January 8, 2026 • 42 mins
The body of Rhonda Fisher was found on April 1, 1987, 25 miles north of Denver, in a rural area of Douglas County.
A motorist passing by the area spotted her body at the 3500 block of South Perry Park Road, and contacted police. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
The night before her murder, she was on foot, walking north on Monaco and toward Denver.
Now, following in-depth investigations with crime scene and evidence, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office has announced a resolution in the case.
Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack talk about the case that was cold for 38 years, and Joe explains how the evidence that pointed to the killer was in the hands of law enforcement from the very start.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.09 Introduction - Decades
02:58.90 Missing Friend found alive
05:02.26 Case begins April 1, 1987
05:53.98 Rhonda Fisher was last seen in Denver.
08:05.10 Serial perps leaving the body a certain way
13:18.90 Looking for minutiae
18:05.56 Triangulating a body
23:49.51 Trace Evidence, Bags came into play
29:38.04 Sexual assault, serialized event
34:25.69 Killer identified by what was found in the paper bags
39:05.15 Vincent Groves died 9 years after he killed Rhonda
40:50.11 Hair combings, cuttings
42:41.86 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body times, but Joseph's gotten more decades. I've been coming
to grips with that recently in my life and my
own life's journey about, you know, thinking about how time
always slips away. You know, for me, I sit back
(00:21):
and I think I'm measuring my life in decades. Now
I'm no longer measuring in years. It's a weird, weird thing,
very weird thing. But you know, it's not half as odd,
I would think, as it is for families that don't
have answers, because for many families, you know, when they
(00:43):
have a death or a person goes missing, time does stop.
And I would imagine that in some moment of lucidity,
they sit back and they say, oh my god, it's
been one decade, two decades, three days, four decades, and
still I don't have answers. Today, we're going to talk
(01:06):
about one such case, one such case that we finally
have answers for. And here's a bit of an insight.
The answers that we have lead right back to one
of the most prolific serial killers in Colorado State history.
(01:30):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks brother Dave
mac Another day on this side of the dirt. It's
a good day, right man.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
You know when you were talking about decades, you know,
in counting time like that, A very very brief slice
of Dave Macworld.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, I love Dave Macworld.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
This is a world that for the last forty eight hours. Yeah,
I've had it in the pit of my stomach. Oh lord,
girl that I dated in high school back in the day, yeah,
adult now went missing. Oh and it was one of
those things. You know, how many of these we cover,
And when you have an adult that goes missing, oftentimes
(02:17):
you know there are it just doesn't end well. And
an hour ago Frank Calton said, they found her.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
So yeah, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
No, No, she's alive. Yeah, found her alive. Yeah, I'm sorry.
I should breafacet to it.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
All the more reason why I like Dave Macworld. That's
a happy ending. It was.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
It was, And my first thought was for all of
the people that we do shows on that don't get
that news. They don't get that good news. They don't
get that. We don't ever call it closure, but it
is a chance to actually move on, to close the
chapter and open a new book. You never get that
closure that you think you're going to yet, but in
(03:01):
this and that's what made for the last hour, that's
what I've been thinking about it. I haven't thought about it.
I thought about her family and all that and how
happy they are now. But my first thought was those
who don't have answers and what that. I can't imagine
laying your head down on your pillow and not knowing
what happened. Now in this case, yeah, you know, we
(03:22):
actually know when Ronda Fisher was thirty years old, she
was killed. It happened on April Fool's Day, nineteen eighty seven.
What were you doing April first, nineteen eighty seven? Think
about that for a minute.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Can I tell you what I was doing. I was
living in New Orleans.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
I was going to say, you're in New Orleans, Then
I was.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
I was living in New Orleans. I was working part
time at the corner's office and working part time at
a hospital and going to college. Still wow, and living
the life man, you know, down in South Louisiana. And
it's weird. And again, you know, I don't want to
(04:05):
digress too much here, but you know it's it's weird.
You know, you get some where on the tires here
and you begin to look back and you hear these
dates and times, and automatically, you know, I think about,
you know, where I was, what I was doing in
nineteen eighty seven. You don't think about necessarily the bad
things back then. You think about all the cool stuff
you were doing with your friends and stuff you were
learning at that point in time. You forget about the
(04:26):
minutia of life and how we were probably complaining about
life just as much back then as we do now.
I hope I'm complaining less now. But you know, you
look back and you've got you know, you're counting the
rings on the tree man. You know, you're sitting here
and you're thinking about it. So, yeah, back in eighty seven,
(04:47):
that's that's where I was. How about you? Were you
up in North Carolina at that point in time.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
No, No, I was only there for a few years.
It's it's funny when you move around when you're younger.
You know. It's when I married LaDonna. You know, she
had grown up within a mile of the home she
lived in her whole life, I mean, this was her
entire life was in this one mile area pretty much.
And I'd lived in, you know, more places than she
(05:14):
in a year, you know, I went to different states
and things. So yeah, in this particular case, back in
nineteen eighty seven, April first, thirty year old Rhnda Fisher
is it's a vicious death. She's last seen in Cholera
and Denver, right, and her body is found twenty five
(05:37):
miles north. And she was sexually assaulted and strangled. Whenever
we hear those sexually assaulted and strangled, do you think
of that as somebody She was an opportunity for somebody
who was looking for a victim.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Yeah. Now I draw two concline illusions here. First off,
I do know this. When she was last seen in Denver,
she was on foot. She was a pedestrian. That's the
last time somebody saw her. The fact that, as you mentioned,
what was that that distance again you say it was
twenty five miles twenty five miles. Yeah, and you know
(06:19):
pretty quickly when you leave Denver, you get twenty five
miles away. It used to be it's not so much now,
but it used to be twenty five miles outside of Denver.
You were outside of Denver, and you were out in
a rural area. So that screams that someone had to
have a conveyance to get out there. She's not going
(06:40):
to walk twenty five miles, all right, that's just not
that's not in the cards. And also the fact that,
you know, I don't know if you mentioned this, but
the fact that she's dumped alongside of a roadway, which
is very intriguing for me anytime I hear this. There's
this huge golf day when you're working a scene and
(07:00):
you're thinking about the forensics of anything, you know, you
can have these cases where people are literally laid out
on the shoulder of the road. Now it may have
been the intention for the person that laid them out
on side of the road to have rolled them down
the hill to try to get them into a ditch, okay,
(07:22):
or a depressed area alongside. Because every road you come across,
even in Florida and South and South Louisiana, they're not
all flat. First off, you've got kind of a crown
and centered the road, and this is for water and
most of the time it's going to kind of you know,
drop off on the sides and you're gonna have some
kind of drainage area. I've always been fascinated by people
(07:44):
that just it would seem this way and know there's
certain motivations that that cereal perpetrators have, you know, for
the way they leave a body. Some people I think
that engage in this they still have the single one
in their brain. It's it's guilt and they want their
sins to be found out. They don't want to bury
(08:05):
the body, they want people to find it. Then you've
got another group of people within the subgrouping that are
looking to expedite you know, I'm dumping this when I'm
going on to the next one, okay, because many times
they're in a sexual frenzy. I'm of the opinion, and
I don't know how many share this, but I'm of
the opinion that most serialized homicides have a sexualized element
(08:28):
to them, the line's share of them. Do you know
it's a control thing. It's certainly not about you know,
making love. It's about dominating and destroying and having the
power for somebody to do that. So you never know,
but it's just the idea. You know, you think about
someone in a car that has dumped a body out
(08:50):
for anyone to find. Now the question is I think
here did in inquiring minds want to know did this
assault take place? Within that vehicle, because what are the
odds that it would actually take place on the side
of the road. Now, I guess I could have pulled
over and park car on side of the road and committed
this section in this offense. I can't imagine that they
(09:14):
would do that. There's all kinds of dirt roads you
could go down and then oh, you know, by the boy,
I'm just going to push her out randomly somewhere right.
That's that's very fascinating, you know, just that behavior in
and of itself. But we you know, the beauty of this,
I think from an evidentiary standpoint, from a forensic standpoint,
is that you you know that in a tight space
(09:36):
like in the cabin of a car, you're going to
have that kind of intimate, intimate connectivity with this individual
so that we transfer of trace evidence, threads, you know,
skin cells, all all manner of things like this, bodily fluids,
and it will all take place. There's this containment that
that goes on, and it's it's kind of a weird thing.
(09:58):
You know, you and I You always catch yourself, Dave
when we're talking. I don't know if you realize this,
you say, I hate to say this. You'll say that
when we remark about something that is actually positive news,
but it's so gruesome to most of the people. But this
is something that's like if you have a car, for instance,
I would much rather work a car where I have
(10:21):
that containment as opposed to being as opposed to being
in an open field.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Okay, well, let me ask you this, because isn't yeah,
when you have a case like this show where again
you know that she's last seen walking in Denver, and
yet her body is found twenty five miles north in
a culvert thrown off the side of the road. So
when you're looking at that front investigation standpoint, again, it's
kind of obvious that they didn't take her out there
(10:48):
and then carry on with whatever. They actually probably were
dumping a body that they had already killed, and that
would have meant that you would have tray's evidence on
her body from the car, maybe from a house, if
you know, if they snatched her off the street and
took her back to an apartment. And you know, there
(11:09):
are so many other things with this that that one
body could actually have. But in nineteen eighty seven, when
a body is found on the side of the road, Yeah,
what were you going to pull? Because now it would
be an automatic. We know we're going to get DNA,
we know we're going to look for we're gonna look
(11:30):
for car fiber. We're going to carpetfiber from the car.
We're going to be looking at the clothing, We're going
to look at all those things. But in nineteen eighty seven, yeah,
what were they looking for? It couldn't have been the
same thing we would do now.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
No, to a certain degree, it was. I think the
watchword here is, even though people use minutia in a
negative connotation, many times, we are looking for minutia. You
want minutia and those fine little things, those fine little
points along the way. And some people will say, you know, well,
(12:03):
you know laying on. Seinfeld once stated one of the
best lines, I'm so sick and tired of listening to
She's referring to all the guys on the show. I'm
so sick and tired of listening to your minutia day
end of the day out She's going to get another
group of friends. Minusia is a good thing, though, because
it lends itself to that detail that we pride ourselves
on in forensics, we're some of the most boring people
(12:24):
in the world because we focus on those little minor
bits along the way. It's not going to be the
big broad picture. You know. Most of the time we're
looking for those those things that take a long, long time,
and so that detail is frustrating to some people, but
we find it intriguing. So can I just give you
the basic rundown of a case, how we would handle
(12:47):
this at the scene, and how we're going to treat
a body like this, and this still applies to this day.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Okay, this is how you would have done it on
April first.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Yeah, yeah, and Al's working cases then. So this is
something that I had been trained to do, and then
I took a lot of pride in doing and trying
to be as careful as possible. Even back then, I
would take precautions to glove up. We didn't wear bunny
suits back then, so if we had anything on our body,
it could fall off. Now, the generation before me, this
(13:18):
guy's didn't glove up. They didn't glove up. Ye have
to know, why would they? You know, I mean, yeah,
I know, why why would they?
Speaker 2 (13:29):
In eighty seven you said, yeah, we gloved up, Well,
you know, what. I'm watching the O. J. Simpson coverage
on Rockingham and they weren't gloved up, you know.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yes, some And the what's interesting if you go back
and look at that footage, there are people that are
wearing shoe covers and people that aren't. Yeah, you know,
it's my old it's a my old adage. Either you
got one foot in the water and one foot in
the boat, you know, and so you don't know you
know what's going on anyway. So yeah, with a case
like this, we would have been very very careful with
(14:00):
the body when collecting the body. Now this all starts,
and I'm thinking about after we have already taken all
the photography at the scene that we can. One of
the things we're going to do very painstakingly that scene
is we're going to protect that body any way that
(14:22):
we can. Well, I want everyone in the sound of
my voice right now to think about your hands. Think
about your hands just for a second, because I got
to tell you in this case, hands are the key
to everything. Consider your hands just for a moment. And hands,
(14:59):
even when we're baby, that's how we experience the world. Okay,
that's a site sound all that stuff too, But let's
face it, even when we're in our infantile stages, we're
touching things all the time. Well how much more so
in a case involving a grown woman. And here, you know,
(15:21):
we're thinking about this young lady that you know has
been found, you know, the victim of a gruesome homicide, Ronda.
And what miss Fisher was probably faced with at that
moment in her life, or what remained of her life,
is that she was trying to fend off an individual
(15:43):
that you know. Obviously I couldn't put myself in her shoes,
but the only thing I can imagine is at that
moment in toime, when she knows that life is leaving
her body, or it's about to she's in danger of it,
She's going to try to fend this person off. Well,
how are you going to do that? You're not going
to do it with your quick wit. You can do
(16:03):
it with your hands. You're gonna put your hands on them,
even if they're stronger than you. You're going to do
everything you can. Just imagine if somebody takes their hands
and wraps them around your throat and begins to squeeze. Well,
I think a lot of us think that we're going
to be very brave about it, and we'll do this,
and we'll do that. No you want, no, you want,
(16:24):
You're going it's almost primal. You're going to go up
and you're going to grab their hands to try to
get relief. That's the first step. Many times, and people
will say, you know, self defense classes, they'll talk about
things like, you know, kicking between the legs and raking
the face. Well, breaking the face might happen, but it's not.
I don't think that it necessarily happens all the time
by somebody saying I'm going to rake the face. Most
(16:46):
of the time it's a reactionary event where they're just
flailing about. That's what happens. That's where that point of
contact takes place, not just raking the face, but also
raking the hands or or digging her fingernails into the
hands and the wrist. Okay, that's that's important to remember here.
So back to her body at the scene, after after
(17:09):
her body would have been photographed and measured and all
these sorts of things that we do because did you know, Dave,
that we like to do triangulation of bodies at scenes
because if we want to, it is harder than it sounds.
(17:30):
What we used to do before we had GPS. We
want to triangulate the body with uh. I used to
use a rolling wheel if you were seeing those like
you see them on the side of the road. Well,
construction people use them too. I always carry a rolling
wheel and it would click it off. Okay, but you
have to go to a fixed point. So you find
three fixed points and you triangulate that body, and you
(17:52):
put I do like center mass of the chest, top
of the head, and generally I would select either the
left or the right foot and go from the sole
of the foot to another fixed point. I could triangulate.
Why do you do that? Well, not only to create
a sketch, but if I wanted to take a jury
back out there, I could take a template of a
body like a mannequin and place it right back in
(18:15):
that spot. Wow, okay, just so people can visualize it
if you wanted to recreate that scene. So those measurements
would have been pulled pulled rather sorry. And then after
all of that is done and the whole area is
inspected for any kind of ancillary evidence, you got to
be real careful because you don't want to trample on anything.
(18:36):
If you're removing the body, because there's a big process
to this, you have to make sure you got a
clean white sheet. Okay. You're going to take a clean
white sheet and place it inside of a fresh body bag, okay,
and the body is then picked up by individuals that
(18:56):
are using precautions body covering and they're placed down onto
the clean white sheet. When you place the body onto
the clean white sheet, you can either do this beforehand
or afterwards. I'd always do it when I have them
in the bag. I would take out brown paper bags
and now they have a different type of bag that
they use, and I would place one over each hand
(19:18):
and I would secure it with evidence tape around the wrist,
and I would write my name as a person that's
sealing it on there and I would put like if
it's right hand, I'd put an R with a circle
around it indicating right and then left. I know it
sounds crazy, but when the body gets back to the more,
I guess what we're going to do. Those are going
(19:39):
to be cut off. They're not going to The tape
is not going to be pulled off. You literally cut
it from the wrist and you have to have another
catchable portion there underneath another fresh, pristine, clean area to
hold the bag over. Because the reason we do that
is to protect the hands as they're going down the road,
because anything contained in there, if the body is like
(20:00):
I'm doing a josh josh jostling motion right now, is
if I'm on television, you're jost of. The body is jostling,
and anything that falls off of those fingertips or off
of even the palms of the hands is going to
be captured in that back. Wow. Okay, So going back
to the point of contact, raking, raking the face, raking
the neck, raking the wrist, doing impressions, you know, with
(20:23):
the fingernails, all that stuff is going to be collected
and accounted for in that bag, and that bag, once
it's taken off, it is actually rebagged individually, okay, and
then it goes to trace evidence. That's that's the process
that happens. And I'm only talking about right now. You know,
(20:48):
Morgan left out a lot. Now I'm just focusing on
the hands right now. That's just one of the steps
that we do. And all that stuff has to be
contained because what they're going to do is with with
these bags, Okay, they're going to put these bags under
a special type of microscope. Some will and they'll do
(21:12):
what's called a gross examination of the interior of that bag,
and they'll look for everything that's contained in there that
you can't necessarily see with the unaided eye, and any
of the little elements in there that they can pick
up on, Like you can find blood droplet, you can
find dried skin, you can find bits of skin hair,
you can even find different types of flora, you know,
(21:36):
elements of plants, all those sorts of things that are
contained that have fallen off. Okay, Now, in addition to
the bags, one of the things that's going to happen
with the hands is that the forensic pathologists will place
another will place another catch area, clean and pristine underneath
(21:58):
the hands. We will take a wooden stick and scrape
beneath each fingernail. Each fingernail get scraped. Then with clean
sterile nail clippers that come in a bag it's generally
an essay bag of sexual assault kit. You clip the
nails over this protected area and all that stuff is
(22:19):
gathered up. I've seen people do it. I've seen people
do it actually where they'll do a collection per finger,
and they'll keep each finger separated so there's no confusion
about it. Confusion because if you have it separated, say
if you've got the collection off of the right middle finger, Okay,
(22:39):
that gives you an idea of well, that person scraped
or put more pressure on this other subject with that
particular hand and scrape down and collected. Whereas we didn't
get anything off the right thumb, we didn't get anything
off the right pinky. Comparatively, did we get anything off
(22:59):
the left index finger? You see what I'm saying, And
so you can actually break it down by digit essentially,
that's just incredible. Yeah, and it's you see what I'm
talking about minutia and if you're taking your time with it,
If you're taking your time with it and you're not
trying to rush through the process. That's why in forensic
science we don't want anybody that's going to if you're
(23:20):
thinking about getting a career in forensics, we don't want
anybody that's, you know, that's going one hundred and ten
miles per hour. You have to have people that are
very thoughtful about what they're doing and painstaking because you know,
you can spend hours just on one case, you know, relative
(23:41):
to trace evidence. And you know, I got to tell you, Dave,
in this particular case's back actually came into play.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Well. You know, I mentioned when we were talking about
this of how the scene would have been dealt with
in nineteen eighty seven versus later. And it's fascinating to
me that what you were talking about with the bags,
a lot of it didn't occur to me really of
what would go on. But knowing how many cases are
(24:10):
sold because of fingernails, what's under the fingernails? What is found?
Why is it a paper bag? You're not a plastic bag.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Because plastic sweats. It's the most offensive thing that if
you really want to make forensics some bench I'm talking
about bench scientists, people with the white lab coats on
them that are sitting in a crime lab somewhere. If
you really want to make them furious, give them something
a plastic bag, because if it has any kind of well,
(24:40):
it's just think about it, okay, if it has any
kind if it is an organic substance that you're collecting,
you know, if it's like some kind of biologic okay
that you're trying to pull up, what does that sweating
do well, it degrades everything. I mean, it literally degrades.
It prompt decomposition you in the bag and maybe and
(25:02):
I'll tell you one of the worst worst things if
you've got like a bit of bloody clothing. I've actually
seen people that have done this before. I was assigned
out to this state crimeline for a while and they
some rural you know department had sent in they had
enough paper packs and they put and they had the
(25:24):
right idea because they had a bloody shirt, bloody pants,
bloody underwear, bloody bra bloody shoes, and they package them individually,
they packaged them in plastic and they sent them in.
You know, I've seen some of these cases where you
will actually see because of because of blood or other
(25:47):
biological elements. I've seen mold growing on things.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Yeah, and that's you know, because the bag is sweating. Wow, right, sweating,
and that kind of prompts it. You know, those sorts
of things that that's the big no nose. So that's
why we use paper traditionally. Now they have special bags
that are kind of breatheable, but they're not plastic, and
so you can you know, and it's I think that
(26:12):
they're probably much more efficient to the task because you
know the paper bags that we use, Dave, these are
the same paper bags that if you went down to
the corner grocery store, it's the same type of bag.
I mean, look, and we had the small ones, we
had the real tiny ones, had the medium sized ones,
and then we had the gigantic ones. And so I've
(26:34):
bagged just about every reasonable area of a human body.
I put bags on heads, bagged hands, backed feet, and
then I bagged individual individual anatomical elements that are no
(26:55):
longer attached to a body, you know, just so that
you can collect trace evidence.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Now, in this case, we've got we've got a woman
who's thirty years old, can't solve, don't know who killed her.
She's dead. She was sexually assaulted and left on the
side of the road, dead, lasting twenty five miles south
in Denver. Now, they're going to start with all the
usual suspects in any crime. They're going to start from
(27:21):
the insiding insact A boyfriend's associates feels she had dated,
what what did she do for work? They're going to
start looking at all of those people. That's a standard
rule here, right, Even if it's somebody who has found
like this doesn't even seem like an intimate person to me.
It doesn't seem like to me, And I'm probably really wrong.
But when I hear of somebody who was last seen
(27:42):
walking in Denver and her body has found twenty five
miles outside of town, discarded on the side of the road,
I'm not thinking of that as somebody that the person
had a connection with personally. I'm thinking that that sounds
like somebody thrown out trash.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah it does. You know. We you and I have
talked about this extensively and we will continue to talk, right,
And that's memorialization of the dead, right, you know, because
it's like you it's almost like you know, I've never
I do a lot of study of like medieval history
and those sort of things what I do with my
spare time nerd alert.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
But by the way, the stuff he looks up are
things that will make you have nightmares for the rest
of your life.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
But no, I think about like, you know, like the
Battle of stirling Bridge and in Great Britain, you know,
William Wallace and what in Great Britain then in England,
and when you go into one of those battlefields. You know,
the bodies are just left there and now they have
people who gout and collect them. Or you think about
any civil war battlefield, which we can't calculate those numbers.
Now they're mind blowing to us. Now where you've got
(28:41):
hundreds and hundreds of dead. Well, that wasn't a personal relationship, right, okay,
And maybe it's a bad comparison, but it's you know,
people were cannon fodder. You heard that term before where
they'll say that, you know, people, when you go to war,
you're cannon fodder. Right, Well, ne'sary missive of humans. When
(29:02):
you say that, that means that you have the value
is you throw in your body into the into the battle. Well,
if you think about this in those terms cannon fodder,
I think that you make an excellent point here, Dave,
because there is no value in her as a person.
(29:22):
You know, people proud alone about objectification. This is the
ultimate in objectification because we've got sexual assault here, and
that's another thing that that we would have to be
you know, and how did back then, how did they
arrive at that conclusion? Okay? It's this is a serialized event.
(29:42):
You're thinking about her clothing and status of her clothing.
And that's a big question that we always ask when
we there's actually in some I've actually seen in some
forms that are generated by Medical Examiner's Office investigative reports
and stuff, that it'll have a section there they'll say
status of clothing, all right, And they're not just talking
about like did they have a shirt on? They have
(30:03):
pants on. That's not what they're talking about. They're actually
asking were the pants not only on, but were they
button where they zipped? Was there underwear? Where were the pants?
And orientation atomically where they were pushed down to the knees. Okay,
the shirt was pulled up or pushed up, the bra
is pushed up. I can't tell you how many cases
(30:24):
I've worked of sexual assault where you find the body
and it's left in that status after they have been killed,
and you can really get an insight into the mind
of the person. I think to a certain degree that's
done this, and automatically you're not thinking that this person
is memorializing this individual in any way. They had a
(30:45):
purpose that they served some kind of twisted sexual gratification,
and then they choked our last breath out of them
and dumped them on the side of a road twenty
five miles away from where they were lasting. The reason
(31:21):
I was excited about this case because I'm sure that
some of our friends out there are saying more than
this happened thirty years ago. I'm are you so excited
about it? Well, I'm so excited about it is because
we've actually gotten answers after all this time, and it's
it is science that has led us to this. Science
(31:43):
is a wonderful thing nowadays, isn't it. It's got a
bad side, but it's boys got an upside too, when
you begin to think about these cases that are being
closed out right now, and they're being closed out because
of molecular evidence, Dave, And in this particular case, we
knew who she was, knew how she died, we never
knew who did it. And Dave, I'm here to turn
(32:05):
this over to you to say that we now have
a name, don't.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Well, you know, when I was looking at this, and
I was looking at dates because I was trying to
think of the investigators. And that's why I was asking
you different questions because I try to think of You've
got a time period here in nineteen eighty seven. It's
Denver area, and you've got a body. And there was
one person who had made his way through Colorado, Ted Bundy,
(32:31):
you know, and his news because he was not put
to death till eighty nine, so he was in prison,
you know, in eighty seven. But people out there were
still thinking, you know, he would sexually assault people, stranglehim,
kill him and dash. You know, he did that all
over the place. And I just wonder sometimes when police
officers come along, investigators come along a scene and they
(32:51):
start thinking, well, we've tried, We've gone with all the
usual suspects. We've gone with everybody close by, relationships, passing acquaintances,
and nothing is working out. Do we start going down
the list, Well, let's look at our sir, Let's look
at people who have killed a lot more than just one.
And you eliminate those that are dead or in jail
(33:12):
at the time. But years later, you know, after this
thing has gone cold, as it did many times when
I was looking at this after you sent it to him,
I'm like, wait a minute. In twenty seventeen, they broke
it out of the cold case files. They had DNA,
they had all the technology we had, you know, eight
years ago, and you know what they didn't solve it.
(33:36):
They did not crack the case. Still, I'm not saying
that I guess the science they just didn't come together
for them. It wasn't until the last twelve months, the
last twelve months where finally Ronda Marie Fisher, the thirty
year old woman who was last seen in Denver walking
on April the first, nineteen eighty seven, well found April
(33:58):
the first, nineteen eighty seven. We actually know who killed her,
and it was somebody that was well known to law enforcement,
somebody especially now looking back on it, who actually has
been dead for almost thirty years himself. Yeah, you know
this guy. His name is Vincent Darryl Groves. He died
(34:25):
in nineteen ninety six. Joe, How are you you know?
He dies nine years after killing her? He dies nine
years after killing Ronda. Now I want to know how
did he get away with it for that long? And
how did they possibly tie her death to a dead man?
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Guy?
Speaker 2 (34:42):
He's been dead for us. He's been warm food for
a long time.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
It was her hands, It was Wrong's hands. Wow, you know,
it's really weird, you know you think about it. You know,
when he was closing his eyes in death, he probably
thought that this was, you know, because he had confessed
other you know, and some people put his numbers. The
people in Colorado keep saying that one of the most
(35:08):
prolific in Colorado history. And I've heard the numbers range
all the way from fourteen to possibly twenty. You always
hear these weird kind of numbers. You know that they'll
the the expanse of these things is mind blowing. Sometimes, however,
did they do that?
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Sometimes though you've got a similar case over here, we
got no way of solving it, and we can depend
it on this guy. Just maybe give the family some
light at the end of the tunnel, you know what
I mean. Do you think that ever happens?
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Yeah, I think that it used to happen in the past.
And of course there were a couple of these guys
that got free lunches out of it too, you know,
going back to Audust two, thinking about him and Henry.
You know, they would get you know, free trips out
of this to go and indicate where they had killed somebody,
(36:01):
which is you know, super you know, super odd now,
and they would take credit for it, and of course
the other person by virtually you know, they're perpetrating, not
just horror that they've done previously. Now they're portraying another
crime because they're they're lying at that point toime and
and and keeping that individual on the street that might
still be perpetrating cases.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
I'd look at Henry Lee Lucas and think you felt
he did it for a pack of smokes and a
cup of coffee. You know, he would tell you anything.
But anyway, So tell me about this guy. Tell me
about Benson Groves show. How did they actually tag him?
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Well, they tagged him because what happened is they had
taken sample, you know, from him over the years, and uh,
he was doing a turn in state pen. You know,
he did several turns. He's a career offender. He had
been married and was relatively successful early on in his
(36:57):
young life. College student, played bad basketball up in Iowa,
then quit going to class, quit everything else, moved back
to Denver, or just outside of Denver, lived with his grandmother,
and he got a job I think as an electrician.
He had a lot of spare time on his hands. Well,
he would wind up cruising. I think it's called Colfax street.
(37:20):
I'd heard that term. I had a friend of mine
that used to be with Denver homicide, and I remember
him mentioning this he'd worked vice for a long time,
not this case, but just Colfax Street because this is
an area where pimps and prostitutes hanging. Well, this individual,
this perpetrator that is now deceased, began hanging out with
(37:40):
pimps and prostitutes and then after a period of time,
Dave he actually groomed a few women along the way.
His earliest kill was back in I think he had
a late seventies early eighties, and it was a girl
that he was pimping.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
And she was seventeen when he started pimping.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
She was seventeen. So they they had yeah, baka, they
had his sample. They had sample from him siblings or
his parents, I believe, And so that's you know, that's
just kind of sitting there. So you know, back to
the bags, when you're going when you're going to collect
(38:27):
this from a trace evidence standpoint, you never know where
this is going to wind up. That's one of the
cool things about forensics, those those little bitty actions that
you take all the way back in time. You know,
I'm becoming reflective now going back to eighty seven. Those
actions that maybe I took in a case back in
eighty seven that might still be unsolved. Did I do
(38:51):
the right thing at that particular time? Did I do
all of the collection? Because you've got to be real careful,
you don't know, you might not get a hit immediately.
But they had enough in the bank and in the
tank relative to what they had collected from her and
then from him in any associated relatives, David, they were
able to do a DNA match on him. And I
(39:12):
think that probably because you know, his kind of modus
operandi was he would take these girls off the street.
He was a violent, violent toward them. They I think
to a person, I think they're all strangled, every single
one of them.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
This is not something where he's using a bludgeon or
a knife or you know whatever, a weapon, pistol or whatever.
He's actually using his hands, wrapping the hands around the
throat so you can feel the life leaving out of
body as he's sexually assaulting them. And now to mention
if they did the rape kits as well, this kind
(39:53):
of doubles up. And this is kind of interesting as well.
How many rape kits do they actually perform where they
would do swabs? You know the vaginal swabs, anal swabs,
oral swabs that we collect commonly with rape kits, hair pluckings,
and people don't realize this, did you know with if
there is genital the genital contact, Okay, in a rape,
(40:16):
what will happen is that you will have hairs, pubic
hairs that will fall off of the perpetrator or will
come off of the victim and attach to the perpetrator.
But most of the time we're looking for perp to
victim hair sample and we'll do we do combings. Actually
if you've heard of a fine tooth comb, we'll actually
do combing of the pubic region the hair, hoping that
(40:40):
we'll get a straight hair. And then we will do
hair pluckings as well, where we get the roots out, okay,
and a lot of that. That totality of this collection
wound up in this case and they're saying that it
came from the bag. So this is an this is
out from underneath her her fingernails. So in her last
(41:05):
moments trying to survive at the hands of this monster,
she did a better collection. She did a better evidence
collection than I've probably ever done in my entire life. Man,
because she raked him at that point in time, or
pressed her nails into him. She got something from him
that was part of his molecular blueprint, and it has
(41:29):
lingered all this time, even in death. Both these people
obviously are dead now. But you know how satisfying is this.
It's horrible, but you know again, how satisfying is it? Again?
Another example of if you're thinking about doing something out there,
if you're thinking about engaging this behavior, it ain't. It
(41:51):
ain't nineteen eighty seven anymore. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is by backs
Body times, but Joseph's gotten more decades. I've been coming
to grips with that recently in my life and my
own life's journey about, you know, thinking about how time
always slips away. You know, for me, I sit back
(00:21):
and I think I'm measuring my life in decades. Now
I'm no longer measuring in years. It's a weird, weird thing,
very weird thing. But you know, it's not half as odd,
I would think, as it is for families that don't
have answers, because for many families, you know, when they
(00:43):
have a death or a person goes missing, time does stop.
And I would imagine that in some moment of lucidity,
they sit back and they say, oh my god, it's
been one decade, two decades, three days, four decades, and
still I don't have answers. Today, we're going to talk
(01:06):
about one such case, one such case that we finally
have answers for. And here's a bit of an insight.
The answers that we have lead right back to one
of the most prolific serial killers in Colorado State history.
(01:30):
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks brother Dave
mac Another day on this side of the dirt. It's
a good day, right man.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
You know when you were talking about decades, you know,
in counting time like that, A very very brief slice
of Dave Macworld.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, I love Dave Macworld.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
This is a world that for the last forty eight hours. Yeah,
I've had it in the pit of my stomach. Oh lord,
girl that I dated in high school back in the day, yeah,
adult now went missing. Oh and it was one of
those things. You know, how many of these we cover,
And when you have an adult that goes missing, oftentimes
(02:17):
you know there are it just doesn't end well. And
an hour ago Frank Calton said, they found her.
Speaker 1 (02:27):
So yeah, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
No, No, she's alive. Yeah, found her alive. Yeah, I'm sorry.
I should breafacet to it.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
All the more reason why I like Dave Macworld. That's
a happy ending. It was.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
It was, And my first thought was for all of
the people that we do shows on that don't get
that news. They don't get that good news. They don't
get that. We don't ever call it closure, but it
is a chance to actually move on, to close the
chapter and open a new book. You never get that
closure that you think you're going to yet, but in
(03:01):
this and that's what made for the last hour, that's
what I've been thinking about it. I haven't thought about it.
I thought about her family and all that and how
happy they are now. But my first thought was those
who don't have answers and what that. I can't imagine
laying your head down on your pillow and not knowing
what happened. Now in this case, yeah, you know, we
(03:22):
actually know when Ronda Fisher was thirty years old, she
was killed. It happened on April Fool's Day, nineteen eighty seven.
What were you doing April first, nineteen eighty seven? Think
about that for a minute.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
Can I tell you what I was doing. I was
living in New Orleans.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
I was going to say, you're in New Orleans, Then
I was.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
I was living in New Orleans. I was working part
time at the corner's office and working part time at
a hospital and going to college. Still wow, and living
the life man, you know, down in South Louisiana. And
it's weird. And again, you know, I don't want to
(04:05):
digress too much here, but you know it's it's weird.
You know, you get some where on the tires here
and you begin to look back and you hear these
dates and times, and automatically, you know, I think about,
you know, where I was, what I was doing in
nineteen eighty seven. You don't think about necessarily the bad
things back then. You think about all the cool stuff
you were doing with your friends and stuff you were
learning at that point in time. You forget about the
(04:26):
minutia of life and how we were probably complaining about
life just as much back then as we do now.
I hope I'm complaining less now. But you know, you
look back and you've got you know, you're counting the
rings on the tree man. You know, you're sitting here
and you're thinking about it. So, yeah, back in eighty seven,
(04:47):
that's that's where I was. How about you? Were you
up in North Carolina at that point in time.
Speaker 2 (04:51):
No, No, I was only there for a few years.
It's it's funny when you move around when you're younger.
You know. It's when I married LaDonna. You know, she
had grown up within a mile of the home she
lived in her whole life, I mean, this was her
entire life was in this one mile area pretty much.
And I'd lived in, you know, more places than she
(05:14):
in a year, you know, I went to different states
and things. So yeah, in this particular case, back in
nineteen eighty seven, April first, thirty year old Rhnda Fisher
is it's a vicious death. She's last seen in Cholera
and Denver, right, and her body is found twenty five
(05:37):
miles north. And she was sexually assaulted and strangled. Whenever
we hear those sexually assaulted and strangled, do you think
of that as somebody She was an opportunity for somebody
who was looking for a victim.
Speaker 1 (05:57):
Yeah. Now I draw two concline illusions here. First off,
I do know this. When she was last seen in Denver,
she was on foot. She was a pedestrian. That's the
last time somebody saw her. The fact that, as you mentioned,
what was that that distance again you say it was
twenty five miles twenty five miles. Yeah, and you know
(06:19):
pretty quickly when you leave Denver, you get twenty five
miles away. It used to be it's not so much now,
but it used to be twenty five miles outside of Denver.
You were outside of Denver, and you were out in
a rural area. So that screams that someone had to
have a conveyance to get out there. She's not going
(06:40):
to walk twenty five miles, all right, that's just not
that's not in the cards. And also the fact that,
you know, I don't know if you mentioned this, but
the fact that she's dumped alongside of a roadway, which
is very intriguing for me anytime I hear this. There's
this huge golf day when you're working a scene and
(07:00):
you're thinking about the forensics of anything, you know, you
can have these cases where people are literally laid out
on the shoulder of the road. Now it may have
been the intention for the person that laid them out
on side of the road to have rolled them down
the hill to try to get them into a ditch, okay,
(07:22):
or a depressed area alongside. Because every road you come across,
even in Florida and South and South Louisiana, they're not
all flat. First off, you've got kind of a crown
and centered the road, and this is for water and
most of the time it's going to kind of you know,
drop off on the sides and you're gonna have some
kind of drainage area. I've always been fascinated by people
(07:44):
that just it would seem this way and know there's
certain motivations that that cereal perpetrators have, you know, for
the way they leave a body. Some people I think
that engage in this they still have the single one
in their brain. It's it's guilt and they want their
sins to be found out. They don't want to bury
(08:05):
the body, they want people to find it. Then you've
got another group of people within the subgrouping that are
looking to expedite you know, I'm dumping this when I'm
going on to the next one, okay, because many times
they're in a sexual frenzy. I'm of the opinion, and
I don't know how many share this, but I'm of
the opinion that most serialized homicides have a sexualized element
(08:28):
to them, the line's share of them. Do you know
it's a control thing. It's certainly not about you know,
making love. It's about dominating and destroying and having the
power for somebody to do that. So you never know,
but it's just the idea. You know, you think about
someone in a car that has dumped a body out
(08:50):
for anyone to find. Now the question is I think
here did in inquiring minds want to know did this
assault take place? Within that vehicle, because what are the
odds that it would actually take place on the side
of the road. Now, I guess I could have pulled
over and park car on side of the road and committed
this section in this offense. I can't imagine that they
(09:14):
would do that. There's all kinds of dirt roads you
could go down and then oh, you know, by the boy,
I'm just going to push her out randomly somewhere right.
That's that's very fascinating, you know, just that behavior in
and of itself. But we you know, the beauty of this,
I think from an evidentiary standpoint, from a forensic standpoint,
is that you you know that in a tight space
(09:36):
like in the cabin of a car, you're going to
have that kind of intimate, intimate connectivity with this individual
so that we transfer of trace evidence, threads, you know,
skin cells, all all manner of things like this, bodily fluids,
and it will all take place. There's this containment that
that goes on, and it's it's kind of a weird thing.
(09:58):
You know, you and I You always catch yourself, Dave
when we're talking. I don't know if you realize this,
you say, I hate to say this. You'll say that
when we remark about something that is actually positive news,
but it's so gruesome to most of the people. But this
is something that's like if you have a car, for instance,
I would much rather work a car where I have
(10:21):
that containment as opposed to being as opposed to being
in an open field.
Speaker 2 (10:26):
Okay, well, let me ask you this, because isn't yeah,
when you have a case like this show where again
you know that she's last seen walking in Denver, and
yet her body is found twenty five miles north in
a culvert thrown off the side of the road. So
when you're looking at that front investigation standpoint, again, it's
kind of obvious that they didn't take her out there
(10:48):
and then carry on with whatever. They actually probably were
dumping a body that they had already killed, and that
would have meant that you would have tray's evidence on
her body from the car, maybe from a house, if
you know, if they snatched her off the street and
took her back to an apartment. And you know, there
(11:09):
are so many other things with this that that one
body could actually have. But in nineteen eighty seven, when
a body is found on the side of the road, Yeah,
what were you going to pull? Because now it would
be an automatic. We know we're going to get DNA,
we know we're going to look for we're gonna look
(11:30):
for car fiber. We're going to carpetfiber from the car.
We're going to be looking at the clothing, We're going
to look at all those things. But in nineteen eighty seven, yeah,
what were they looking for? It couldn't have been the
same thing we would do now.
Speaker 1 (11:42):
No, to a certain degree, it was. I think the
watchword here is, even though people use minutia in a
negative connotation, many times, we are looking for minutia. You
want minutia and those fine little things, those fine little
points along the way. And some people will say, you know, well,
(12:03):
you know laying on. Seinfeld once stated one of the
best lines, I'm so sick and tired of listening to
She's referring to all the guys on the show. I'm
so sick and tired of listening to your minutia day
end of the day out She's going to get another
group of friends. Minusia is a good thing, though, because
it lends itself to that detail that we pride ourselves
on in forensics, we're some of the most boring people
(12:24):
in the world because we focus on those little minor
bits along the way. It's not going to be the
big broad picture. You know. Most of the time we're
looking for those those things that take a long, long time,
and so that detail is frustrating to some people, but
we find it intriguing. So can I just give you
the basic rundown of a case, how we would handle
(12:47):
this at the scene, and how we're going to treat
a body like this, and this still applies to this day.
Speaker 2 (12:53):
Okay, this is how you would have done it on
April first.
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Yeah, yeah, and Al's working cases then. So this is
something that I had been trained to do, and then
I took a lot of pride in doing and trying
to be as careful as possible. Even back then, I
would take precautions to glove up. We didn't wear bunny
suits back then, so if we had anything on our body,
it could fall off. Now, the generation before me, this
(13:18):
guy's didn't glove up. They didn't glove up. Ye have
to know, why would they? You know, I mean, yeah,
I know, why why would they?
Speaker 2 (13:29):
In eighty seven you said, yeah, we gloved up, Well,
you know, what. I'm watching the O. J. Simpson coverage
on Rockingham and they weren't gloved up, you know.
Speaker 1 (13:39):
Yes, some And the what's interesting if you go back
and look at that footage, there are people that are
wearing shoe covers and people that aren't. Yeah, you know,
it's my old it's a my old adage. Either you
got one foot in the water and one foot in
the boat, you know, and so you don't know you
know what's going on anyway. So yeah, with a case
like this, we would have been very very careful with
(14:00):
the body when collecting the body. Now this all starts,
and I'm thinking about after we have already taken all
the photography at the scene that we can. One of
the things we're going to do very painstakingly that scene
is we're going to protect that body any way that
(14:22):
we can. Well, I want everyone in the sound of
my voice right now to think about your hands. Think
about your hands just for a second, because I got
to tell you in this case, hands are the key
to everything. Consider your hands just for a moment. And hands,
(14:59):
even when we're baby, that's how we experience the world. Okay,
that's a site sound all that stuff too, But let's
face it, even when we're in our infantile stages, we're
touching things all the time. Well how much more so
in a case involving a grown woman. And here, you know,
(15:21):
we're thinking about this young lady that you know has
been found, you know, the victim of a gruesome homicide, Ronda.
And what miss Fisher was probably faced with at that
moment in her life, or what remained of her life,
is that she was trying to fend off an individual
(15:43):
that you know. Obviously I couldn't put myself in her shoes,
but the only thing I can imagine is at that
moment in toime, when she knows that life is leaving
her body, or it's about to she's in danger of it,
She's going to try to fend this person off. Well,
how are you going to do that? You're not going
to do it with your quick wit. You can do
(16:03):
it with your hands. You're gonna put your hands on them,
even if they're stronger than you. You're going to do
everything you can. Just imagine if somebody takes their hands
and wraps them around your throat and begins to squeeze. Well,
I think a lot of us think that we're going
to be very brave about it, and we'll do this,
and we'll do that. No you want, no, you want,
(16:24):
You're going it's almost primal. You're going to go up
and you're going to grab their hands to try to
get relief. That's the first step. Many times, and people
will say, you know, self defense classes, they'll talk about
things like, you know, kicking between the legs and raking
the face. Well, breaking the face might happen, but it's not.
I don't think that it necessarily happens all the time
by somebody saying I'm going to rake the face. Most
(16:46):
of the time it's a reactionary event where they're just
flailing about. That's what happens. That's where that point of
contact takes place, not just raking the face, but also
raking the hands or or digging her fingernails into the
hands and the wrist. Okay, that's that's important to remember here.
So back to her body at the scene, after after
(17:09):
her body would have been photographed and measured and all
these sorts of things that we do because did you know, Dave,
that we like to do triangulation of bodies at scenes
because if we want to, it is harder than it sounds.
(17:30):
What we used to do before we had GPS. We
want to triangulate the body with uh. I used to
use a rolling wheel if you were seeing those like
you see them on the side of the road. Well,
construction people use them too. I always carry a rolling
wheel and it would click it off. Okay, but you
have to go to a fixed point. So you find
three fixed points and you triangulate that body, and you
(17:52):
put I do like center mass of the chest, top
of the head, and generally I would select either the
left or the right foot and go from the sole
of the foot to another fixed point. I could triangulate.
Why do you do that? Well, not only to create
a sketch, but if I wanted to take a jury
back out there, I could take a template of a
body like a mannequin and place it right back in
(18:15):
that spot. Wow, okay, just so people can visualize it
if you wanted to recreate that scene. So those measurements
would have been pulled pulled rather sorry. And then after
all of that is done and the whole area is
inspected for any kind of ancillary evidence, you got to
be real careful because you don't want to trample on anything.
(18:36):
If you're removing the body, because there's a big process
to this, you have to make sure you got a
clean white sheet. Okay. You're going to take a clean
white sheet and place it inside of a fresh body bag, okay,
and the body is then picked up by individuals that
(18:56):
are using precautions body covering and they're placed down onto
the clean white sheet. When you place the body onto
the clean white sheet, you can either do this beforehand
or afterwards. I'd always do it when I have them
in the bag. I would take out brown paper bags
and now they have a different type of bag that
they use, and I would place one over each hand
(19:18):
and I would secure it with evidence tape around the wrist,
and I would write my name as a person that's
sealing it on there and I would put like if
it's right hand, I'd put an R with a circle
around it indicating right and then left. I know it
sounds crazy, but when the body gets back to the more,
I guess what we're going to do. Those are going
(19:39):
to be cut off. They're not going to The tape
is not going to be pulled off. You literally cut
it from the wrist and you have to have another
catchable portion there underneath another fresh, pristine, clean area to
hold the bag over. Because the reason we do that
is to protect the hands as they're going down the road,
because anything contained in there, if the body is like
(20:00):
I'm doing a josh josh jostling motion right now, is
if I'm on television, you're jost of. The body is jostling,
and anything that falls off of those fingertips or off
of even the palms of the hands is going to
be captured in that back. Wow. Okay, So going back
to the point of contact, raking, raking the face, raking
the neck, raking the wrist, doing impressions, you know, with
(20:23):
the fingernails, all that stuff is going to be collected
and accounted for in that bag, and that bag, once
it's taken off, it is actually rebagged individually, okay, and
then it goes to trace evidence. That's that's the process
that happens. And I'm only talking about right now. You know,
(20:48):
Morgan left out a lot. Now I'm just focusing on
the hands right now. That's just one of the steps
that we do. And all that stuff has to be
contained because what they're going to do is with with
these bags, Okay, they're going to put these bags under
a special type of microscope. Some will and they'll do
(21:12):
what's called a gross examination of the interior of that bag,
and they'll look for everything that's contained in there that
you can't necessarily see with the unaided eye, and any
of the little elements in there that they can pick
up on, Like you can find blood droplet, you can
find dried skin, you can find bits of skin hair,
you can even find different types of flora, you know,
(21:36):
elements of plants, all those sorts of things that are
contained that have fallen off. Okay, Now, in addition to
the bags, one of the things that's going to happen
with the hands is that the forensic pathologists will place
another will place another catch area, clean and pristine underneath
(21:58):
the hands. We will take a wooden stick and scrape
beneath each fingernail. Each fingernail get scraped. Then with clean
sterile nail clippers that come in a bag it's generally
an essay bag of sexual assault kit. You clip the
nails over this protected area and all that stuff is
(22:19):
gathered up. I've seen people do it. I've seen people
do it actually where they'll do a collection per finger,
and they'll keep each finger separated so there's no confusion
about it. Confusion because if you have it separated, say
if you've got the collection off of the right middle finger, Okay,
(22:39):
that gives you an idea of well, that person scraped
or put more pressure on this other subject with that
particular hand and scrape down and collected. Whereas we didn't
get anything off the right thumb, we didn't get anything
off the right pinky. Comparatively, did we get anything off
(22:59):
the left index finger? You see what I'm saying, And
so you can actually break it down by digit essentially,
that's just incredible. Yeah, and it's you see what I'm
talking about minutia and if you're taking your time with it,
If you're taking your time with it and you're not
trying to rush through the process. That's why in forensic
science we don't want anybody that's going to if you're
(23:20):
thinking about getting a career in forensics, we don't want
anybody that's, you know, that's going one hundred and ten
miles per hour. You have to have people that are
very thoughtful about what they're doing and painstaking because you know,
you can spend hours just on one case, you know, relative
(23:41):
to trace evidence. And you know, I got to tell you, Dave,
in this particular case's back actually came into play.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
Well. You know, I mentioned when we were talking about
this of how the scene would have been dealt with
in nineteen eighty seven versus later. And it's fascinating to
me that what you were talking about with the bags,
a lot of it didn't occur to me really of
what would go on. But knowing how many cases are
(24:10):
sold because of fingernails, what's under the fingernails? What is found?
Why is it a paper bag? You're not a plastic bag.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
Because plastic sweats. It's the most offensive thing that if
you really want to make forensics some bench I'm talking
about bench scientists, people with the white lab coats on
them that are sitting in a crime lab somewhere. If
you really want to make them furious, give them something
a plastic bag, because if it has any kind of well,
(24:40):
it's just think about it, okay, if it has any
kind if it is an organic substance that you're collecting,
you know, if it's like some kind of biologic okay
that you're trying to pull up, what does that sweating
do well, it degrades everything. I mean, it literally degrades.
It prompt decomposition you in the bag and maybe and
(25:02):
I'll tell you one of the worst worst things if
you've got like a bit of bloody clothing. I've actually
seen people that have done this before. I was assigned
out to this state crimeline for a while and they
some rural you know department had sent in they had
enough paper packs and they put and they had the
(25:24):
right idea because they had a bloody shirt, bloody pants,
bloody underwear, bloody bra bloody shoes, and they package them individually,
they packaged them in plastic and they sent them in.
You know, I've seen some of these cases where you
will actually see because of because of blood or other
(25:47):
biological elements. I've seen mold growing on things.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
Yeah, and that's you know, because the bag is sweating. Wow, right, sweating,
and that kind of prompts it. You know, those sorts
of things that that's the big no nose. So that's
why we use paper traditionally. Now they have special bags
that are kind of breatheable, but they're not plastic, and
so you can you know, and it's I think that
(26:12):
they're probably much more efficient to the task because you
know the paper bags that we use, Dave, these are
the same paper bags that if you went down to
the corner grocery store, it's the same type of bag.
I mean, look, and we had the small ones, we
had the real tiny ones, had the medium sized ones,
and then we had the gigantic ones. And so I've
(26:34):
bagged just about every reasonable area of a human body.
I put bags on heads, bagged hands, backed feet, and
then I bagged individual individual anatomical elements that are no
(26:55):
longer attached to a body, you know, just so that
you can collect trace evidence.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
Now, in this case, we've got we've got a woman
who's thirty years old, can't solve, don't know who killed her.
She's dead. She was sexually assaulted and left on the
side of the road, dead, lasting twenty five miles south
in Denver. Now, they're going to start with all the
usual suspects in any crime. They're going to start from
(27:21):
the insiding insact A boyfriend's associates feels she had dated,
what what did she do for work? They're going to
start looking at all of those people. That's a standard
rule here, right, Even if it's somebody who has found
like this doesn't even seem like an intimate person to me.
It doesn't seem like to me, And I'm probably really wrong.
But when I hear of somebody who was last seen
(27:42):
walking in Denver and her body has found twenty five
miles outside of town, discarded on the side of the road,
I'm not thinking of that as somebody that the person
had a connection with personally. I'm thinking that that sounds
like somebody thrown out trash.
Speaker 1 (27:57):
Yeah it does. You know. We you and I have
talked about this extensively and we will continue to talk, right,
And that's memorialization of the dead, right, you know, because
it's like you it's almost like you know, I've never
I do a lot of study of like medieval history
and those sort of things what I do with my
spare time nerd alert.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
But by the way, the stuff he looks up are
things that will make you have nightmares for the rest
of your life.
Speaker 1 (28:19):
But no, I think about like, you know, like the
Battle of stirling Bridge and in Great Britain, you know,
William Wallace and what in Great Britain then in England,
and when you go into one of those battlefields. You know,
the bodies are just left there and now they have
people who gout and collect them. Or you think about
any civil war battlefield, which we can't calculate those numbers.
Now they're mind blowing to us. Now where you've got
(28:41):
hundreds and hundreds of dead. Well, that wasn't a personal relationship, right, okay,
And maybe it's a bad comparison, but it's you know,
people were cannon fodder. You heard that term before where
they'll say that, you know, people, when you go to war,
you're cannon fodder. Right, Well, ne'sary missive of humans. When
(29:02):
you say that, that means that you have the value
is you throw in your body into the into the battle. Well,
if you think about this in those terms cannon fodder,
I think that you make an excellent point here, Dave,
because there is no value in her as a person.
(29:22):
You know, people proud alone about objectification. This is the
ultimate in objectification because we've got sexual assault here, and
that's another thing that that we would have to be
you know, and how did back then, how did they
arrive at that conclusion? Okay? It's this is a serialized event.
(29:42):
You're thinking about her clothing and status of her clothing.
And that's a big question that we always ask when
we there's actually in some I've actually seen in some
forms that are generated by Medical Examiner's Office investigative reports
and stuff, that it'll have a section there they'll say
status of clothing, all right, And they're not just talking
about like did they have a shirt on? They have
(30:03):
pants on. That's not what they're talking about. They're actually
asking were the pants not only on, but were they
button where they zipped? Was there underwear? Where were the pants?
And orientation atomically where they were pushed down to the knees. Okay,
the shirt was pulled up or pushed up, the bra
is pushed up. I can't tell you how many cases
(30:24):
I've worked of sexual assault where you find the body
and it's left in that status after they have been killed,
and you can really get an insight into the mind
of the person. I think to a certain degree that's
done this, and automatically you're not thinking that this person
is memorializing this individual in any way. They had a
(30:45):
purpose that they served some kind of twisted sexual gratification,
and then they choked our last breath out of them
and dumped them on the side of a road twenty
five miles away from where they were lasting. The reason
(31:21):
I was excited about this case because I'm sure that
some of our friends out there are saying more than
this happened thirty years ago. I'm are you so excited
about it? Well, I'm so excited about it is because
we've actually gotten answers after all this time, and it's
it is science that has led us to this. Science
(31:43):
is a wonderful thing nowadays, isn't it. It's got a
bad side, but it's boys got an upside too, when
you begin to think about these cases that are being
closed out right now, and they're being closed out because
of molecular evidence, Dave, And in this particular case, we
knew who she was, knew how she died, we never
knew who did it. And Dave, I'm here to turn
(32:05):
this over to you to say that we now have
a name, don't.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Well, you know, when I was looking at this, and
I was looking at dates because I was trying to
think of the investigators. And that's why I was asking
you different questions because I try to think of You've
got a time period here in nineteen eighty seven. It's
Denver area, and you've got a body. And there was
one person who had made his way through Colorado, Ted Bundy,
(32:31):
you know, and his news because he was not put
to death till eighty nine, so he was in prison,
you know, in eighty seven. But people out there were
still thinking, you know, he would sexually assault people, stranglehim,
kill him and dash. You know, he did that all
over the place. And I just wonder sometimes when police
officers come along, investigators come along a scene and they
(32:51):
start thinking, well, we've tried, We've gone with all the
usual suspects. We've gone with everybody close by, relationships, passing acquaintances,
and nothing is working out. Do we start going down
the list, Well, let's look at our sir, Let's look
at people who have killed a lot more than just one.
And you eliminate those that are dead or in jail
(33:12):
at the time. But years later, you know, after this
thing has gone cold, as it did many times when
I was looking at this after you sent it to him,
I'm like, wait a minute. In twenty seventeen, they broke
it out of the cold case files. They had DNA,
they had all the technology we had, you know, eight
years ago, and you know what they didn't solve it.
(33:36):
They did not crack the case. Still, I'm not saying
that I guess the science they just didn't come together
for them. It wasn't until the last twelve months, the
last twelve months where finally Ronda Marie Fisher, the thirty
year old woman who was last seen in Denver walking
on April the first, nineteen eighty seven, well found April
(33:58):
the first, nineteen eighty seven. We actually know who killed her,
and it was somebody that was well known to law enforcement,
somebody especially now looking back on it, who actually has
been dead for almost thirty years himself. Yeah, you know
this guy. His name is Vincent Darryl Groves. He died
(34:25):
in nineteen ninety six. Joe, How are you you know?
He dies nine years after killing her? He dies nine
years after killing Ronda. Now I want to know how
did he get away with it for that long? And
how did they possibly tie her death to a dead man?
Speaker 1 (34:42):
Guy?
Speaker 2 (34:42):
He's been dead for us. He's been warm food for
a long time.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
It was her hands, It was Wrong's hands. Wow, you know,
it's really weird, you know you think about it. You know,
when he was closing his eyes in death, he probably
thought that this was, you know, because he had confessed
other you know, and some people put his numbers. The
people in Colorado keep saying that one of the most
(35:08):
prolific in Colorado history. And I've heard the numbers range
all the way from fourteen to possibly twenty. You always
hear these weird kind of numbers. You know that they'll
the the expanse of these things is mind blowing. Sometimes, however,
did they do that?
Speaker 2 (35:27):
Sometimes though you've got a similar case over here, we
got no way of solving it, and we can depend
it on this guy. Just maybe give the family some
light at the end of the tunnel, you know what
I mean. Do you think that ever happens?
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Yeah, I think that it used to happen in the past.
And of course there were a couple of these guys
that got free lunches out of it too, you know,
going back to Audust two, thinking about him and Henry.
You know, they would get you know, free trips out
of this to go and indicate where they had killed somebody,
(36:01):
which is you know, super you know, super odd now,
and they would take credit for it, and of course
the other person by virtually you know, they're perpetrating, not
just horror that they've done previously. Now they're portraying another
crime because they're they're lying at that point toime and
and and keeping that individual on the street that might
still be perpetrating cases.
Speaker 2 (36:22):
I'd look at Henry Lee Lucas and think you felt
he did it for a pack of smokes and a
cup of coffee. You know, he would tell you anything.
But anyway, So tell me about this guy. Tell me
about Benson Groves show. How did they actually tag him?
Speaker 1 (36:33):
Well, they tagged him because what happened is they had
taken sample, you know, from him over the years, and uh,
he was doing a turn in state pen. You know,
he did several turns. He's a career offender. He had
been married and was relatively successful early on in his
(36:57):
young life. College student, played bad basketball up in Iowa,
then quit going to class, quit everything else, moved back
to Denver, or just outside of Denver, lived with his grandmother,
and he got a job I think as an electrician.
He had a lot of spare time on his hands. Well,
he would wind up cruising. I think it's called Colfax street.
(37:20):
I'd heard that term. I had a friend of mine
that used to be with Denver homicide, and I remember
him mentioning this he'd worked vice for a long time,
not this case, but just Colfax Street because this is
an area where pimps and prostitutes hanging. Well, this individual,
this perpetrator that is now deceased, began hanging out with
(37:40):
pimps and prostitutes and then after a period of time,
Dave he actually groomed a few women along the way.
His earliest kill was back in I think he had
a late seventies early eighties, and it was a girl
that he was pimping.
Speaker 2 (38:01):
And she was seventeen when he started pimping.
Speaker 1 (38:03):
She was seventeen. So they they had yeah, baka, they
had his sample. They had sample from him siblings or
his parents, I believe, And so that's you know, that's
just kind of sitting there. So you know, back to
the bags, when you're going when you're going to collect
(38:27):
this from a trace evidence standpoint, you never know where
this is going to wind up. That's one of the
cool things about forensics, those those little bitty actions that
you take all the way back in time. You know,
I'm becoming reflective now going back to eighty seven. Those
actions that maybe I took in a case back in
eighty seven that might still be unsolved. Did I do
(38:51):
the right thing at that particular time? Did I do
all of the collection? Because you've got to be real careful,
you don't know, you might not get a hit immediately.
But they had enough in the bank and in the
tank relative to what they had collected from her and
then from him in any associated relatives, David, they were
able to do a DNA match on him. And I
(39:12):
think that probably because you know, his kind of modus
operandi was he would take these girls off the street.
He was a violent, violent toward them. They I think
to a person, I think they're all strangled, every single
one of them.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (39:32):
This is not something where he's using a bludgeon or
a knife or you know whatever, a weapon, pistol or whatever.
He's actually using his hands, wrapping the hands around the
throat so you can feel the life leaving out of
body as he's sexually assaulting them. And now to mention
if they did the rape kits as well, this kind
(39:53):
of doubles up. And this is kind of interesting as well.
How many rape kits do they actually perform where they
would do swabs? You know the vaginal swabs, anal swabs,
oral swabs that we collect commonly with rape kits, hair pluckings,
and people don't realize this, did you know with if
there is genital the genital contact, Okay, in a rape,
(40:16):
what will happen is that you will have hairs, pubic
hairs that will fall off of the perpetrator or will
come off of the victim and attach to the perpetrator.
But most of the time we're looking for perp to
victim hair sample and we'll do we do combings. Actually
if you've heard of a fine tooth comb, we'll actually
do combing of the pubic region the hair, hoping that
(40:40):
we'll get a straight hair. And then we will do
hair pluckings as well, where we get the roots out, okay,
and a lot of that. That totality of this collection
wound up in this case and they're saying that it
came from the bag. So this is an this is
out from underneath her her fingernails. So in her last
(41:05):
moments trying to survive at the hands of this monster,
she did a better collection. She did a better evidence
collection than I've probably ever done in my entire life. Man,
because she raked him at that point in time, or
pressed her nails into him. She got something from him
that was part of his molecular blueprint, and it has
(41:29):
lingered all this time, even in death. Both these people
obviously are dead now. But you know how satisfying is this.
It's horrible, but you know again, how satisfying is it? Again?
Another example of if you're thinking about doing something out there,
if you're thinking about engaging this behavior, it ain't. It
(41:51):
ain't nineteen eighty seven anymore. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is by backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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