December 24, 2025 • 44 mins
May 28, 1983: Badly burned 1977 Honda Civic is found in a field. The body in the driver seat was so charred it was difficult to positively identify. The license plate and other items showed the vehicle belonged to 55-year-old Edward L. Cates - a former Mississippi Assistant Attorney General and Jackson City Commissioner. Cates wife, Dorothy, identified a partly burned shoe found on the left foot of the victim as belonging to Cates. Edward L. Cates was a veteran and received a full military funeral. A month after his funeral Cates was found living under an alias as a Retired Army General, in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack investigate the case of the disgraced lawyer who pleaded guilty to reduced charges and is sentenced to 20-years in prison, without identifying the person found in his burning car who was buried in a grave with Ed Cates name on it.....40 years later, Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan is helping our friends at Othram raise the money needed to move forward with the investigation. Click the link below to find out more
https://dnasolves.com/articles/rankin-county-1983-homicide-victim/
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.00 Introduction - Othram, DNA Solves
03:33.40 1977 Honda Civic found fully engulfed, body charred beyond recognition
04:44.50 Weeks after Cates burial, wife gets money orders from Georgia
06:09.30 Body buried, not Cates. Cates faked his death, body not identified
09:58.78 Accelerant used to burn car and body
15:21.34 Person was alive when set on fire
20:12.47 Fractures caused by "post-mortem" handling
25:02.62 Injuries caused by being hit by car
30:15.08 Massive injuries, but skull fractures not mentioned in reports
35:02.88 Cates died in prison
40:05.46 Body did not have teeth
44:09.22 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body Bats with Joseph Scott Moore. Full disclosure in going
into this episode today, I've never done an episode like this,
and I felt that since we are in the season
of Giving right now, that I can't think of anything
(00:23):
at this moment in time on my end at least
that would be more apropos than to perhaps speed a
case along, if you will. And the reason I say
that is there is a case that has come to
my attention from our friends at Authorn and this case
actually begins all the way back in nineteen eighty three
(00:48):
when there was a small vehicle, actually a Honda Civic
that was found fully engulfed in flames, and inside that
Honda Civic were the burning remains of a fellow who
no one still to this day knows what his name is. Now,
(01:11):
the reason I say the Season of Giving is that
Authorm has raised just over I think twenty three hundred
bucks right now in order to get this fellow identified.
And the story that I'm going to lay on you
right now is something I can guarantee that most of
you have never heard the like of. So without further ado,
(01:35):
myself and brother Dave are going to tell you what's
what I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks, Dave.
I had to do one of those cartoon double takes
the other day. You know. I didn't have the sound
effect though, you know when I did it, because when
(01:56):
I saw this case come across my all I could
think of was, wait, did I read that right? Because
it said authorm. But the problem is when it said authoram,
the case is still open, right, And they published an
(02:16):
article about this thing. And then I saw the number
nineteen eighty three, and I saw that there was conviction
in the case. But I saw that there was that
there was not an ID of the victim in This is.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
The most jacked up case you've ever said, And you
sent me stuff where people have chopped off their own heads.
I mean, you sent me some crazy stuff, Joe. This
is by far. And here's the kick, friends, I want
to review what Joe just said about authoram and raising money.
AUTHORAM does not get funding from the government or other
agencies when they go to solve these cases that we
(02:55):
oftentimes talk about on the show.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
It's called it's crowdfunding.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
It's by people being interested in a particular story, a
particular location and geography. What have you, And that's why
we do them because the work they are doing at
AUTHORM is not being done anywhere else, and they don't
have an unlimited supply of money to get these things done.
I thought they did when we first started. I thought,
surely you know there's money for this.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
There is not.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
And that's why Joe and I take the time, because
here's the scoop. In nineteen eighty three, May twenty eighth,
nineteen eighty three, the death of Edward L.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
Kates.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Edward Kates was a former Mississippi Assistant Attorney General. He
was a Jackson City commissioner. This is a fifty five
year old man who was very accomplished, and his car,
a nineteen seventy seven Honda Civic, was found in a field,
(03:54):
fully engulfed and in flames, and a body charred beyond
the ability to be positively identified. So they used what
they had at the time, basic information license plate, who
owned the car, basic size of the charred remains, and decided, well,
this must be Edward Kates. So they actually had a
(04:19):
funeral for mister Kates because he was a veteran. It
was a full military funeral and it was a sad
day for the people of that area, a public servant,
you know, the whole nine. The thing is, they never
got a positive id on the corpse. They buried it
(04:42):
as Edward Kates. But a couple of weeks after all
of this happens, Joe, Edward Kate's wife or ex wife
starts getting money orders from different places in Georgia from
a a man named Kurtz. Kurtz curts, Now, when your
(05:07):
wife starts getting money in the mail from somebody they
don't know, she's got two choices and it really goes
to her character. Some women would cash it and go on,
you know, hey, free money, but not missus. Kate's something
hit her as not quite right.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Now.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
She knew who her husband was, and you're going to
find out who he was as well in a minute.
But she calls her attorney and says, something's up with this.
Her attorney says, yeah, you're right, and the attorney calls
investigators on the case because they're still trying to figure
out what really happened because they don't know Joe. All
they know is we got the body of this guy
(05:48):
and we couldn't even identify it. Something's not right. Couldn't
they know, didn't they know when they buried the body
that an accelerant had been used on body? I mean,
what could they tell Joe, Because they did not bury
Edward L.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Kates. They buried somebody.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
But that's why we're doing the show today, because friends,
they buried a body, but it wasn't Edward L.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Kates. Edward Kates faked his death.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Yeah, yeah, I was.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
When I was telling you about this. When I was
telling you about this case the other day, it brought
to mind one of my favorite Matthew Perry movies. As
a matter of fact, one of my favorite Bruce Willis
movies is The Whole Nine Yards, one of the funniest
movies I have ever seen. It might not be to
everyone's taste, but it actually involved a circumstance that's kind
(06:42):
of similar to this, but it was all mob related
and all that sort of stuff, you know, like Hollywood does,
and it was much more complex, So I don't know,
maybe it wasn't much more complex. What was really interesting, though,
is that you know, this is this is out of
this is out of Mississippi and up around north where
(07:05):
the car was found was actually up north of Jackson.
So if you're if you're coming out of Jackson and
you're on the major thoroughfare there, it's I think it's
Highway fifty five. Are Interstate fifty five that will of
course take you, you know, take you all the way
to Memphis, running parallel to the Natchez trace. This car
(07:29):
was found and the sheriff at the time said, could
be an accident. Don't really know.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
I actually got his direct quote, Joe I found him
on a news piece from nineteen eighty three. This is
what Billy Noble, the sheriff of Madison County at the time, said.
It could be foul play, could be an accidental hard
to say at this particular time.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Yeah, yeah, you don't. And you know with car with
fully involved car fires particular, you've got you've got a
lot of choices, you know, if you if you've got
a home, for instance, that burns up, it's a much
more kind of static thing that's going on. You know.
Back during this time, during nineteen eighty three, there were
(08:19):
in the news, in the news if you remember going
to the Ford Motor Company, there were you know, cases
of pentos blowing up, you know, and that had continued
on into the early early eighties, you know, and people
people died in those things. And then afterwards if you
remember the Ugo, I don't know if you recall the Ugo.
(08:43):
I worked a couple of Yugo fires where they collided, Yeah,
where they collided with another vehicle and exploded. I remember
one that got so hot. I was on I eighty
five in Atlanta and Dave this thing, this thing ignited.
It was five guys from Guatemala that had been working
(09:07):
at the airport all night and they were on their
way home to their apartment that they all shared. They'd
been cleaning like ash trays and doing upholstery cleaning on
jets down at Hartsfield, and one of the guys, in
an effort to get out of the vehicle, knocked out
the vent window on the side in a you go
(09:28):
and tried to climb out, and I'll never forget half
of his body was hanging out. The whole thing went up.
So you had cases back then where the gas tank
is literally located in this really dangerous area right beneath
the rear seat, and these things will explode. But then
you have to think about, well, is this an explosion
(09:49):
related event or is this some kind of ignitable event
where something like an accelerant has been applied to a
vehicle and the whole thing catches up on fire. What
kind of sustainability? Because you know, if you just take
a match, Dave, and you throw it into the interior
of a car, you might burn your seat, you might
(10:10):
burn the carpet, but the thing is not going to
like catch fire and the whole thing is going to
burn down. You have to have an initient what's referred
to as an initient with this and some kind of
chemical compound, primarily some kind of accelerant like gas or
I guess you could use a road flare, but like
(10:32):
with gas that has some kind of sustainability where it vaporizes,
the air actually kind of catches on fire superheated in
this environment. So those things that have like a high
burning point, like a carpet or an upholstery on the seat,
they're going to get so hot in there that the
thing will ignite and begin to burn. Think about it
(10:52):
is if any and I urge anybody within the sound
of my voice right now, if you've never seen a
nineteen seventy seven HOTDA Civic, please do yourself a favor
and go take a look at it. Kimmy's father actually
had one that he commuted. He was an air traff
controller in Hampton, Georgian and he actually commuted back and
(11:13):
forth in one yellow one had it for you still
had it when we got married in the late nineties,
and he swore by that car. But this scene is
so tight, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Most people swear at them.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Yeah, well, I don't know. It was a Honda, you know,
and it would and you know, it sounds like a
go kart when it runs, but it was rather dependable.
But you know, the thing about it is if you
get inside of a closed space, Dave, and you've got
accelerant in there. First off, every bit of oxygen is
going to be consumed in the twinkling of an eye,
all right. So if you're thinking about someone being alive
(11:47):
in the vehicle, every bit of breathable air in there
is gone. And people don't think about that most of
the time. The other thing that happens if you're alive
inside of a vehicle is that superheated air, okay, that
you breathe in. Did you know this day that we
can look into the mouth and into the airway of
(12:13):
a victim at autopsy, and we will see these highly
irritated focal areas of trauma inside the airway because of
the heat that the airways being subjected to. Okay, now
you don't get these. You don't get these if like
you just throw a body in there and set them
on fire. So the actual airway itself, the nostrils, the mouth,
(12:37):
they'll they'll all sustain this kind of trauma. Just imagine
the worst sore throat you can ever imagine, and multiplied
by factor of a thousand, and so that superheated air
is now going down into the lungs. You have all
these inflammatory changes that at a cellular level initiate almost immediately. Then,
(12:59):
don't top of that, you're still breathing for a second.
So you remember how I mentioned the carpet, the seats, Okay,
the gear lever, the steering wheel that's covered in plastic.
Now you're breathing all that debris in as well. So
not only do you have this kind of debris that
(13:19):
turns into almost like ash that's floating about, did you
know that like the chemical substrate that all of these
things are made out of, And did you know a
couple of these things are like heavy metal. It releases
like arsenic into the air. You'll see this inside of
homes as well. And of course all this stuff is
petroleum based. You'll get those levels in the bloodstream if
(13:39):
they breathe it. You know, there'll be trace amounts of this.
Not to mention the you know, I'm always talking about
carbox of hemoglobin level which comes about as a result
of breathing, breathing in carbon monoxide. So you get all
of these kind of chemical indicators relative to were they
alive or where dead at the time of this. But
(14:03):
I got to tell you, with this case that we're
talking about today, this unknown subject that still to this
day remains unknown, it's not just what he was breathing,
oh my lord, it was the trauma he sustained as well.
(14:36):
All I gotta tell you. You know, when you're just
coming off with Thanksgiving, you talk about things you're thankful for. Well,
first off Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for Dave mac. I'm thankful
for him that he's in my life and he's my partner.
And secondly I am he's one of the best gifts
I can possibly receive at Christmas time. And here is
(14:58):
why this man knows no boundaries when it comes to
collecting data. He is absolutely amazing. And this is an
old cold case and Dave has created, I would say, Dave,
probably one of the most robust injury lists that you
(15:19):
and I have potentially ever had on any episode of
Body Bags. And it was even it was even kind
of surprising to me, and you were kind of excited
about it in a good way, because that's what we
do on body Bags, Right, we talked about trauma. Now
from your perspective, let's just go through some of these insults.
(15:43):
Will put it and put it to you that way
that this body has sustained this body that has no name, okay,
has no name. He's the unknown person. He's like high
planes drifter. We had no idea who he is. All right,
So Dave, let.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
Me just shaw you.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
What caught my attention and what made me go back
and dig further is I went back to the nineteen
eighty three news reports and was looking at different quotes
and different things from officials, including the sheriff you know,
who said we don't know, we don't know what happened.
Now you've got a guy, Edward Cates, who was a
former assistant Attorney General he's on the city council. This
(16:22):
is a man who was very involved and engaged in
a lot of different things, and a very well known lawyer.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
And so.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
That's that's not cutting it with me. To not have
an answer on that just bothered me. But it bothered
me that that the fire was that they went with, Well,
it's his car, it must be him, you know that
just does that doesn't cut it with me. And this
is again nineteen eighty three. It's not ancient times. We're
not drawing cave drawings here. So hey, I can I'll
say something real quick there. I think that's fascinating that
(16:54):
he is. Let me see if I can get this right.
Come on that he is not just a government official,
he's also a prosecuting government official. Yeah, Dave, this just
kind of came to mind. Do you think that he
had an awareness perhaps of how this case would be handled?
Speaker 3 (17:14):
He knew it from the beginning to the end.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
And because he's going to have an insight that nobody
else would, he's got the thousand and thirty thousand foot
view on cases and how they operate. I don't know.
It just kind of I had to say that. I
had to say.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
That well, we know so much about the ending, you know,
we know the end. That's why I mentioned his undoing. Okay,
after he's after they bury Edward Kates with a full
military funeral. A couple of weeks later, his wife starts
getting money orders that are sent from various locations around Georgia,
(17:51):
and they hone in on it. Because she's not expecting
anything from anyone, she gives it to her lawyer. The
lawyer turns to investigation. Within thirty days, they tracked down
this ain't Edward Kate's in the ground. Edward Kates is
in an apartment in Lawrenceville, Georgia, which is just outside
of Atlanta.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Drive up eighty five north.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Now, when the reason I tell you that now is
because now that you know he faked his own death,
and we're trying to identify the person in the car, Joe,
this person that was in the car something. As I
was reading this list of injuries, they were shocking. But
(18:36):
what got me more was that I read through it
before I went back and made notes, and at the
very ending it says was this individual as a man,
and he was alive before he was burned. He was
alive before he was burned. Now friends alive before the
(18:59):
fire began. That's what the pathologist ruled. He had this
person in the car had a fracture to his left fibula,
a fracture to the twelfth thoracic vertebrae, fractures to the seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth,
eleventh left ribs, and possibly eleventh right rib. The body
(19:26):
was severely burned in the presence of accelerants, and this
burning probably did not cause the apparent absence of teeth. Now, Joe,
I thought that was a powerful thing to include in this,
because you've got a body. By the way, two ribs,
(19:50):
the left, seventh and eighth ribs showed quote fresh fractures
that might have occurred around the time of death or
during post mortem handling. Now, Joseph Scott Morgan, I want
to start with a question there and then you can
break all the rest of this down. But if I'm
(20:13):
a defense attorney, how could you possibly say that we're
not sure about two of these fractures here they might
have occurred during post mortem handling.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Is it possible that all.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Of the fractures were from post mortem handling trying to
get the guy out of the car that's on fire,
it remains.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Yeah, No, I don't think that that would be the case,
because the other ones were not specifically identified as having
been of having some type of post mortem identifier. Okay,
I think that the And let me tell you why. Now,
as many of you can imagine, people that are subjected
(20:56):
to intense heat in these environments are very very fragile.
I mean the bodies are very very fragile. They I've
had them. Let's see, how can I say this. I've
actually had bodies that will depend upon the amount of
heat and the concentration and how long it was sustained.
(21:17):
I've had bodies fracture in my hands or even disintegrate.
They'll almost pulpify sometimes. And like I'll give you for instance,
I was always weary or leary. Let me rephrase that
I was leary, like if I had a rib cage
that was exposed, of touching any of the ribs because
(21:41):
because you can actually have them snap off in your hand.
As a matter of fact, one of the one of
the opening chapter actually in my memoir that I talk
about an event that kind of sets the table for
you know, my my life as a death investigator. And
(22:01):
it happened on Georgia four hundred and it was a
ranger Ford Ranger truck that had died. I mean, a gentleman,
a kid was on the way to work in early
morning hours and he ran into a bridge abutment and
the whole thing caught on fire. And I was going
(22:23):
to examine his body inside of the cab because the
body was almost melded to the springs of the seat.
So I was just like looking in the vehicle and
taking photos and everything, and just as I did his,
you have to understand, I'm looking through the past the
driver's window, which is now burst out because of the heat,
(22:46):
and I'm looking in and kind of wrapping my head around,
and I've got a camera in one hand and going
to transfer it to my left hand. And his he
was in a pugilistic posture which we see with the
with fire victims where their arms draw up and they
almost look likect their boxing hints pugilistic and his left
(23:08):
his left hand brushed against my right cheek, and I
reached up reactively like this with my left hand and
his hand and his wrists snapped off in my hand.
And that's how fragile, you know, these bodies can be
so to be able to make that determination on in
(23:29):
that sense, I think for those two ribs can it's
it's inconclusive. However, I think that what is significant though,
is that on the other injuries, the other injuries, they're
noting fractures. And I'm fascinated by the fact that the
(23:50):
lion's share of these fractures. Let me just go back, Yeah,
and just to validate this just for a second, where
we're talking about the left fibula, which is of course
the fib of fibula. There's two bones in your lower body,
(24:10):
I mean, excuse me, in your lower extremities. So you've
got the tip fib all right in your lower legs,
and so you've got the left fibula, and you've got
the right fibula and the left ribs seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh,
and possibly the eleventh rib. Dave, these are heavily weighted
(24:33):
to the left aspect of this guy. I gotta tell you, brother,
when I see this and they're saying that they're not
saying these are post mortem, so you cannot exclude anti
mortem here. Dave just sounds like a pedestrian, this guy,
because those are consistent with like an impact injury. Like
(24:56):
if you just think, if people in your mind will
just envision. I don't know if you guys, I've ever
had that moment in time where where you know, if
you had a lump coal in your butt, you'd wind
up with a diamond. It gets so tight because it
scares you to death when you're a pedestrian walkway. I've
had this happen. I had it happen in London and
because I'm you know, I'm a yank and i wasn't
(25:17):
looking the right direction and her tire screeching. So as
the car squats, all right, as the car squats and
the brakes are being applied, it kind of the front
end dips down. Well, if you're walking across the street
at with your left side exposed, all right, the first
(25:38):
point of impact is probably gonna be your lower leg
or around your knee, all right, So you think about
boom you hit, and then what's your body do? Well,
your body does not get thrown forward, Guess what it does.
It bends and it lands potentially on the leading edge
of the grill or on the hood, and then the
(25:59):
car will go over it, okay, and so that would
account for these fractures of the rib cage on the
left side, which is very very impressive here. I mean,
this is extensive, and that energy transfer went all the
way through his left side where he's he's actually got
correct me if I'm wrong, day he's got his twelfth
(26:21):
thoracic vertebra is actually fractured. So that's going to be
like mid range down your back. You've got the cervical
and then you've got the thoracic bodies in there. So
he it would squarely have been like probably at the
level of hang on, keep going back and forth here.
Let me get my anatomy right, probably about the level
(26:43):
of that ninth tenth rib area where that energy transfer
is going through on the left side, and it hits
that eleventh that the twelfth thoracic vertebra, and that bone
is very robust. You know, probably vertebral bodies are some
of them, those robust bones in our body. Plus they're
oddly shaped. Some people refer to them. There's several categories
(27:06):
of types of bones. This is an irregular bone. It's
got these little points all over it and everything. The
anatomy is kind of fascinating. You know when you take
a look at it, and of course it's got the
internal canal that the spinal corp passes through and all that.
But they're very robust. And they're robust because because they
have to be. They're protecting the spinal cord. This thing's
(27:26):
fractured day, so there's a specific transfer energy. I'm thinking,
I'm thinking, if this guy just go with me here
just for a second, just indulge my insanity for a second.
What if what if some bright bulb says I'm going
to fake my death. I'm going to ride around until
(27:48):
I find some poor soul that's just walking across the
street I don't know, in Jackson, Mississippi, at night, and
I'm going to run them down. All right, Well, when
I run them down, they're going to be dead. And
if they're not dead, I'm gonna make sure that they're dead,
because you know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take
(28:08):
my little car. I'm gonna drive it up the road
to Canton, Canton, Mississippi, and parking on side of the road,
and I'm gonna go get you know, a couple of
gallons gasoline poureding cab set the thing on fire, and
I got my little you know, my little diddy bag,
and I'm off. I go, man, I'm going to disappear
(28:28):
into the Eastern into the Eastern sunrise and leave Mississippi behind.
I'm just I don't know. That's just one of the
things I was thinking about at What's fascinating though, is
that with this case, we don't have I haven't come
across it yet, But I have yet to come across
(28:52):
any information about the anthropomorphic examination of the body. Okay, like, like,
what race are we talking about? Because you know, they
can race his skulls. They can do racial determinational skulls.
We can do sex, obviously, we can do age. Now,
(29:13):
I think that they do give an age description, don't they, Dave.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
You know, the original description was twenty five to fifty
five year old male five foot six inches tall. Okay,
that was the initial one. But when they came back
and spent more time on it to determine the actual age,
they came up with an age of thirty nine years
old and a very specific thirty nine years old. And again,
(29:38):
and actually my notes here, thirty five to fifty five
was the original age range they gave. That this is
from the pathologist at the time. This is the pathologist
who ruled that this victim was alive before the fire began. Now, Joe,
we ran down the list of these injuries, and how
(29:59):
can you possibly survive all those injuries only to die
in a fire.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Well, I think that yeah, you can, you would be
and oh my god, this just goes from horrific to
horrific because let's just say again, continuing on with my
with my thought here, let's just say that that he
(30:29):
was struck by car. Now you've got to gather this
poor soul up whoever they are, throw them in there
in the car. They don't say anything in their examination
about status of the brain or the skull, like skull fractures,
that sort of thing. And that's that's kind of hard
because this is one thing and I don't know that
(30:49):
I've ever mentioned this before, but let me go with it.
There are fire related fractures that occur. You know, the
heat has to rise to a certain temperature and it
has to be sustained, and heat will fracture bone. One
of the first places to fracture will be the skull
and what happens contained within skull and this kind of
graphic just so people understand forerehand, did you know that
(31:10):
the brain begins to boil inside of the skull in
that closed in space and it creates almost well, it
almost creates steam within that area, and the actual the
internal and external table I've seen it happen of the
skull will actually fracture, all right. Now. There's some debate
(31:31):
as to whether or not the boiling of the brain
actually creates that fracture or if it's the thinness of
the skull because they are thin, particularly if you get
around the temporal bones and that sort of thing, they
will fracture pretty easily. But heat he can certainly do that.
You know, I would the brain. I don't know if
(31:52):
it would be appreciable in this case as far as
like if you could determine, if you could determine any
kind of cerebral trauma with this guy, because not only
does it boil, you know what else it does. The
brain shrinks, It shrinks also, even if it doesn't reach
a boiling point, the brain will shrink and kind of contract,
(32:13):
and it really it really kind of screws up your
ability to do an effective assessment. That's why in certain circumstances.
Fire can be really useful if you're trying to hide
things like this. And again, it all goes to the
sustainability and the layer and the level of heat that
is attained inside of a vehicle, how long it burns,
(32:36):
how intense that temperature was, all this sort of thing.
So I don't know, Dave. My thought is, and I
was talking about going from horror to even more horrific,
is that if this guy was alive after he was struck,
he would have had to have been transported somewhere. Was
it in the back of this little civic you know,
(32:58):
thrown or was he picked up, you know, and put
into the and then told along the way, yeah, I'm
going to go get your help. I'm going to go
get your help. And the guy is either unconscious or
he's like in that kind of you know Perry mortem state, Uh,
you know, kind of like this and you're driving down
the road. What kind of ghoul does this? And then
because what they're saying, Dave, is that this there is
(33:20):
a high probability this guy was burned alive. Right, this
guy was burned alive. Can you imagine having gasoline thrown
all over you inside of a car after you've been
struck by the car, just minding your own man, not
having a care in the world, and you're hit by
this person that does this and then thrown in and
essentially barbecued at that point in time, alive, alive. I
(33:44):
got to tell you this, this thing, the more we
talk about it, the more absolutely grotesque this becomes. And
it's not just the injuries, Dave, It's not just the
injuries in this case. The grotesqueness that I'm really speaking
right now is how rotten someone's soul must have been
(34:07):
that did this. So, Dave, you know you'd mentioned the
wife receiving these checks out of the blue. Now she's
(34:30):
fully aware that her husband is now deceased, all right,
she's got checks rolling in. I don't think the checks.
I can't. I would imagine probably at first blush, she
might rip open the envelope and say, oh wow, maybe
this is an insurance payment, right maybe, And they don't
(34:52):
really go into a lot of detail to talk about
specifically how much each individual check was. But I think
that there was an insurre and payout, you know, for
this man, this Kate's fellow, that had died and by
the way, it's interesting to note that not only was
he a state prosecutor in his real life, he had
(35:13):
actually been a full colonel in the Army Reserve. So
he's an attorney. So he was probably serving as a
jag officer at the at the reserve level. And I'm thinking, oh,
my lord, you know, this guy is betraying trust all
over place, well, most importantly as marriage, and then secondly,
you know, the public trust. He's an elected official. And
(35:35):
then you know he swore he took two o's, Dave.
You know, he was sworn in as an attorneys, sworn
in as an officer in the United States Army. Lord,
have mercy.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
When his wife goes to you know, gets the checks
from Kurts, I was thinking, you know, maybe something to
do with apocalypse now, something along those lines.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
I thought the same thing.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
A month a month after the funeral, a month after
the full on military funeral, because he was no longer
there to sweep up the messes that he had made.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
And this is the part that people forget. He fakes
his death.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
So all the things that he was hiding, the balls
he was juggling, well, there's nobody there to keep him juggling,
so they start falling and fairly quickly. We're talking in
the days following the funeral. Okay, by the way, you
had a god an idea where they actually believed they
were burying Kates.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
It came from a shoe.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
One of his shoes actually was used to say, yeah,
that's his shoe. It's just crazy that that was the
one thing that went, oh yeah, yeah, it has to
be him then. So anyway, he takes off and he
goes to Lawrenceville, Georgia, rents an apartment and he's living
there under the name of Christopher E. Curtis, retired Army general. Okay,
(36:54):
not a colonel, he's a retired profile.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
He's going to buddy, he's going he's literally adopting a
false identity based upon a rank that people don't realize
if you're a general in the army, Guess who has
to facilitate that. The Congress of the United States, they
approve all general ranks. I think the President has to
sign off on it as well. Boy, you talk about
(37:18):
rolling the dice man.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah, buddy, Well, Christopher E. Curtis, retired Army general living
in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Basically undone by his own stupidity. But
he gets arrested. They bring him back to Mississippi and
this is you know, the Madison County grand jury is
brought together and he's indicted there because not only is
(37:40):
he charged with capital murder and arson, because now that
we know we have him, who is that person that
you killed? Because again, remember Joe, that person that was
injured with all those broken bones, Yeah, was alive when
the fire was excited. Tolerance began. So he's charged with
(38:03):
capital murder and arson. But then Kates was also indicted
in Hinz County for embezzling two hundred and thirty three
thousand dollars from a farm co op he did legal
work for. And let's see, there was another motivation here
for him faking his death to escape the indictment on
that charge. It was to collect the four hundred thousand
(38:25):
dollars in life insurance policies that he had recently purchased. Okay,
so we've got this money coming through. We got lots
of problems. And they sit down to flea bargain with him, Joe,
and the one thing that they did not do was
make him identify the person he killed. They allowed him
(38:48):
to get away with this, Okay, he ends up receiving
a twenty year sentence for the charges of capital murder
and arson, and Joe, I'm just here to tell you
that that's not acceptable, which leads me to believe he
didn't know the person he killed, that he randomly hit somebody,
(39:08):
that he went out looking for somebody he could run over,
somebody that he could, you know, take out and do,
which is exactly what he did. He probably scooped it
out for a while ahead of time, but he ends
up not being able to identify the individual. Maybe, And
so there you go, because that's what we're still trying
to do.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
Here we are.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
It's twenty twenty five, We're at the end of the year,
and we have a family. Okay, no matter what that
person did before, during, or after, they had a mom
and dad.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
They had family.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
And they've been gone now since nineteen eighty three because
of this scumbag who was trying to take the easy
way out of all the problems he had created for
himself by stealing money that didn't belong to him, and
he killed this guy in the worst way you can
possibly imagine.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Yeah, he did. That's an aggravating circumstance. I understand why
they went out after capital capital murder with that, because
you're literally burning somebody alive. Here's one more thing. I
forgot to mention that it's kind of they make up
mention of the dead guy's teeth here.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Yeah, they didn't have any.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Yeah, and that that absence of teeth did not happen
as a result of fire. I'm wondering, first off, if
this guy is naturally absent of dentition, or did this
ghoule get a pair of pliers I'm thinking needle knows
and go into this guy's mouth and extract teeth. And
(40:36):
that's going to be dependent upon how badly the skull
is charred. You know, teeth are going to last even
when other bone you know, comes apart, and I say bone.
Teeth are not bone. I've said that before. So the
teeth are going to be present even in the absence
of bone or when bone is compromised. Again, that goes
(40:58):
to motivation, But that leaves us with the big question
that's still here at literally at the end of twenty
twenty five, we don't know who this guy is, but
there's somebody out there that does want to know who
he is other than us, and that's our friends at AUTHRAM.
They've taken the reins on this case, and I think
(41:18):
that this is kind of a worthy way to end
our year coming up, you know, because we Dave and
I have spent a lot of time talking about AUTHRAM.
I don't want to put words in my friend's mouth,
but this is something that we actually believe in because
it's a worthy pursuit, and how much more so in
(41:39):
this case. Right now AUTHRAM has two thousand, two hundred
four dollars and thirty five cents put toward this case.
They got to get seventy five hundred bucks in order
to flip switch on this. I urge you to go
(42:02):
to their website, and if you will, just when you
get to their website, look for the case that is
entitled Madison County Corner's Office and Rankin County Corner's Office.
That's Madison County Corner's Office and Rankin County Corner's Office.
Look for that title in their articles. It's going to
(42:24):
be at You can find it at d NA solves
dot com. That's d NA solves dot com and check
under their head are called cases and it'll pop up.
If you can just send a couple of bucks. I'm
going to send a couple of bucks toward this case
to see if we can't get this thing resolved, if
(42:45):
we can't get this thing rolling. Because I don't know
about you guys, whoever this person was, I don't care
who they were. They did not deserve this. They did
not deserve And guess what our man that said, he
was a retired army general. He died in Parchment, and
Parchment is the big house in Mississippi. It's like the
(43:06):
main penitentiary there, all right, he died. I think what
was it like back in nineteen ninety day?
Speaker 3 (43:13):
Yea and thy two when he died.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
And this thing is kind of falling, you know, kind
of falling off the radar. We need to keep this
case alive. No pun intended, or maybe it is intended,
because what we want to do, what we want to
do is we want to see life breathe into these cases,
these long since dead people that have no identification, Their
(43:38):
families don't know about it, they don't know what happened
to them. Let's all join together and breathe life into
them and get resolutions for these cases. There's no way.
And I don't necessarily believe in justice in this old world.
All right. We're a falling place, it's an evil place.
I don't believe that justice really truly comes to anyone
(43:59):
in the whole grand scheme of things. But I do
know that science can offer some answers, and you know
that maybe there's a little comfort in that, but I
think that in the long run it's something that could
benefit And it's also a warning again. I'll say this again.
This is a warning out there to anyone who thinks
that they have done things in secret and they thought
(44:22):
that they were going to get away with it, even
in depth. They thought that they were going to get
away with it, and folks, that just ain't the case.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Bodybags.
Body Bats with Joseph Scott Moore. Full disclosure in going
into this episode today, I've never done an episode like this,
and I felt that since we are in the season
of Giving right now, that I can't think of anything
(00:23):
at this moment in time on my end at least
that would be more apropos than to perhaps speed a
case along, if you will. And the reason I say
that is there is a case that has come to
my attention from our friends at Authorn and this case
actually begins all the way back in nineteen eighty three
(00:48):
when there was a small vehicle, actually a Honda Civic
that was found fully engulfed in flames, and inside that
Honda Civic were the burning remains of a fellow who
no one still to this day knows what his name is. Now,
(01:11):
the reason I say the Season of Giving is that
Authorm has raised just over I think twenty three hundred
bucks right now in order to get this fellow identified.
And the story that I'm going to lay on you
right now is something I can guarantee that most of
you have never heard the like of. So without further ado,
(01:35):
myself and brother Dave are going to tell you what's
what I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks, Dave.
I had to do one of those cartoon double takes
the other day. You know. I didn't have the sound
effect though, you know when I did it, because when
(01:56):
I saw this case come across my all I could
think of was, wait, did I read that right? Because
it said authorm. But the problem is when it said authoram,
the case is still open, right, And they published an
(02:16):
article about this thing. And then I saw the number
nineteen eighty three, and I saw that there was conviction
in the case. But I saw that there was that
there was not an ID of the victim in This is.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
The most jacked up case you've ever said, And you
sent me stuff where people have chopped off their own heads.
I mean, you sent me some crazy stuff, Joe. This
is by far. And here's the kick, friends, I want
to review what Joe just said about authoram and raising money.
AUTHORAM does not get funding from the government or other
agencies when they go to solve these cases that we
(02:55):
oftentimes talk about on the show.
Speaker 3 (02:57):
It's called it's crowdfunding.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
It's by people being interested in a particular story, a
particular location and geography. What have you, And that's why
we do them because the work they are doing at
AUTHORM is not being done anywhere else, and they don't
have an unlimited supply of money to get these things done.
I thought they did when we first started. I thought,
surely you know there's money for this.
Speaker 3 (03:19):
There is not.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
And that's why Joe and I take the time, because
here's the scoop. In nineteen eighty three, May twenty eighth,
nineteen eighty three, the death of Edward L.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
Kates.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
Edward Kates was a former Mississippi Assistant Attorney General. He
was a Jackson City commissioner. This is a fifty five
year old man who was very accomplished, and his car,
a nineteen seventy seven Honda Civic, was found in a field,
(03:54):
fully engulfed and in flames, and a body charred beyond
the ability to be positively identified. So they used what
they had at the time, basic information license plate, who
owned the car, basic size of the charred remains, and decided, well,
this must be Edward Kates. So they actually had a
(04:19):
funeral for mister Kates because he was a veteran. It
was a full military funeral and it was a sad
day for the people of that area, a public servant,
you know, the whole nine. The thing is, they never
got a positive id on the corpse. They buried it
(04:42):
as Edward Kates. But a couple of weeks after all
of this happens, Joe, Edward Kate's wife or ex wife
starts getting money orders from different places in Georgia from
a a man named Kurtz. Kurtz curts, Now, when your
(05:07):
wife starts getting money in the mail from somebody they
don't know, she's got two choices and it really goes
to her character. Some women would cash it and go on,
you know, hey, free money, but not missus. Kate's something
hit her as not quite right.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Now.
Speaker 2 (05:27):
She knew who her husband was, and you're going to
find out who he was as well in a minute.
But she calls her attorney and says, something's up with this.
Her attorney says, yeah, you're right, and the attorney calls
investigators on the case because they're still trying to figure
out what really happened because they don't know Joe. All
they know is we got the body of this guy
(05:48):
and we couldn't even identify it. Something's not right. Couldn't
they know, didn't they know when they buried the body
that an accelerant had been used on body? I mean,
what could they tell Joe, Because they did not bury
Edward L.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Kates. They buried somebody.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
But that's why we're doing the show today, because friends,
they buried a body, but it wasn't Edward L.
Speaker 3 (06:14):
Kates. Edward Kates faked his death.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Yeah, yeah, I was.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:21):
When I was telling you about this. When I was
telling you about this case the other day, it brought
to mind one of my favorite Matthew Perry movies. As
a matter of fact, one of my favorite Bruce Willis
movies is The Whole Nine Yards, one of the funniest
movies I have ever seen. It might not be to
everyone's taste, but it actually involved a circumstance that's kind
(06:42):
of similar to this, but it was all mob related
and all that sort of stuff, you know, like Hollywood does,
and it was much more complex, So I don't know,
maybe it wasn't much more complex. What was really interesting, though,
is that you know, this is this is out of
this is out of Mississippi and up around north where
(07:05):
the car was found was actually up north of Jackson.
So if you're if you're coming out of Jackson and
you're on the major thoroughfare there, it's I think it's
Highway fifty five. Are Interstate fifty five that will of
course take you, you know, take you all the way
to Memphis, running parallel to the Natchez trace. This car
(07:29):
was found and the sheriff at the time said, could
be an accident. Don't really know.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
I actually got his direct quote, Joe I found him
on a news piece from nineteen eighty three. This is
what Billy Noble, the sheriff of Madison County at the time, said.
It could be foul play, could be an accidental hard
to say at this particular time.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
Yeah, yeah, you don't. And you know with car with
fully involved car fires particular, you've got you've got a
lot of choices, you know, if you if you've got
a home, for instance, that burns up, it's a much
more kind of static thing that's going on. You know.
Back during this time, during nineteen eighty three, there were
(08:19):
in the news, in the news if you remember going
to the Ford Motor Company, there were you know, cases
of pentos blowing up, you know, and that had continued
on into the early early eighties, you know, and people
people died in those things. And then afterwards if you
remember the Ugo, I don't know if you recall the Ugo.
(08:43):
I worked a couple of Yugo fires where they collided, Yeah,
where they collided with another vehicle and exploded. I remember
one that got so hot. I was on I eighty
five in Atlanta and Dave this thing, this thing ignited.
It was five guys from Guatemala that had been working
(09:07):
at the airport all night and they were on their
way home to their apartment that they all shared. They'd
been cleaning like ash trays and doing upholstery cleaning on
jets down at Hartsfield, and one of the guys, in
an effort to get out of the vehicle, knocked out
the vent window on the side in a you go
(09:28):
and tried to climb out, and I'll never forget half
of his body was hanging out. The whole thing went up.
So you had cases back then where the gas tank
is literally located in this really dangerous area right beneath
the rear seat, and these things will explode. But then
you have to think about, well, is this an explosion
(09:49):
related event or is this some kind of ignitable event
where something like an accelerant has been applied to a
vehicle and the whole thing catches up on fire. What
kind of sustainability? Because you know, if you just take
a match, Dave, and you throw it into the interior
of a car, you might burn your seat, you might
(10:10):
burn the carpet, but the thing is not going to
like catch fire and the whole thing is going to
burn down. You have to have an initient what's referred
to as an initient with this and some kind of
chemical compound, primarily some kind of accelerant like gas or
I guess you could use a road flare, but like
(10:32):
with gas that has some kind of sustainability where it vaporizes,
the air actually kind of catches on fire superheated in
this environment. So those things that have like a high
burning point, like a carpet or an upholstery on the seat,
they're going to get so hot in there that the
thing will ignite and begin to burn. Think about it
(10:52):
is if any and I urge anybody within the sound
of my voice right now, if you've never seen a
nineteen seventy seven HOTDA Civic, please do yourself a favor
and go take a look at it. Kimmy's father actually
had one that he commuted. He was an air traff
controller in Hampton, Georgian and he actually commuted back and
(11:13):
forth in one yellow one had it for you still
had it when we got married in the late nineties,
and he swore by that car. But this scene is
so tight, I'm sorry.
Speaker 3 (11:24):
Most people swear at them.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Yeah, well, I don't know. It was a Honda, you know,
and it would and you know, it sounds like a
go kart when it runs, but it was rather dependable.
But you know, the thing about it is if you
get inside of a closed space, Dave, and you've got
accelerant in there. First off, every bit of oxygen is
going to be consumed in the twinkling of an eye,
all right. So if you're thinking about someone being alive
(11:47):
in the vehicle, every bit of breathable air in there
is gone. And people don't think about that most of
the time. The other thing that happens if you're alive
inside of a vehicle is that superheated air, okay, that
you breathe in. Did you know this day that we
can look into the mouth and into the airway of
(12:13):
a victim at autopsy, and we will see these highly
irritated focal areas of trauma inside the airway because of
the heat that the airways being subjected to. Okay, now
you don't get these. You don't get these if like
you just throw a body in there and set them
on fire. So the actual airway itself, the nostrils, the mouth,
(12:37):
they'll they'll all sustain this kind of trauma. Just imagine
the worst sore throat you can ever imagine, and multiplied
by factor of a thousand, and so that superheated air
is now going down into the lungs. You have all
these inflammatory changes that at a cellular level initiate almost immediately. Then,
(12:59):
don't top of that, you're still breathing for a second.
So you remember how I mentioned the carpet, the seats, Okay,
the gear lever, the steering wheel that's covered in plastic.
Now you're breathing all that debris in as well. So
not only do you have this kind of debris that
(13:19):
turns into almost like ash that's floating about, did you
know that like the chemical substrate that all of these
things are made out of, And did you know a
couple of these things are like heavy metal. It releases
like arsenic into the air. You'll see this inside of
homes as well. And of course all this stuff is
petroleum based. You'll get those levels in the bloodstream if
(13:39):
they breathe it. You know, there'll be trace amounts of this.
Not to mention the you know, I'm always talking about
carbox of hemoglobin level which comes about as a result
of breathing, breathing in carbon monoxide. So you get all
of these kind of chemical indicators relative to were they
alive or where dead at the time of this. But
(14:03):
I got to tell you, with this case that we're
talking about today, this unknown subject that still to this
day remains unknown, it's not just what he was breathing,
oh my lord, it was the trauma he sustained as well.
(14:36):
All I gotta tell you. You know, when you're just
coming off with Thanksgiving, you talk about things you're thankful for. Well,
first off Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for Dave mac. I'm thankful
for him that he's in my life and he's my partner.
And secondly I am he's one of the best gifts
I can possibly receive at Christmas time. And here is
(14:58):
why this man knows no boundaries when it comes to
collecting data. He is absolutely amazing. And this is an
old cold case and Dave has created, I would say, Dave,
probably one of the most robust injury lists that you
(15:19):
and I have potentially ever had on any episode of
Body Bags. And it was even it was even kind
of surprising to me, and you were kind of excited
about it in a good way, because that's what we
do on body Bags, Right, we talked about trauma. Now
from your perspective, let's just go through some of these insults.
(15:43):
Will put it and put it to you that way
that this body has sustained this body that has no name, okay,
has no name. He's the unknown person. He's like high
planes drifter. We had no idea who he is. All right,
So Dave, let.
Speaker 3 (15:58):
Me just shaw you.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
What caught my attention and what made me go back
and dig further is I went back to the nineteen
eighty three news reports and was looking at different quotes
and different things from officials, including the sheriff you know,
who said we don't know, we don't know what happened.
Now you've got a guy, Edward Cates, who was a
former assistant Attorney General he's on the city council. This
(16:22):
is a man who was very involved and engaged in
a lot of different things, and a very well known lawyer.
Speaker 3 (16:29):
And so.
Speaker 2 (16:31):
That's that's not cutting it with me. To not have
an answer on that just bothered me. But it bothered
me that that the fire was that they went with, Well,
it's his car, it must be him, you know that
just does that doesn't cut it with me. And this
is again nineteen eighty three. It's not ancient times. We're
not drawing cave drawings here. So hey, I can I'll
say something real quick there. I think that's fascinating that
(16:54):
he is. Let me see if I can get this right.
Come on that he is not just a government official,
he's also a prosecuting government official. Yeah, Dave, this just
kind of came to mind. Do you think that he
had an awareness perhaps of how this case would be handled?
Speaker 3 (17:14):
He knew it from the beginning to the end.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
And because he's going to have an insight that nobody
else would, he's got the thousand and thirty thousand foot
view on cases and how they operate. I don't know.
It just kind of I had to say that. I
had to say.
Speaker 2 (17:29):
That well, we know so much about the ending, you know,
we know the end. That's why I mentioned his undoing. Okay,
after he's after they bury Edward Kates with a full
military funeral. A couple of weeks later, his wife starts
getting money orders that are sent from various locations around Georgia,
(17:51):
and they hone in on it. Because she's not expecting
anything from anyone, she gives it to her lawyer. The
lawyer turns to investigation. Within thirty days, they tracked down
this ain't Edward Kate's in the ground. Edward Kates is
in an apartment in Lawrenceville, Georgia, which is just outside
of Atlanta.
Speaker 3 (18:09):
Drive up eighty five north.
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Now, when the reason I tell you that now is
because now that you know he faked his own death,
and we're trying to identify the person in the car, Joe,
this person that was in the car something. As I
was reading this list of injuries, they were shocking. But
(18:36):
what got me more was that I read through it
before I went back and made notes, and at the
very ending it says was this individual as a man,
and he was alive before he was burned. He was
alive before he was burned. Now friends alive before the
(18:59):
fire began. That's what the pathologist ruled. He had this
person in the car had a fracture to his left fibula,
a fracture to the twelfth thoracic vertebrae, fractures to the seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth,
eleventh left ribs, and possibly eleventh right rib. The body
(19:26):
was severely burned in the presence of accelerants, and this
burning probably did not cause the apparent absence of teeth. Now, Joe,
I thought that was a powerful thing to include in this,
because you've got a body. By the way, two ribs,
(19:50):
the left, seventh and eighth ribs showed quote fresh fractures
that might have occurred around the time of death or
during post mortem handling. Now, Joseph Scott Morgan, I want
to start with a question there and then you can
break all the rest of this down. But if I'm
(20:13):
a defense attorney, how could you possibly say that we're
not sure about two of these fractures here they might
have occurred during post mortem handling.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
Is it possible that all.
Speaker 2 (20:26):
Of the fractures were from post mortem handling trying to
get the guy out of the car that's on fire,
it remains.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Yeah, No, I don't think that that would be the case,
because the other ones were not specifically identified as having
been of having some type of post mortem identifier. Okay,
I think that the And let me tell you why. Now,
as many of you can imagine, people that are subjected
(20:56):
to intense heat in these environments are very very fragile.
I mean the bodies are very very fragile. They I've
had them. Let's see, how can I say this. I've
actually had bodies that will depend upon the amount of
heat and the concentration and how long it was sustained.
(21:17):
I've had bodies fracture in my hands or even disintegrate.
They'll almost pulpify sometimes. And like I'll give you for instance,
I was always weary or leary. Let me rephrase that
I was leary, like if I had a rib cage
that was exposed, of touching any of the ribs because
(21:41):
because you can actually have them snap off in your hand.
As a matter of fact, one of the one of
the opening chapter actually in my memoir that I talk
about an event that kind of sets the table for
you know, my my life as a death investigator. And
(22:01):
it happened on Georgia four hundred and it was a
ranger Ford Ranger truck that had died. I mean, a gentleman,
a kid was on the way to work in early
morning hours and he ran into a bridge abutment and
the whole thing caught on fire. And I was going
(22:23):
to examine his body inside of the cab because the
body was almost melded to the springs of the seat.
So I was just like looking in the vehicle and
taking photos and everything, and just as I did his,
you have to understand, I'm looking through the past the
driver's window, which is now burst out because of the heat,
(22:46):
and I'm looking in and kind of wrapping my head around,
and I've got a camera in one hand and going
to transfer it to my left hand. And his he
was in a pugilistic posture which we see with the
with fire victims where their arms draw up and they
almost look likect their boxing hints pugilistic and his left
(23:08):
his left hand brushed against my right cheek, and I
reached up reactively like this with my left hand and
his hand and his wrists snapped off in my hand.
And that's how fragile, you know, these bodies can be
so to be able to make that determination on in
(23:29):
that sense, I think for those two ribs can it's
it's inconclusive. However, I think that what is significant though,
is that on the other injuries, the other injuries, they're
noting fractures. And I'm fascinated by the fact that the
(23:50):
lion's share of these fractures. Let me just go back, Yeah,
and just to validate this just for a second, where
we're talking about the left fibula, which is of course
the fib of fibula. There's two bones in your lower body,
(24:10):
I mean, excuse me, in your lower extremities. So you've
got the tip fib all right in your lower legs,
and so you've got the left fibula, and you've got
the right fibula and the left ribs seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh,
and possibly the eleventh rib. Dave, these are heavily weighted
(24:33):
to the left aspect of this guy. I gotta tell you, brother,
when I see this and they're saying that they're not
saying these are post mortem, so you cannot exclude anti
mortem here. Dave just sounds like a pedestrian, this guy,
because those are consistent with like an impact injury. Like
(24:56):
if you just think, if people in your mind will
just envision. I don't know if you guys, I've ever
had that moment in time where where you know, if
you had a lump coal in your butt, you'd wind
up with a diamond. It gets so tight because it
scares you to death when you're a pedestrian walkway. I've
had this happen. I had it happen in London and
because I'm you know, I'm a yank and i wasn't
(25:17):
looking the right direction and her tire screeching. So as
the car squats, all right, as the car squats and
the brakes are being applied, it kind of the front
end dips down. Well, if you're walking across the street
at with your left side exposed, all right, the first
(25:38):
point of impact is probably gonna be your lower leg
or around your knee, all right, So you think about
boom you hit, and then what's your body do? Well,
your body does not get thrown forward, Guess what it does.
It bends and it lands potentially on the leading edge
of the grill or on the hood, and then the
(25:59):
car will go over it, okay, and so that would
account for these fractures of the rib cage on the
left side, which is very very impressive here. I mean,
this is extensive, and that energy transfer went all the
way through his left side where he's he's actually got
correct me if I'm wrong, day he's got his twelfth
(26:21):
thoracic vertebra is actually fractured. So that's going to be
like mid range down your back. You've got the cervical
and then you've got the thoracic bodies in there. So
he it would squarely have been like probably at the
level of hang on, keep going back and forth here.
Let me get my anatomy right, probably about the level
(26:43):
of that ninth tenth rib area where that energy transfer
is going through on the left side, and it hits
that eleventh that the twelfth thoracic vertebra, and that bone
is very robust. You know, probably vertebral bodies are some
of them, those robust bones in our body. Plus they're
oddly shaped. Some people refer to them. There's several categories
(27:06):
of types of bones. This is an irregular bone. It's
got these little points all over it and everything. The
anatomy is kind of fascinating. You know when you take
a look at it, and of course it's got the
internal canal that the spinal corp passes through and all that.
But they're very robust. And they're robust because because they
have to be. They're protecting the spinal cord. This thing's
(27:26):
fractured day, so there's a specific transfer energy. I'm thinking,
I'm thinking, if this guy just go with me here
just for a second, just indulge my insanity for a second.
What if what if some bright bulb says I'm going
to fake my death. I'm going to ride around until
(27:48):
I find some poor soul that's just walking across the
street I don't know, in Jackson, Mississippi, at night, and
I'm going to run them down. All right, Well, when
I run them down, they're going to be dead. And
if they're not dead, I'm gonna make sure that they're dead,
because you know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna take
(28:08):
my little car. I'm gonna drive it up the road
to Canton, Canton, Mississippi, and parking on side of the road,
and I'm gonna go get you know, a couple of
gallons gasoline poureding cab set the thing on fire, and
I got my little you know, my little diddy bag,
and I'm off. I go, man, I'm going to disappear
(28:28):
into the Eastern into the Eastern sunrise and leave Mississippi behind.
I'm just I don't know. That's just one of the
things I was thinking about at What's fascinating though, is
that with this case, we don't have I haven't come
across it yet, But I have yet to come across
(28:52):
any information about the anthropomorphic examination of the body. Okay, like, like,
what race are we talking about? Because you know, they
can race his skulls. They can do racial determinational skulls.
We can do sex, obviously, we can do age. Now,
(29:13):
I think that they do give an age description, don't they, Dave.
Speaker 2 (29:17):
You know, the original description was twenty five to fifty
five year old male five foot six inches tall. Okay,
that was the initial one. But when they came back
and spent more time on it to determine the actual age,
they came up with an age of thirty nine years
old and a very specific thirty nine years old. And again,
(29:38):
and actually my notes here, thirty five to fifty five
was the original age range they gave. That this is
from the pathologist at the time. This is the pathologist
who ruled that this victim was alive before the fire began. Now, Joe,
we ran down the list of these injuries, and how
(29:59):
can you possibly survive all those injuries only to die
in a fire.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Well, I think that yeah, you can, you would be
and oh my god, this just goes from horrific to
horrific because let's just say again, continuing on with my
with my thought here, let's just say that that he
(30:29):
was struck by car. Now you've got to gather this
poor soul up whoever they are, throw them in there
in the car. They don't say anything in their examination
about status of the brain or the skull, like skull fractures,
that sort of thing. And that's that's kind of hard
because this is one thing and I don't know that
(30:49):
I've ever mentioned this before, but let me go with it.
There are fire related fractures that occur. You know, the
heat has to rise to a certain temperature and it
has to be sustained, and heat will fracture bone. One
of the first places to fracture will be the skull
and what happens contained within skull and this kind of
graphic just so people understand forerehand, did you know that
(31:10):
the brain begins to boil inside of the skull in
that closed in space and it creates almost well, it
almost creates steam within that area, and the actual the
internal and external table I've seen it happen of the
skull will actually fracture, all right. Now. There's some debate
(31:31):
as to whether or not the boiling of the brain
actually creates that fracture or if it's the thinness of
the skull because they are thin, particularly if you get
around the temporal bones and that sort of thing, they
will fracture pretty easily. But heat he can certainly do that.
You know, I would the brain. I don't know if
(31:52):
it would be appreciable in this case as far as
like if you could determine, if you could determine any
kind of cerebral trauma with this guy, because not only
does it boil, you know what else it does. The
brain shrinks, It shrinks also, even if it doesn't reach
a boiling point, the brain will shrink and kind of contract,
(32:13):
and it really it really kind of screws up your
ability to do an effective assessment. That's why in certain circumstances.
Fire can be really useful if you're trying to hide
things like this. And again, it all goes to the
sustainability and the layer and the level of heat that
is attained inside of a vehicle, how long it burns,
(32:36):
how intense that temperature was, all this sort of thing.
So I don't know, Dave. My thought is, and I
was talking about going from horror to even more horrific,
is that if this guy was alive after he was struck,
he would have had to have been transported somewhere. Was
it in the back of this little civic you know,
(32:58):
thrown or was he picked up, you know, and put
into the and then told along the way, yeah, I'm
going to go get your help. I'm going to go
get your help. And the guy is either unconscious or
he's like in that kind of you know Perry mortem state, Uh,
you know, kind of like this and you're driving down
the road. What kind of ghoul does this? And then
because what they're saying, Dave, is that this there is
(33:20):
a high probability this guy was burned alive. Right, this
guy was burned alive. Can you imagine having gasoline thrown
all over you inside of a car after you've been
struck by the car, just minding your own man, not
having a care in the world, and you're hit by
this person that does this and then thrown in and
essentially barbecued at that point in time, alive, alive. I
(33:44):
got to tell you this, this thing, the more we
talk about it, the more absolutely grotesque this becomes. And
it's not just the injuries, Dave, It's not just the
injuries in this case. The grotesqueness that I'm really speaking
right now is how rotten someone's soul must have been
(34:07):
that did this. So, Dave, you know you'd mentioned the
wife receiving these checks out of the blue. Now she's
(34:30):
fully aware that her husband is now deceased, all right,
she's got checks rolling in. I don't think the checks.
I can't. I would imagine probably at first blush, she
might rip open the envelope and say, oh wow, maybe
this is an insurance payment, right maybe, And they don't
(34:52):
really go into a lot of detail to talk about
specifically how much each individual check was. But I think
that there was an insurre and payout, you know, for
this man, this Kate's fellow, that had died and by
the way, it's interesting to note that not only was
he a state prosecutor in his real life, he had
(35:13):
actually been a full colonel in the Army Reserve. So
he's an attorney. So he was probably serving as a
jag officer at the at the reserve level. And I'm thinking, oh,
my lord, you know, this guy is betraying trust all
over place, well, most importantly as marriage, and then secondly,
you know, the public trust. He's an elected official. And
(35:35):
then you know he swore he took two o's, Dave.
You know, he was sworn in as an attorneys, sworn
in as an officer in the United States Army. Lord,
have mercy.
Speaker 2 (35:43):
When his wife goes to you know, gets the checks
from Kurts, I was thinking, you know, maybe something to
do with apocalypse now, something along those lines.
Speaker 3 (35:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
I thought the same thing.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
A month a month after the funeral, a month after
the full on military funeral, because he was no longer
there to sweep up the messes that he had made.
Speaker 3 (36:08):
And this is the part that people forget. He fakes
his death.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
So all the things that he was hiding, the balls
he was juggling, well, there's nobody there to keep him juggling,
so they start falling and fairly quickly. We're talking in
the days following the funeral. Okay, by the way, you
had a god an idea where they actually believed they
were burying Kates.
Speaker 3 (36:28):
It came from a shoe.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
One of his shoes actually was used to say, yeah,
that's his shoe. It's just crazy that that was the
one thing that went, oh yeah, yeah, it has to
be him then. So anyway, he takes off and he
goes to Lawrenceville, Georgia, rents an apartment and he's living
there under the name of Christopher E. Curtis, retired Army general. Okay,
(36:54):
not a colonel, he's a retired profile.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
He's going to buddy, he's going he's literally adopting a
false identity based upon a rank that people don't realize
if you're a general in the army, Guess who has
to facilitate that. The Congress of the United States, they
approve all general ranks. I think the President has to
sign off on it as well. Boy, you talk about
(37:18):
rolling the dice man.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
Yeah, buddy, Well, Christopher E. Curtis, retired Army general living
in Lawrenceville, Georgia. Basically undone by his own stupidity. But
he gets arrested. They bring him back to Mississippi and
this is you know, the Madison County grand jury is
brought together and he's indicted there because not only is
(37:40):
he charged with capital murder and arson, because now that
we know we have him, who is that person that
you killed? Because again, remember Joe, that person that was
injured with all those broken bones, Yeah, was alive when
the fire was excited. Tolerance began. So he's charged with
(38:03):
capital murder and arson. But then Kates was also indicted
in Hinz County for embezzling two hundred and thirty three
thousand dollars from a farm co op he did legal
work for. And let's see, there was another motivation here
for him faking his death to escape the indictment on
that charge. It was to collect the four hundred thousand
(38:25):
dollars in life insurance policies that he had recently purchased. Okay,
so we've got this money coming through. We got lots
of problems. And they sit down to flea bargain with him, Joe,
and the one thing that they did not do was
make him identify the person he killed. They allowed him
(38:48):
to get away with this, Okay, he ends up receiving
a twenty year sentence for the charges of capital murder
and arson, and Joe, I'm just here to tell you
that that's not acceptable, which leads me to believe he
didn't know the person he killed, that he randomly hit somebody,
(39:08):
that he went out looking for somebody he could run over,
somebody that he could, you know, take out and do,
which is exactly what he did. He probably scooped it
out for a while ahead of time, but he ends
up not being able to identify the individual. Maybe, And
so there you go, because that's what we're still trying
to do.
Speaker 3 (39:25):
Here we are.
Speaker 2 (39:25):
It's twenty twenty five, We're at the end of the year,
and we have a family. Okay, no matter what that
person did before, during, or after, they had a mom
and dad.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
They had family.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
And they've been gone now since nineteen eighty three because
of this scumbag who was trying to take the easy
way out of all the problems he had created for
himself by stealing money that didn't belong to him, and
he killed this guy in the worst way you can
possibly imagine.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
Yeah, he did. That's an aggravating circumstance. I understand why
they went out after capital capital murder with that, because
you're literally burning somebody alive. Here's one more thing. I
forgot to mention that it's kind of they make up
mention of the dead guy's teeth here.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Yeah, they didn't have any.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Yeah, and that that absence of teeth did not happen
as a result of fire. I'm wondering, first off, if
this guy is naturally absent of dentition, or did this
ghoule get a pair of pliers I'm thinking needle knows
and go into this guy's mouth and extract teeth. And
(40:36):
that's going to be dependent upon how badly the skull
is charred. You know, teeth are going to last even
when other bone you know, comes apart, and I say bone.
Teeth are not bone. I've said that before. So the
teeth are going to be present even in the absence
of bone or when bone is compromised. Again, that goes
(40:58):
to motivation, But that leaves us with the big question
that's still here at literally at the end of twenty
twenty five, we don't know who this guy is, but
there's somebody out there that does want to know who
he is other than us, and that's our friends at AUTHRAM.
They've taken the reins on this case, and I think
(41:18):
that this is kind of a worthy way to end
our year coming up, you know, because we Dave and
I have spent a lot of time talking about AUTHRAM.
I don't want to put words in my friend's mouth,
but this is something that we actually believe in because
it's a worthy pursuit, and how much more so in
(41:39):
this case. Right now AUTHRAM has two thousand, two hundred
four dollars and thirty five cents put toward this case.
They got to get seventy five hundred bucks in order
to flip switch on this. I urge you to go
(42:02):
to their website, and if you will, just when you
get to their website, look for the case that is
entitled Madison County Corner's Office and Rankin County Corner's Office.
That's Madison County Corner's Office and Rankin County Corner's Office.
Look for that title in their articles. It's going to
(42:24):
be at You can find it at d NA solves
dot com. That's d NA solves dot com and check
under their head are called cases and it'll pop up.
If you can just send a couple of bucks. I'm
going to send a couple of bucks toward this case
to see if we can't get this thing resolved, if
(42:45):
we can't get this thing rolling. Because I don't know
about you guys, whoever this person was, I don't care
who they were. They did not deserve this. They did
not deserve And guess what our man that said, he
was a retired army general. He died in Parchment, and
Parchment is the big house in Mississippi. It's like the
(43:06):
main penitentiary there, all right, he died. I think what
was it like back in nineteen ninety day?
Speaker 3 (43:13):
Yea and thy two when he died.
Speaker 1 (43:15):
And this thing is kind of falling, you know, kind
of falling off the radar. We need to keep this
case alive. No pun intended, or maybe it is intended,
because what we want to do, what we want to
do is we want to see life breathe into these cases,
these long since dead people that have no identification, Their
(43:38):
families don't know about it, they don't know what happened
to them. Let's all join together and breathe life into
them and get resolutions for these cases. There's no way.
And I don't necessarily believe in justice in this old world.
All right. We're a falling place, it's an evil place.
I don't believe that justice really truly comes to anyone
(43:59):
in the whole grand scheme of things. But I do
know that science can offer some answers, and you know
that maybe there's a little comfort in that, but I
think that in the long run it's something that could
benefit And it's also a warning again. I'll say this again.
This is a warning out there to anyone who thinks
that they have done things in secret and they thought
(44:22):
that they were going to get away with it, even
in depth. They thought that they were going to get
away with it, and folks, that just ain't the case.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Bodybags.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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