans used them famously
to open oysters. They loved oysters, and they were used
through time for any number of things. You could carve
(21:26):
a meal with them. But what sets a dagger apart
from say, other edged weapons, is that it's a double
edged weapon. So it's not like you have this blunt spine.
Think of any kind of knife that you take out
of your drawer at home. Most knives that you have
in a home are going to have this kind of
blunt spine that runs away from the hilt and goes
(21:48):
out to the tip, and then the tip curves back
down onto the blaated surface, so you've got a sharp
surface and you've got kind of a blunted surface. When
you look at a single edged knife wound compared to
a double edged wound, it is completely different. Some people
(22:10):
refer to it as the winking eye. A single edged weapon,
when you take a look at it, at first, it
has a sharp edge or point, it comes to a
very acute point on one side, and then the other
side is kind of blunted looking. When you look at
it close enough, you begin to see an eye. Conversely,
(22:31):
when you take a look at a double edged weapon,
such as a dagger, it's going to have two distinct
acute points on either side of it. How these things
are going to appear is going to be dependent upon
where you're stabbed. We have contour lines that run all
over the course of our skin throughout our body. As
(22:52):
a matter of fact, when physicians learn how to conduct
even minor surgery, they're taught about something called the lines
of languor. And lines of languor are these contour lines
that run throughout our body, and they have to do
with the tension of the skin and how we're kind
of constructed. And if you go opposing to the lines
(23:12):
of languor, you get these really nasty looking cuts that
are open and gaping. It doesn't mean that the weapon
was any larger than say, where they're not as gaping.
It's just that you've gone across the grain, if you will,
and so it opens up. So with surgeons, when they
make an incision into someone, they follow the line of languor,
(23:33):
and if they do this, then you're not going to
have as nasty as scar If they go against the grain,
that opens up in this very horrific kind of way.
When you're reading these wounds, you have to be very
very careful actually in the morgue. One of the things
that will do sometimes is you've heard of us doing
tape lifts, where we're lifting fragile evidence, trace evidence, this
(23:54):
sort of thing. What we will do many times if
we've got one of these big gaping wounds, will actually
take scotch tape after we've cleaned the wound, and will
place the scotch tape over both sides of the wound
and draw it together so that we can get an
idea of the orientation of the wound, because if it's
gone across the grain, you might not be able to
(24:17):
appreciate it as it had insulted the body initially, so
you have to be mindful of that. When you're in
the morgue. You take a look at all of these
things and it gives you ideas to the orientation. Now,
what we have here in this case with Frankie Fitzgerald
is that his throat was in fact cut. And I
find it interesting their language is a bit different than ours.
(24:39):
In the court documents when you begin to read about
this case, they state that he had a catastrophic loss
of blood. But such a very British thing to say.
Here in the US we would say, well, he bled
to death. They're saying it was a catastrophic loss of blood,
and in medical terminology we would say that he extanguinated,
which means the volume of blood that he loss was
(25:00):
incompatible with life. It's what it came down to, is
that because of the throat slash, meaning the other staff bounds.
Perhaps that's a good point. It is a cataclysmic event
from a physiological standpoint when you've got this knife being
plunged into him. Now he's obviously in a very submissive
(25:21):
position when this has occurred. You have to imagine that
she's on top of him. The question you would want
to ask is how do you perpetrate this many insults
to his body? Was he restrained in some way or
was he drugged? Or how did he get into this
position where he could not fend her off? That's an
important question here, I think, and it goes to the
(25:42):
lifestyle that they were engaging in. You have submissives and
you have dominance. They lived by this ethos of bondage
and sado masochism and these sorts of things. So was
he in a submissive position? Did he see this on
his horizon? Was he submitting to her when this happened.
When you go back and you look at the injuries,
(26:04):
in order to assess these injuries, you would have to
take each one one by one and consider the location anatomically.
Are they in the middle line of the chest or
in the side of the chest? Also, are any of
these post mortem? And that's a big factor here, Dave,
because if she's into knife play and she's into serial killers,
(26:28):
some of the hallmarks of serial killers, not every one
of them, obviously, but many of them is what will
they do with bodies after they're deceased? Well, sometimes there's
a further attempt to disfigure the body or to abuse
a body. So you would want to take the measure
of that to try to understand is there hemorrhage in
(26:50):
all of these wounds? Are all of these in the
throes of death what we refer to the perimortem state.
You have this initial area where he was attacked. How
much blood was associated with this? We'd mentioned the throat
being cut, So if you're bleeding out through this insult
to the throat, which most of these that you see
are wide and gaping, and again that goes to these
(27:13):
contour lines that I've mentioned in the body. If you're
cutting across the grain, the throat will open up significantly,
because people can have their throat cut without it being fatal.
But if you get into the area where you're down
into these vessels where you're thinking about, particularly the carotids,
you're down that deep, which is a couple of centimeters
below the surface of the skin, and then you go
(27:35):
across the trachea, which, for lack of a better term,
is the windpipe. There's things that we can look for, say,
for instance, in the lungs. Well, if the throat is cut,
you're still breathing, perhaps are attempting to breathe, you're gasping.
Guess what you're going to find down in the airway.
You're gonna find blood, and sometimes you will find blood
within the lungs, depend upon how long the individual. And
(27:58):
I'm not talking about where we have what's referred to
as plural effusion, where the chess cavities filled with blood
and the lungs are floating in it. That's not what
I'm saying. I'm talking about when there's an insult to
the airway and people actually aspirate blood where they draw
it in when they're taking in their breath and it
just kind of goes back into the lungs and you
(28:19):
can find it when the lungs are dissected. That's kind
of fascinated too. And all of this goes to time,
doesn't it. You begin to think about how much time
did this take? How much time did she spend with him?
Was it a torture event? Because knives have been used
over the ages to torment and to terrorize people. Think
back to what our initial premise was with her, where
(28:42):
she has stated openly that they engaged in quote unquote
knife play. Was she ultimately living out a fantasy here
that of course, wound up in the death of Frankie Fitzgerald.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Backs.
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. My wife likes to
say that she loves love, and I think that all
of us have this kind of romanticized view of what
it means to love somebody. But for some, I guess
(00:31):
their perception of love or the way love is expressed,
is in a different atmosphere from many of us. I've
never thought of integrating the term knife play into an
expression that even remotely resembles romantic love. But the case
(00:51):
I'm going to lay on you today is beyond anything
I've covered. Really, it doesn't occur here in the you
as it's actually in Great Britain, England specifically, which I've
traveled too many times and that I have an incredible
affection for. But what happened in this little town, in
(01:12):
this space is absolutely beyond the pale. Today I'm going
to talk about the murder of Frankie Fitzgerald and his
girlfriend that perpetrated this crime, Shacrobes. I am Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is body Bags. Dave mac my good buddy,
(01:35):
is a senior crime reporter for Crime on One. I
want to apologize to you in advance or springing this
case on you. There's no saying on the South that
some people say you get something in your mind it's
so horrible they'll actually say, well, thanks, I'm going to
have to slaughter a hog get that image out of
my mind. And in this particular case, I gotta tell you,
it ranks right up there all the stuff that we
(01:56):
cover on body bags. I need some more reorientation here.
Perhaps maybe you can offer that up, Dave. I don't know.
I don't think I have a degree in psychology or
sociology that could help break this down, Joe. But I
will tell you this. There's an old saying pretty is
as pretty does, and this twenty seven year old Shay
Groves is physically attractive on the outside. When you get
(02:20):
down to the nitty gritty of who that an individual
is not very pretty a matter of fact, it's pretty disgusting,
and Shay Groves is kind of the definition of that.
When we were looking at this story, big big story
in Great Britain, not so much here. He did get
some play in the US, but a huge and great Britain.
And he goes back to all the photos. Young people
(02:40):
now live their lives online, and that means a lot
of pictures, a lot of stories and things like that.
Oftentimes we can see somebody over the years either devolve
or evolve in their thinking and how they look at
themselves in the world. But in her case, just to
throw it out there, Shay grows, even by our best
estimation from her friends, was always a bit of a
(03:02):
weirdo even as a child. She grows when she was younger,
how little girls dress up in colorful outfits and things.
She didn't go full on goth look at five years old,
but she was bending that way. But the thing that
really catches the attention for this case in particular is
the fact that she is quote unquote obsessed with serial killers.
(03:27):
I don't know how you go past it when somebody
is obsessed with serial killers and has pictures of them
framed in their home. I'm going to tell you what, Joe,
If you're that person and somebody in your world dies
of island death, who do you think the cops are
looking at? First? There's this fond line that is easy
to cross, perhaps where there is this fascination with the morbid,
(03:49):
and certainly we explore many of these horrible events that
have occurred and try to put some sense to it
if you will. From a scientific standpoint, I don't know
that there's a necessarily way you can take the measure
of it day in and day out. And what is
it in your life to get you to the point
where you're going to frame a picture of Ted Bundy
(04:10):
and hang it on your wall, and so that every
day when you get up to start your day, maybe
to have a cup of coffee or as the Brits say,
have a cup of tea to get the day rolling.
There you are eye to eye with a person that's
arguably a monster. I've seen the pictures of her apartment.
(04:32):
If you're looking at Ted, you look to the left.
Oh my gosh, there's Richard Ramirez, the night stalker who
does this. There's even a charcoal of Jeffrey Dahmer hanging
on the wall of this home. Say what you will
about the impressionist went about reproductions, But if I had
a choice, I think I'd much rather look at lily
(04:53):
pads by Monet, you know, to be created with, TOI
to sit my morning, my morning off you with and
meditate on things. So this is what you're filling your
mind with day in and day out. And people make
light of this, there's any number of memes out there,
little clips that are floating about on social media, you know,
where they'll say what my husband thinks I'm listening to
(05:15):
as opposed to what I'm actually listening to. And then
you hear this narrator's voice that says, this person murdered
her husband or whatever it is. And it's quite comical.
But now you kind of have a touch of reality
with this when you entered the space. This is her
private space, this is her home, and yet it is
festooned with all manner of these images that are quite chilling.
(05:39):
And if you take the totality of what each one
of these monsters has done, and you were to kind
of calculate that, pile it up, and you think about
all of the sorrow and the misery and the horror
that's associated with each one of these people that hangs
on her wall. It's quite staggering to think that an
(06:02):
individual could in fact become this obsessed with these individuals
who are arguably some of the most evil people that
have ever entered our mind's eye. You know, I'm glad
you pointed out what these pictures represented inside the home.
You actually alluded to Monet and Lilies of the Fields,
which is a beautiful painting, has sold many times over
(06:24):
from multiple millions of dollars. So you've got your choice.
So I get a reproduction of that, or do I
frame photos of the nice stocker, Ted Bundy and others
On top of all that, Remember this just goot Morgan.
Shay Groves has a daughter. So as you're trying to
raise a child, do you think it's in the child's
best interest for you to surround that child with happy, wonderful,
(06:47):
colorful pictures of beautiful things and love or of the
most evil, darkest things you can find. Because what we're
seeing in the life of Shay Grows is that after
having her daughter, her life did not turn around and
start becoming more focused on happy thoughts and a happy place,
but actually continued to go deeper and deeper and darker
(07:09):
and darker. To set this table very quickly, Shay Groves
and Frankie Fitzgerald were in a romantic relationship for about
six months on and off, is what it says. But
in six months time to have a relationship, there are
going to be a few ups and downs, but that's
really the limit here. I thought they'd been together much longer.
According to her friend, Shay Groves was a very controlling person.
(07:31):
She had very few friends, but the friends she did have,
she was able to control them, manipulate them. She had
power over them. And one of the things that did
come up about Shay Groves is even as a little girl,
she loved the Chucky doll, the crazy redheaded killer Chucky
that spawned a number of movies. She loved Chucky. Look,
it's one thing for a doll to be kind of funny.
(07:53):
You know, a horror movie with a doll named Chucky.
It's funny. Fine, But she started referring to some of
her friends as Chucky. That was like her thing. She
was always limited to a small group of friends, although
she was close to them, and she would manipulate them
and their situations. And she and Frankie Fitzgerald for about
six months, on and off, they had a very sexual relationship.
(08:17):
I say that because everything about what we found out
in this case it seemed to be centered on their
sex life. She was obsessed with her sex life with
Frankie Fitzgerald and even used his prowess in the bedroom
against him. Later on, as the police were zeroing in
because one has to remember, if somebody you're close to
(08:40):
dies and the police come to talk to you and
they find pretty much a museum for the worst criminal
killers of all time in your house, you're going to
be a suspect. Here we go back to back. The
Shay Groves story starts with her and Frankie Fitzgerald, in
a very active sexual relationship, has videos that she is
(09:01):
sending to friends to try to set it up that
she's a victim Joe actually saying that he was raping her,
he was abusing her. But even her best friend at
the time saw these videos she was using to try
to manipulate her friends and said, this is a really
bad editing job. She tried to edit it to make
it look like he was raping her. Winning fact, it
(09:21):
was all a stage. The health thing was a big setup.
If you're an investigator and you walk into this environment
and you're trying to take the measure of it relative
to what's going on, Because as investigators, we walk into
a location where a death has occurred and we come
in cold. There's a high probability that you've never met
(09:44):
the person that you're about to look into their life
unless you're in a very small location, you're not going
to know the victim most of tom you're not going
to know the perpetrator. Every now and then, you'll have
police that have particularly uniform police officers that will have
gone out to a scene where there is domestic instability
and they'll have to calm things down. I've had this
(10:05):
happen a number of times where I'll arrive at a
homicide scene and There'll be a young patrol officer there
and I'll go up and talk to them. Do you
come to this address very frequent? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
I've been here several times. They love to break glass
and bust furniture and yell at one another. There's been
a couple of punches thrown over the years, but we
(10:26):
could get them settled down. Or there's a domestic violence
issue that has come up. They've both gone accord on it,
once had restraining orders, but yet the other one chose
to move back with the individual, and you'll get this
kind of long serial history that goes along with it.
But for investigators, when you show up the scene, there's
a high probability you're not going to know either one.
So first impressions. Right, you walk in to a location,
(10:49):
and trust me, if you're an investigator, you've been to
enough seminars over the years, Even if you don't follow
a true crime, the stuff that we learn about, the
things that we read, the old cases that we review
to try to understand how an earlier generation of the
investigators worked a case. You're going to be familiar with
some of these images hanging on the wall, and I
(11:09):
hate to use the word iconic, but you begin to
think about you can't go anywhere without seeing a picture
of Dahmer or John wick Gacy or Hillside Stranglers or
even the night Stalker. They're gonna be there. In your mind,
you're gonna see that. But then when you walk into
this kind of domestic situation and you've got these images
(11:31):
hanging all about, and you're thinking, what what does this
say about the individual that lives in this environment, that
exists within this environment. It kind of denotes that their
mind is focused in one particular area. And then when
it comes to these two you had mentioned the manipulation
of the video, how do you do that? Well? She
(11:52):
had a camera that was set up in her bedroom
where she would tape all of her sex acts with Fitzgerald,
and for whatever reason, she'd go back and review them.
The sex life that they had had a level of
violence to it. They were into bondage, they were into
sado masochism, and maybe retrospectively, they would go back take
(12:15):
a look at the videos and it would sexually excite
them or arouse them, or whatever the case might be.
So she apparently had a whole catalog. You had mentioned
a relationship that had taken place over six month period.
Just think about this for a second. You're with someone,
for let's face at a very short period of time,
(12:37):
six months, and your situation has evolved or devolved to
the point where you're engaged in dangerous behavior in the bedroom.
I'd mentioned earlier she was famously into knife play. Now
what does that mean. Well, knife play generally is where
(12:59):
individuals will tie an individual up, and after they've tied
them up, they'll take out an edged weapon, perhaps, and
while they're in the midst of having sex, the blade
is placed against the throat, or maybe it's placed just
adjacent to the eye in a threatening manner, and this
(13:22):
causes arousal. So this is being taped over and over
and over again, And you really wondered, Dave, you really
wonder what was it that, of all the times, out
of all the times that they've engaged in this behavior
over a six month period, what actually led her to
(13:42):
cut his throat? Dave? When I smell bleach, I guess
(14:03):
I could think of our laundry room here at home.
But one of the things I always think of is
the time that I spent working in the morgue. For
all of those years. Bleach was central to what I
would use in order to clean with. And that's after
I'd applied detergent to the surrounding area to scrub things down,
(14:24):
and then as a final kind of exclamation point on
the morgue and kind of the finishing touches, I would
wipe everything down with bleach. And that smell lingers, doesn't it.
Can you imagine when the police show up at a
scene and you have someone that is deceased, that smell
of bleach hits you full force in the face. I
(14:47):
would think that you would begin to wonder what has
occurred in here. I'm telling you this is a freaky
story that I've had trouble of just getting past. But
you said something a minute ago and it kind of
caught my attention and throwing this out here for you
because it is Bodybags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I wonder
if Shay Groves actually determined she was going to commit
(15:12):
this murder before she ever met Frankie Fitzgerald. And the
reason I say that is in six months time, she
went from meeting in a pub to putting him in
the ground. And we have her best friend saying that
Shay Groves used these videotapes of sex in previous relationships.
(15:33):
She used these videos of her having sex with boyfriends
as a way to manipulate them. She used it for
blackmail of previous boyfriends. So she was actively filming her
sex acts for many months, maybe years, before she ever
met Frankie Fitzgerald. Then brings him in and immediately they're
down the sado masochism path that included in writing that
(15:56):
he Frankie was allowed to wake Shay up with violent sex.
This is in writing in their contract. Okay, the pre
planning that went in it was to actually be able
to videotape this act taking place and then use it
against him later on saying it was rape. Yeah, and
(16:18):
I'm going back to this pre planning. Here did she
actually find her victim after she decided I need these things,
because again we've got a woman obsessed with serial killers,
obsessed with murder, obsessed with the idea of killing somebody.
Then she did. So you mentioned bleach that cover up
as much a part of the murder as any part
(16:39):
of the crime, because she knew she would beat the suspect.
Maybe you're right, Dave. Maybe she had thought about these
things for so long where she had contemplated doing this,
had kind of toyed around with it. As it turns out,
she was thinking about how to get away with crimes
based upon things that she had seen in true crime
(17:02):
that she could certainly have videography, and as you had mentioned,
the fact that she presented as a piece of evidence
if you will. There's no shame here, by the way, either.
See look at this video that I've created, and you
can see him clearly here being aggressive towards me sexually.
He's attempting to rape me. I was in fear of
(17:23):
my life and all of this sort of things. So
that takes some bit of planning to do, and not
just the planning, but the execution of just that bit there.
She had also considered the idea that maybe after she
perpetrates this horrible crime against mister Fitzgerald, that she's going
to need bleach to clean up afterwards. You think about that,
(17:45):
just for a second. What did she absorb from watching
true crime documentaries perhaps or reading about the exploits of
serial killers that, by the way, many of these individuals
had gotten away with crimes for a protracted period of
time before they were ever caught. And here's one more
I'll throw at you if you like that one. What
(18:08):
if this was just going to be an attempt at
killing for the first time, with maybe thoughts extending out
into the future. If I can do it one time,
maybe I can do it again. And she's got a
child living in the house with her. Think about that.
When you consider what this place is populated with, it's
(18:30):
absolutely and totally pure evil. Day investigators walk into an
(18:53):
environments that I've often made comments about, we're always have
to understand the abnormal in the context of the normal.
And when I say this, this is not a battlefield,
this is not a slaughterhouse. This is a home. Think
(19:14):
about what home means, and then you look at what
has occurred in this home and what occurs in so
many other places that you're having to detect the measure
of as an investigator and trying to make sense of
it all when you see a young man whose life
has just been drained out of him, literally, and you
(19:37):
think about what has to occur, What was it that
brought them to this point that such violence would be
exacted upon someone like Frankie Fitzgerald. You mentioned a couple
of things during the course of the program today, and
one of those was knife play. We know that Jake
gros was obsessed with serial killer's murder. She had gone
(20:01):
down a path of darkness on the outside. The image
she projected to the outside world was of a tattered
up young woman with a lot of piercings, and they
were not happy hollygo lightly type of piercings and tattoos.
These were really dark. I'm really curious here because you
mentioned knife play and the fact that Shay Groves actually
(20:25):
killed Frankie Fitzgerald, her boyfriend air quotes in bed and
everything I'm seeing is that she sliced his throat and
stabbed him multiple times, like what twenty five to forty times?
But there are multiple different knives here at play four
specific types of knife, but one was referred to as
(20:46):
a dagger. Others were referred to as bladed cutlery. I'm
looking at this going okay, help me understand, Joseph Scott Morgan,
what we were actually dealing with here in terms of
the knives and the actual slicing or blunging. When you
throw up the word dagger, it has a very Shakespearean
(21:06):
ring to it because daggers were carried by people for
their utility. It wasn't just merely an implement that was
used to protect yourself with. The Romans used them famously
to open oysters. They loved oysters, and they were used
through time for any number of things. You could carve
(21:26):
a meal with them. But what sets a dagger apart
from say, other edged weapons, is that it's a double
edged weapon. So it's not like you have this blunt spine.
Think of any kind of knife that you take out
of your drawer at home. Most knives that you have
in a home are going to have this kind of
blunt spine that runs away from the hilt and goes
(21:48):
out to the tip, and then the tip curves back
down onto the blaated surface, so you've got a sharp
surface and you've got kind of a blunted surface. When
you look at a single edged knife wound compared to
a double edged wound, it is completely different. Some people
(22:10):
refer to it as the winking eye. A single edged weapon,
when you take a look at it, at first, it
has a sharp edge or point, it comes to a
very acute point on one side, and then the other
side is kind of blunted looking. When you look at
it close enough, you begin to see an eye. Conversely,
(22:31):
when you take a look at a double edged weapon,
such as a dagger, it's going to have two distinct
acute points on either side of it. How these things
are going to appear is going to be dependent upon
where you're stabbed. We have contour lines that run all
over the course of our skin throughout our body. As
(22:52):
a matter of fact, when physicians learn how to conduct
even minor surgery, they're taught about something called the lines
of languor. And lines of languor are these contour lines
that run throughout our body, and they have to do
with the tension of the skin and how we're kind
of constructed. And if you go opposing to the lines
(23:12):
of languor, you get these really nasty looking cuts that
are open and gaping. It doesn't mean that the weapon
was any larger than say, where they're not as gaping.
It's just that you've gone across the grain, if you will,
and so it opens up. So with surgeons, when they
make an incision into someone, they follow the line of languor,
(23:33):
and if they do this, then you're not going to
have as nasty as scar If they go against the grain,
that opens up in this very horrific kind of way.
When you're reading these wounds, you have to be very
very careful actually in the morgue. One of the things
that will do sometimes is you've heard of us doing
tape lifts, where we're lifting fragile evidence, trace evidence, this
(23:54):
sort of thing. What we will do many times if
we've got one of these big gaping wounds, will actually
take scotch tape after we've cleaned the wound, and will
place the scotch tape over both sides of the wound
and draw it together so that we can get an
idea of the orientation of the wound, because if it's
gone across the grain, you might not be able to
(24:17):
appreciate it as it had insulted the body initially, so
you have to be mindful of that. When you're in
the morgue. You take a look at all of these
things and it gives you ideas to the orientation. Now,
what we have here in this case with Frankie Fitzgerald
is that his throat was in fact cut. And I
find it interesting their language is a bit different than ours.
(24:39):
In the court documents when you begin to read about
this case, they state that he had a catastrophic loss
of blood. But such a very British thing to say.
Here in the US we would say, well, he bled
to death. They're saying it was a catastrophic loss of blood,
and in medical terminology we would say that he extanguinated,
which means the volume of blood that he loss was
(25:00):
incompatible with life. It's what it came down to, is
that because of the throat slash, meaning the other staff bounds.
Perhaps that's a good point. It is a cataclysmic event
from a physiological standpoint when you've got this knife being
plunged into him. Now he's obviously in a very submissive
(25:21):
position when this has occurred. You have to imagine that
she's on top of him. The question you would want
to ask is how do you perpetrate this many insults
to his body? Was he restrained in some way or
was he drugged? Or how did he get into this
position where he could not fend her off? That's an
important question here, I think, and it goes to the
(25:42):
lifestyle that they were engaging in. You have submissives and
you have dominance. They lived by this ethos of bondage
and sado masochism and these sorts of things. So was
he in a submissive position? Did he see this on
his horizon? Was he submitting to her when this happened.
When you go back and you look at the injuries,
(26:04):
in order to assess these injuries, you would have to
take each one one by one and consider the location anatomically.
Are they in the middle line of the chest or
in the side of the chest? Also, are any of
these post mortem? And that's a big factor here, Dave,
because if she's into knife play and she's into serial killers,
(26:28):
some of the hallmarks of serial killers, not every one
of them, obviously, but many of them is what will
they do with bodies after they're deceased? Well, sometimes there's
a further attempt to disfigure the body or to abuse
a body. So you would want to take the measure
of that to try to understand is there hemorrhage in
(26:50):
all of these wounds? Are all of these in the
throes of death what we refer to the perimortem state.
You have this initial area where he was attacked. How
much blood was associated with this? We'd mentioned the throat
being cut, So if you're bleeding out through this insult
to the throat, which most of these that you see
are wide and gaping, and again that goes to these
(27:13):
contour lines that I've mentioned in the body. If you're
cutting across the grain, the throat will open up significantly,
because people can have their throat cut without it being fatal.
But if you get into the area where you're down
into these vessels where you're thinking about, particularly the carotids,
you're down that deep, which is a couple of centimeters
below the surface of the skin, and then you go
(27:35):
across the trachea, which, for lack of a better term,
is the windpipe. There's things that we can look for, say,
for instance, in the lungs. Well, if the throat is cut,
you're still breathing, perhaps are attempting to breathe, you're gasping.
Guess what you're going to find down in the airway.
You're gonna find blood, and sometimes you will find blood
within the lungs, depend upon how long the individual. And
(27:58):
I'm not talking about where we have what's referred to
as plural effusion, where the chess cavities filled with blood
and the lungs are floating in it. That's not what
I'm saying. I'm talking about when there's an insult to
the airway and people actually aspirate blood where they draw
it in when they're taking in their breath and it
just kind of goes back into the lungs and you
(28:19):
can find it when the lungs are dissected. That's kind
of fascinated too. And all of this goes to time,
doesn't it. You begin to think about how much time
did this take? How much time did she spend with him?
Was it a torture event? Because knives have been used
over the ages to torment and to terrorize people. Think
back to what our initial premise was with her, where
(28:42):
she has stated openly that they engaged in quote unquote
knife play. Was she ultimately living out a fantasy here
that of course, wound up in the death of Frankie Fitzgerald.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Backs.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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