February 26, 2026 • 45 mins
This is a tale of two sisters, Karen and Debra.
Karen is loving, responsible, and well-liked by all who know her. She lived with and cared for her parents until they lost their battles with Alzheimer's and cancer. Karen also took care of her finances and was financially well-off for retirement.
Debra was gone for decades, living several states away in Louisiana. She never held a steady job and never had any money.
When their parents died, Debra moved back to Florida, with no money and no place to stay, and Karen let her sister move into her home.
Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack dig into the story of how the evil sister murdered the good sister with a bullet to the chest, wrapped her body in a trash bag, and buried her in a hole in the backyard.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.15 Introduction
02:10.97 Victim loves working in her yard
05:06.55 Two sisters, Karen and Debra
08:25.53 Debra comes back after parents die
12:14.34 Perp keeping victim close after death
16:55.11 Seeing a hole in the yard
20:57.88 Odor of decomposing body
25:33.91 Bad smell doesn't mean something is there
29:48.57 Very careful digging to not miss anything
35:07.70 Everything goes to the lab
40:27.15 Karen has one GSW to the chest
44:43.54 Debra claims she is "blameless"
45:28.45 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quodydas, but Joseph's gotten more. The best gardener that I
have ever known, hands down, is my mama. She can
make things grow where other people other people would pale.
It's amazing what she can do in a garden. And
(00:22):
her gardens are lovely. Now don't get me wrong, I'm
not saying, you know, when you go into her backyard
it looks like Versailles or anything, right, But it's amazing
what she can do just with a clipping. For instance,
I gave her, I don't know, I guess as a gift.
I gave her this like specialized fern many years ago,
and just out of the clippings that she saved from
(00:46):
this thing, she has got baskets to this day that
she gives away of these things. And you could say
that about a lot of her let's just say Flora.
But today we're going to talk about another beautiful garden,
(01:06):
a garden that was tended to with loving care by
a lady who spent it would seem most of her
time in it. And of course it's in Florida, so
kind of year round. Her name was Karen. Karen spent
(01:27):
a lot of time tending to her garden. But what
people didn't realize is that Karen would wind up buried
in it as well. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this
is body bags, David. I don't know that I've ever
(01:48):
asked you this question. Do you have a green thumb?
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Oh? You know, Joe asking me a question like that,
you gotta know better. I'm not the gardener, I'm the
goather tips the.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Gardener today with this case, this lady, she seems as
though that she spent the majority of her tom outside
just working in the yard. And you know, back to
my mother, it's very therapeutic for people. You can get
lost out there.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
And that's what Karen Pieas did. She worked in the yard,
not just the flowers, but the yard, I mean the grass,
the you know, the edging, every aspect of the guard
of her yard was important to her. And living in Florida,
she spent a lot of time working in the yard.
But let me give you a little background on Karen Joe.
Because Karen Pieas was known by neighbors as very friendly, loving,
(02:45):
just a wonderful nice person. They knew her as the
person working in the yard. When they didn't see her
in the yard for a couple of days and couldn't
get her on the phone. They knew something was wrong,
so they called their friends called used to do a
welfare check. Hey man, just go check on our friend.
Now when police shop up, I'm gonna give you the
(03:05):
backstory in just a minute, okay, because there's so much
There is so much more to this. The friends didn't
just make one phone call, okay, but to cut to
the nitty gritty, police show up to do a welfare check.
Karen is not in the house. They can't find her
and her sister, Deborah Patton, who lives with Karen. They
live in this house together in Florida, and she's giving
(03:30):
answers Joe to the questions police are asking and they're
not right. They're not right, and the police know she's lying.
They know that the person talking into them is lying
to them, and so they started looking around and one
thing leads to another, and they notice that there's like
(03:50):
a hole that's been dug in the backyard. You know
how when you dig a hole and you put the
dirt back in, it never levels out, you know. So
while one of the deputy he's just standing there, you know, watching,
they went ahead and got a warrant to do a
search and to make sure nothing else could go on.
And sure enough, Karen Paie is was found buried in
(04:12):
the backyard in about a two foot hole, and her
sister was arrested. Karen Patten was arrested in charge. Now,
by the way, I was looking at their ages, Joe
seventy two years old, sixty seven at the time. They're
not twins. The girls, the sisters were born thirteen months apart,
(04:34):
so kind of keep that in mind. These are sisters
who really are close in age, were raised very close
in age, but their adult lives total opposites. Joe and
I mean total opposites. So if you can imagine where
Karen Paie has stayed near the family home, she cared
(04:56):
for her adult parents as they got older. Karen maintained
a career on her own. She saved money. She was
known as a penny pincher. Okay, she was very concerned
about financial stability, and she took care of her parents
as they slipped into Alzheimer's dementia into Alzheimer's, and she
was there caring for their parents.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Well.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Deborah Patten meanwhile had married and was gone. She was
living in Louisiana with her husband for twenty eight years.
Never came back to help care for the elder adult parents.
That was Karen's job. But once the parents died, Deborah
shows up and moves in with Karen. Now I mentioned
(05:42):
Karen Pius has taken care of this house. She took
care of the parents. Everything is owned by her. She
owns this. Deborah shows up having done nothing and moves in.
Neighbors are like, you know, Deborah's not really nice to you.
They heard arguments, They knew Deborah just pushed Karen every
which way. Joe, to give you an example, I mentioned
(06:05):
Karen stays home to take care of mom and dad
as they go through. I don't know how many of
y'all understand how bad Alzheimer's is. It's really really rough.
On my hat's off to you if you've heard for
an adult, it's just rough. But Karen stayed, took care
of both mom and dad. Deborah didn't have any to
do with them. She shows up after they're gone and
(06:29):
she's left her husband of twenty eight years. Deborah has
and moves in with Karen. They don't get along. Now,
when I say they don't get along, Joe. I'm thinking,
if Karen has been living in this community her whole
adult life and taking care of the house and the
family and all that, and then somebody else moved, that
new person coming into the mix is the one causing
(06:51):
the problems, not the person that's been there the whole time.
So when I say they didn't get along on something
of no, Deborah did not get along with Karen. She
wanted what Karen had. Deborah had nothing, no money, no nothing.
She never kept a job for very long, did not
proceed very long. She couldn't, you know. So here's Karen,
who has taken care of everything, had her own career
(07:11):
and took care of mom and dad. Now she owns
her own house, she proud of her yard, and here
comes her sister with nothing. Debrah has nothing, but Karen
puts her up.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Well, you know this dynamic started. Uh, you know, it's
amazing as a death investigator when I always tell I
always tell students, I've given interviews where they say, well,
what's the most interesting interesting thing about being a death
investigator aside from being around the dead. And this is
(07:48):
going to be really this is going to sound really,
really creepy, but I'm going to go ahead and go ahead.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
And say it.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
What's really cool about it is that you literally get
to peek in people's closets, and if you want a
good story, suddenly, because of the intimate access that you
have behind the scenes kind of seeing the way things
develop in that world, you have this narrative that's laid out,
(08:18):
you know, and suddenly, and many times it'll burst on
the scene. You'll have this kind of moment of clarity
when you're working a case and you begin to understand
interpersonal dynamics. And let me tell you something, when you're
dealing with uh, with sick parents, when you're dealing with
the death of a parent, there is nothing like the
(08:43):
stimulus that that is interjected into the relationship between siblings,
because if there is something ugly there, it's going to
pop up. But you know, I submit to you that
this ugliness has it far. It extends way way back
into the past. It wasn't just the moment she shows
(09:04):
up on the doorstep here, and there's probably been ongoing
tension over the years. There's probably been resentment, you know,
from the perspective of this sister that just you know,
kind of floats in from Louisiana, incredible jealousy. You know,
(09:25):
parents always preferred you over me.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
All the while.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
You know she's not doing anything to lift her finger
to help, And you're right, it's a There are people, Dave,
I don't see how they keep from cracking under the burden.
And if you've got two parents that are affected by
any kind of dementia, it is exhausting. I don't see
(09:53):
how people do it. And you're having to bear that
burden day in and day out, shifting from one to
the other to try to keep control over it, try
to manage it. Just the finances alone. I can see
why she would retreat to a garden day. I really can.
For those few precious moments she might be able to
(10:13):
go out there and retrieve some bit of sanity, some
bit of solemnity, some bit of peace, maybe hoping that
she would walk back into that house where her parents
had been, in the state that they were in, and
something magical would have happened. But I got to tell you,
(10:36):
in the case of Karen, after her sister shows up,
it was anything but magical. Because when the sister showed up,
Hell followed with her. It amazes me, Brother, Dave, that
(11:07):
we've had this conversation before about deposited remains. The dynamic
that interests me the most from a forensic well, it's
behavioral and it's also forensics as well as kind of
this interesting blend because I could I could sit there
and look at a depressed area in the ground, do
(11:31):
do a retrieval of remains and excavation if you will,
of remains. But I always always think, why do people
why do people take not just bodies but evidence and
hang on to them in there in their environment. And
that's that's always been a very fascinating dynamic. I think
(11:53):
it has something to do I've always thought this. I
think it has something to do with potential perpetrator wanting
to have constant control and watchcare over what they've done.
You know, isn't it interesting, Dave? How many cases that
you and I have covered over the years now where
(12:15):
you will have a perpetrator that will take a human remain,
for instance, and just discarded like it's rubbish, you know,
out in some horrible area. But yet we have these
others that kind of latch on to these and literally
hang on to them and continue to exist, perhaps in
(12:36):
the same environment where just out your front door or
your kitchen window. You pull the curtains aside, and there's
active decomposition going on in your backyard. Think about that
just for a second. I mean, that's a real I think.
I think that there could be an academic study actually
(12:57):
that could be applied to this. You begin to look
at depositive remains and kind of the relationship between the
perpetrators and remains, and to see kind of how they
you know, how how did all this come together? What
was your rationale for hanging on us.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
I have a theory, well, pretty much the same thing
of what you were saying about control. I think that
when you have somebody that commits a murder and they
just discard the body to get away from it because
they have no connection to it, it is just an it.
They don't have a connection to that person. They might
even know the name, you know, They just they did
their thing, they killed them whatever, and now I'm getting
(13:35):
rid of the body. But when it comes to this
type of a situation where a sister has killed a
sister and put her remains in the backyard in a
hole two foot hole, and she's right there, I think
it's because that way her body is there in the backyard.
And in this case, I think Debra had control over,
you know, anybody that wants to see. She knows nobody's
(13:58):
discovered the body. Yet if no wo he discovers the body,
I'm free and clear, you know, and that way, and
I think that's the case with others who keep somebody
close to them where they can watch over the remains,
because it's like, if somebody goes near it, I can
go out there and I can get them looking someplace else.
I control the remains. I can keep somebody from finding it.
(14:18):
But if I don't see them, if I bury it
out in the middle of nowhere, I don't know, one
hundred might fall over it or something. But Joe, my
question for you about this. Okay, you get the cops
in the backyard, they get a warrant, they see that
there has been there's disturbed ground in the backyard. Not unique,
and that is kind of unique. When you have two
elderly women at the time, both they're sixty seven years old,
(14:41):
You're not going to see them out there digging a
hole for no reason. So there had to be a
reason for it, and they want to look, how do
law enforcement because they're going to be the first ones
to look at something like this. How did they go
about digging what they believe? You know, hey, we got
to find out what's in this area before we call
because it could be nothing, you know, But do you
(15:03):
have to like dig up and see if there's something
in there?
Speaker 1 (15:05):
What?
Speaker 2 (15:05):
How does that start? Do I have as a cop
with a gun and a badge writing tickets? One minute?
Am I in the backyard digging this with a tan traw?
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Okay, excellent question, and kind of let me break it
down to you this way. I know people use use
motorized augers now too to put in post dig post
holes with. Okay, but let's go back in time and
think about a and lord knows I've had to use
these over the years. I used to work on a
(15:34):
fencing crew when I was in college, one of the
toughest jobs I ever had. Think about an old uh
uh posthold digger. You know it's got the two you
know it's got the the the two spoons. They look
like gigantic spoon driving it into the round, into the ground.
(15:55):
You're pinching it bringing it out. So if you're if
you're trying to analyze this from a forensic standpoint, and
you're looking at a defect in the ground, you look at,
say the space, and think about kind of the cylindrical
hole that you would generate with a posthole digger or
even an augur Anythink, now, if I'm going to search
(16:18):
that area and I'm looking for somebody that is missing,
what's the potential that they could be in a hole
with a caliber the size of a coffee can probably
probably not much. Now, could you discard evidence in there?
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Yeah, you could put a weapon in there, or you
could just be planting trees for all I know. But
if I see some kind of irregularity, and this is
one of the things that in what's referred to as
forensic tafonomy, which is a study of the ground, you
look at the ground from the perspective of the potential
(17:01):
of what you could harvest out of it from an
evidentary standpoint, and also are the dimensions of this thing?
Are they very uniformed? Are they irregular? Because when you
start to look at uniformity. Okay, and let's say you
want to you want to dig a hole. I keep
using hole. Everybody thinks that it's you know, you're talking
(17:23):
about a circle. But let's just say you're pulling the
earth out of it. Do you have definitive margins here
where you can say, okay, yeah, ge way, is that
looks like a rectangle? It looks like a square, but
you've kind of got this randomized thing. And if you're
using kind of like a spade spade shaped shovel, this
(17:44):
comes to a point at the bottom. You've got square
bottom shovels, you've got spade shaped shovels, and it's got
these kind of curved edges around. Not a lot of
care has been given to that. This is just one
thing that we look for. What is the potential that,
first off, this was dug for some other purpose, or
(18:05):
does it have the potential the dimensions here for discarding
human remains or covering up human remains. One of the
things that's fascinating to me about this.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Is that.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
When you think about the size and the only dimension
that they are giving us, Dave is two feet Well,
it's two feet two feet wide, two feet long. Is
it two feet deep? I'm going with two feet deep. Okay,
so we don't really know what the outer perimeter is.
Two feet deep is insufficient to the task I'll put
(18:42):
it to you that way, and let me flip this
around and let me throw this out to you. Okay,
that hole in and of itself is accusatory. It's accusatory
to let's just say it's the sister and she's looking
out the window at it. It's accused tory in the
(19:04):
sense that Karen the gardener had a real sense of
the yard of the esthetic that whole screams at a
potential perpetrator and says, even in digging a hole, you're insufficient.
And everything you've done in life, and this is a
great example of it. You're talking about a two foot
(19:25):
hole to get rid of your sister's body. Here is
such a loser because the sister would not have done this.
You know what she would have done. She probably would
have got steaks, and I mean that you can drive
in the ground. She would have gotten kite string, she
would have tied it off, she would have carefully measured
(19:46):
it because of the aesthetic of it, because she saw beauty.
But you know, you have to plan beauty. And what
it comes down to with this is this is pure horror.
I think, Dave that once they begin to look at this,
and I've actually had this happen. People think that you
can take dirt and shovel it over human remains and
(20:12):
you're not gonna smell anything. That is not the case.
That's one of the many reasons. There are other there
are other reasons. But you know, in funerary practices in
America and worldwide, you go deep. Okay, so and six
(20:32):
feet is kind of you know, it's kind of the
standard measurement, six feet deep, and then you cover it, right,
you have to cover it and you're not going to
have some kind of smell emanated. And I know people
are saying, well, Morgan, what about in balm bodies. We're
not talking about in BALMD bodies. We're just talking about
because not everybody's inbalm. Embalming is one of the things
(20:52):
that is it's very unique to Western culture. There's a
whole other world out there. There are people that bury
non embalmed bodies.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
You know, Griffith wasn't involved.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
I mean seven thirty that morning, ten thirty that morning
they were burying him.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, my wife and I
are talking about, you know, into the ground. We're talking
about natural burial here with no preservation. You know what,
you know, what's kind of what's the point?
Speaker 2 (21:22):
You know what you would I always thought you would
like dedicate your body to your skills and let them.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Know that's not going to happen.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Okay, let me go back to this real quick, Joe.
You've got the two cops and they're looking for Karen.
They talked to her sister, and they know sister Deborah
is lying to them that she doesn't know where her
sister is. Her sister's car is in the garage, her
sister's phone, her sister's while it's all still here, Karen's
stuff is here, and the woman who lives with her,
(21:53):
her sister says, I don't know where she is, and
the cops know she's lying. They see this disturbed ground
in the backyard. They decide they, being the police, they
want to look at it. They get a warrant. Now
do the police do the officers do this on their own?
Do they go out there and just you know, with
their hands, start, you know, scrubbing away. Let's see what
we got here, because you're only going to be we
(22:15):
know postfact, we know after the fact that it's only
two feet deep. That's what we're told, But Karen's body
was placed in trash bags, in a black trash bag
with bungee cords wrapped around it and duct tape. So
if her body is placed in there, are the police
(22:35):
going to be able to smell, you know, the body
and realize we got something here we need to explore.
Are they going to get on their hands and knees
and start pulling dirt? No?
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Okay, no, I if if they were, if I were
whispering in their ear as an advisor, I'd say freeze. Okay,
because okay, so this is kind of interesting. I gotta,
I gotta, I gotta tell you this, this is kind
of cool. Well, I'm so glad you brought this up.
Does smell equal probable cause? Kind of fascinating, right, I
(23:07):
mean when you think, yeah, because you know, we think
many times if we see blood coming Okay, let's just
say we've got a closed door in a closet and
we see blood coming out from beneath in a house,
I would think that if I'm a police officer and
I'm clearing the house and I see blood what appears
to be blood, right, I can't fall into that trap. Forensically,
(23:29):
you're going to nail me. So if I if I
look down and I see what appears to be blood
coming from beneath a door, first off, I'm going to
have my weapon out, and secondly, I'm going to carefully
open the door and I see a body in there,
after I check them to see if they have any vitals.
I'm not pulling the body out, Okay, I'm backing out
(23:53):
because that's a matter of public safety with a body
or let's just say, we don't know it's a body yet.
All we all we have is smell. We have a dimension.
Remember we got to go back to the dimensional aspect
of this. Could it contain a body? Yeah, potentially if
they smell it, which I submit to you that you
(24:15):
could through trashbacks. Just think about this. How many times
have you ever walked to your garbage can outside, okay,
and you've got your kitchen garbage bagged up, and you
lift the lid on that puppy and all of a sudden,
it's like, what was it the Thriller song? The funk
of forty thousand years rushes out, you know, and distraction
(24:37):
in the face. Yeah, dude, yeah, it's foul. But here's
here's the slippery slope because we know lawyers are watching
everything we do. Right, if I don't secure a warrant
before I start moving earth on this thing, anything that
I uncover relative to this has the potential of being
(24:59):
thrown out out so and it has gotten to the
point now in the world that we exist in that
if you do not secure a warrant before you get
your trial out, you get your brushes out, You've literally
got you know. Now, they were kind of like people
that you've seen guys that do ceramic tiles, that are
(25:22):
wearing those knee pads. You know, you've got all your
equipment out Before you do that, you better have a
magistrate or judge sign off on this thing. Because here's
the thing, just because it smells bad doesn't necessarily mean
that there is something there. But what they found when
they finally excavated the spot was quite shocking. Thing about
(26:03):
criminals is they don't think things through and when it
comes to buried remains, the last thing on their mind
is vegetation. And it has been It's been one of
those things that has caught people in the past. When
(26:26):
I'm thinking about digging a hole in the yard, Dave,
I'm you know, if I'm just going out in my
backyard to dig a hole, I know that I have
to refill the hole or pack the dirt around a
tree I'm planning, or whatever it is I'm doing. From
an excavation standpoint, crooks don't do that. Did you know that.
(26:48):
Let's say they will dig a hole and bury, say
like a body in an area, and they'll put the
same dirt back in. They don't take time to pull
the grass out, shake the grass off grass because you
can actually look down and I've seen this happen and
you've got roots staring back up at your face. And
as you well know, we were talking about things that
(27:09):
the cops would have seen out there. I think that
that's something that's significant. If you've got roots, if you're
looking at roots, you should not be looking at roots. Okay,
you've got Saint Augustine grass. We're talking about Florida. Saint
Augustine grass is everywhere, a thick lush, you know, really green,
loves that tropical environment. Those roots are staring you in
(27:30):
the face. You know, when did grass start growing inverted?
Speaker 2 (27:33):
You know?
Speaker 1 (27:34):
So you're thinking, you're thinking, okay, this is just not
the case. So you have to be very careful because
it's not just if somebody is doing this in a frenzy.
You might see something on the surface that should not
be there like it can be. You know, I had
a couple of guys that we caught in New Orleans
(27:54):
that killed a photographer out of the French court. They
had escaped from Florida State pen. Actually everybody winds up
in the French French Quarter or Vegas, right, And so
they took this guy out that was a cameraman and
beat him to death with his camera tripod and buried
him out in the marsh. And I caught this case.
(28:16):
And you know, we caught that guy. We caught those
guys because they flicked a cigarette butt down into the hole.
Wow yeah yeah, And it had DNA deposition on it.
So you know, you have to look for those tiny
little things like that, and you really as an investigator,
you have to adjust your lens because it's really easy
(28:40):
to kind of take a bulldozer approach here when you
should be doing surgery to observe and to document an area.
You begin to look at this and you think, Okay,
what is it that I need to see? And you
have to be patient. You have to be so patient
out here because it's so tempting, and just.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Think about it.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
It's like a god. This is a bad example, but
I'll go ahead and say it. It's like a kid
on Christmas morning that's unwrapping a present. That same part
of your brain is stimulated out and seen. I know
that sounds grotesque, but it really is. You're thinking, Okay,
I know in my heart of hearts that there's probably
a body down here. Okay, you have to resist the urge.
(29:25):
You have to resist the urge. This is why I
always recommend that you have a forensic anthropologist on site
with you, because they can kind of throw the brakes
on there. You leave them to be in charge. This
is what they do because if you don't, well, if
you don't, I mean, like me, I'm going to go in,
(29:46):
you know, with no breaks on. I will, but not
to the degree of friends of anthropologists, because they start
off in like one inch squares, brushing things away and
it can get really tedious. But there's a lot of
importance here because they don't want to miss a single thing. Dave,
And in this case, I think that I think that that.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
That was it was.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
I'll put it through this way. They aired on the
cautious side here as opposed to just going in like
a bull in a china shop.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
And you know, interesting, as I was digging into this,
digging digging into this story and found out, you know,
the neighbors called for the because they weren't getting responses
on the phone, they weren't getting answers from Devon Patten,
and they called police to do the welfare check, and
that's what led to the finding of the disturbed ground
in the backyard that leads to Karen being found in
(30:38):
these garbage bags, black garbage bags with the bungee cords
and duct tape. But I just give you an idea.
When all of this is going on, you know, as
they're working the investigation, neighbors are saying, hey, man, they
didn't get along. Karen had been here for years. We've
known her for a long time, and she told us
if she ever went missing or that her sister probably
(31:01):
did it, because her sister said had told her to
her face. She's like, Karen is telling friends, Deborah said
she's gonna kill me. Deborah's got a gun, Deborah is
gonna And so as police are getting this information, and
they're looking at the lives of the sisters. Karen, consistent
with mom and dad their whole lives, you know, took
care of them, and she owns this house. Deborah in
(31:24):
a twenty eight year marriage, couldn't keep a job and
walks away from her husband in New Orleans or Louisiana,
pardon me, Louisiana, and comes to Florida to crash in
her sister's house, you know, something, Joe, to make her
sister happy. And Karen owned this home outright, it was
her home. She built Deborah a luxury chef's kitchen inside
(31:46):
that home, just a beautiful, a gourmet kitchen. This is
what Karen did for her sister, to make her sister happy.
And Karen, who owns the home, she actually has a
small little kitchen that type thing set up for herself
in the garage. That's what Karen did, bending over backwards
to make Deborah happy. And eventually, you know, Karen ends
(32:09):
up in the hole in the backyard. But as they
as they being the investigators, Joe, all right, we have
found Karen's body in the backyard. What do we do
now we see that we have a body in the
garbage bags, yep. And the bungee cords are wrapped around
her body and then the bags are secure with a
(32:31):
duct tape. So tell me about this. How are you
going to unroll all? Are you going to take this
whole thing out of the ground with dirt back to
the lab?
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Yes? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I can't guarantee that
they did that. This is one of the things that
is really hard to get across to crom scene investigators.
You do not, under any circumstances want to practice bag open.
(33:01):
And here's the thing. You remember JJ and Tylely right?
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Ohious? Yet yeah, I had to bring that up right.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
So with JJ, one of the problems I had with
that case is that you know, you remember he was
cocooned in bags and he was buried adjacent to that
empty pond. Yes, And I remember the investigators it seems
like it was during the trial and it was like
one of these cringe moments for me. They said, we
(33:32):
opened the bag and could see his head or see
his hair, And I'm thinking, why the hell you open
in the bag?
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Yeah? Why?
Speaker 1 (33:40):
I mean, you know that the subject that's inside the
bag is to cease. Now you know that something horrible
has happened. Where are you going to risk everything by
not taking the remains to a controlled environment. Okay, you
have to be able to restrain yourself to the point,
(34:01):
because anything you do out there, it's like I was
just saying a second about the you know, I know
it's not necessarily the same thing, but with a cigarette butt, Okay,
if you just kind of blast through this thing, there's
no confirmatory thing here going on. You know that you've
got somebody that's deceased for my money, Okay. And how
I would instruct people is, ye know, we can kind
(34:25):
of palpate the outside of this bag very very carefully.
It feels like human form. I think we're going to
go to the medical examiner's office and which they have there.
The state of Florida is broken down into medical examiner districts,
and they're pretty dark on good at what they do.
They're used to this sort of thing. You roll in
(34:45):
there with that bag and you don't try to listen.
You try to do everything you can to not brush
away dirt. Period end of paragraph. I don't care how
dirty it is. I don't care if they're mag it's
crawling all over the place. You take everything to the lab,
(35:06):
specifically the Medical Examiner's office, and you put it in
that controlled environment because just by okay, just by splitting
the bag open, let's say that there were points of
contact there relative to layton prints. You say, Morgan, it's
been buried in the earth. It rains in Florida. I
don't care, because you don't know what layton prints might
(35:30):
might have been preserved on the outside. You don't know
what's under under the surface. I mean, how many Let
me ask you this, my friends, how many times have
you taken a garbage bag and I know you're thinking,
I'm gonna pop it like this, I'm gonna get it open. Okay,
guess what you do that you don't think about? You
(35:51):
readjust your hands many times and put them on the
inside of the bag. Well, that's a point of contact.
And guess what else? If you like that one, I
got another one for you. You leave behind latent, Prince,
and particularly in this day and age, you leave behind
DNA deposition as well, just by touching the inside. So
(36:12):
if you're going to cowboy it up as an investigator
and go in there and you begin to at the
scene and you begin to manipulate the bag in some way.
You know, you pull out your buck knife that you
got on the side, or your spider coat knife out
of your pocket. You flick it open dramatically and you
begin to slice open the bag like you're in some
episode of some ridiculous television show. Well, it's not controlled.
(36:38):
You have got to remain maintain control. And that's why
it's you cannot go into this haphazardly. You don't want
to cut through the tape. You don't want to dislodge
any of the bungee cords. And sometimes, you know, bungee
cords failed, they become unattached. Lord knows, I've had I've
had them pop me in the face when I'm trying
(36:58):
to tie things down my truck. No pain like it
in the world.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
My brother lost an eye to a buncht ye.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Lord.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Yeah, they're so dangerous man, and and and they're un
there's they're not predictable. Don't touch them. Don't touch them
in any way again until you get back to the
controlled area. Now, I am sure that the authorities down
in Florida they do enough of these. They would have
They're not in some rural location.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
It's just outside of Tampa. Bay.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Yeah, they're there. I have I would bet money on
these people that they took due care with this, and
we're trying to be very, very careful because there's all
kinds of things you can get off of plastic bags.
And at this point, all you know, after you've served
a warrant on this property, all you know is that
(37:50):
you've got a body that's wrapped in a bag. You
haven't hooked anybody up on charges yet, so you have
to collect. You're trying to build a case and build
it out. But daved, I got tell you when they
finally got those bags off of this poor woman's body, who,
by the way, I haven't said this. You know she
was a retired engineer for Verizon.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
I know that.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
And she's nobody's fool.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
No that is think. She was such a nice She's nice, brilliant,
took care of herself, took care of her parents, took
care of her money, and then here comes her thirteen
month old You know the difference in age thirteen months Yeah, yeah,
and Deborah was thirteen months older than Karen. Karen was
professional and was just wonderful and everybody loved her and
(38:36):
then never do well, Deborah shows up and it all
goes to hell in a handbasket.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
You're right, Dave, it does. It goes downhill really quickly.
When this I don't know, I don't know how to
put it. This human leech shows up, because that's kind
of the way it feels at this point in tom.
You know when you can tell that. I think anytime
you can learn a lot about a person that perpetrates
(39:07):
a homicide by the way they treat remains. This seems
to be rather frenzied. I would think maybe spontaneous. It
happened in a flash. And you know when she when
she was killed, Karen still had a necklace around her
(39:28):
neck with the name Karen on it. So in the
course of this crime and the cocooning of her body,
there was no effort to try to take eyes off
of who this was. Because granted, listen, I know that
(39:49):
many people think that when you see a necklace that
says Karen on it, that's a positive idea. I don't
trust things like that. I have to have it scientifically
verified because too many times I've personally been burned. There
are other people that have been burned, and you have
to take doe care with all of this that's very important.
(40:12):
And in this particular case, when they finally got Karen's
body out of this, these bags got the tape detached.
She sustained a single gsw to the chest. And you know,
just think about this woman's lovely woman that has and
(40:33):
she shot like an animal yep, and then her remains
are treated like she's an animal and buried literally adjacent
to this place that she loves. I guess that, you know,
there's nothing ironic about it, but you have to look
at it and you think, you know, all of this
love and care that she's put into this home, she's created,
the care that she gave to her parents, the beautiful
(40:55):
garden that she had, she worked in daily. She worked
toward retirement. Anybody that gets to retirement, God bless everybody
out there. You know what a labor this is. And
to have it all just taken from her in a
flash because somebody is jealous of her, somebody has got
(41:16):
issues with her that cannot live their own life on
their own.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Dave, I'm you know you you actually laid it all
out perfectly. Joe and I did look at something on
this because they never found they being investigators, never found
the murder weapon. They were never able to determine, you know,
what gun was used, what type of gun. But I'm
(41:41):
gonna read you something here. While the specific murder weapon
was not explicitly identified, evidence included DNA from Deborah Patten
on blood covered latex gloves found with the body, and
surveillance footage showing Deborah Patten the shovel. Now, this surveillance
(42:02):
footage was from a next door neighbor, Joe, we should
all have this type of individual as our next door neighbor.
I made a note when I sent this because the
surveillance video from the neighbor was a Hillsboro County deputy
who has this surveillance video showing the victim, Karen, entering
(42:26):
her home on May twenty fourth, twenty twenty one, last
time she has seen alive. The video also depicts Deborah
Patten throwing several large trash bags into the garbage and
shows Deborah Patten walking with a shovel. After everything was
(42:48):
said and done, Joe, Deborah Patton is charged with murder.
But the reason it took so long and the reason
we're talking about this today, because this just got adjudicated.
It's gone on this long because you cannot you cannot
(43:10):
try somebody who is incompetent stand trial. And over the years,
Devora Patten was deemed incompetent to stand trial. She remained
in the state mental hospital for treatment for a couple
of years. It wasn't until February last year that a
(43:31):
judge ruled Debora Patent competent to stand trial. And when
she finally went to trial last month, the jury did
not have to deliberate long. I think it was an hour,
and they judged her guilty of second degree murder of
her own little sister. Little sister who took care of
(43:56):
her when she had nothing, fed her when she had
no food, gave her a place to stay when she
had nowhere to stay, Joe. And by the way, you
know what police found, Well, they found a note written
by Deborah Paton describing how she was going to kill
(44:17):
her ex husband in Louisiana, how she was going to
drive there and kill him and then she was going
to kill herself. Actually took everybody out.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
But yeah, you know, Dave, what was really horrific about this?
I think during the period of time, first off, she
stated to the court that that she was blameless here. Yeah,
blame completely blameless. If that's not bad enough. She smiled
(44:48):
and laughed during this period of tom in court saying
that she's not blameless, and she offered up some kind
of half hearted prayer that was directed toward the judge,
talked about how the world is populated with evil people,
this sort of thing. Well, on that count, she's right,
(45:09):
because I got to tell you, at the end of
the day, Deborah Patten is a glaring example of pure,
unadulterated evil. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is bodybags
Quodydas, but Joseph's gotten more. The best gardener that I
have ever known, hands down, is my mama. She can
make things grow where other people other people would pale.
It's amazing what she can do in a garden. And
(00:22):
her gardens are lovely. Now don't get me wrong, I'm
not saying, you know, when you go into her backyard
it looks like Versailles or anything, right, But it's amazing
what she can do just with a clipping. For instance,
I gave her, I don't know, I guess as a gift.
I gave her this like specialized fern many years ago,
and just out of the clippings that she saved from
(00:46):
this thing, she has got baskets to this day that
she gives away of these things. And you could say
that about a lot of her let's just say Flora.
But today we're going to talk about another beautiful garden,
(01:06):
a garden that was tended to with loving care by
a lady who spent it would seem most of her
time in it. And of course it's in Florida, so
kind of year round. Her name was Karen. Karen spent
(01:27):
a lot of time tending to her garden. But what
people didn't realize is that Karen would wind up buried
in it as well. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this
is body bags, David. I don't know that I've ever
(01:48):
asked you this question. Do you have a green thumb?
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Oh? You know, Joe asking me a question like that,
you gotta know better. I'm not the gardener, I'm the
goather tips the.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Gardener today with this case, this lady, she seems as
though that she spent the majority of her tom outside
just working in the yard. And you know, back to
my mother, it's very therapeutic for people. You can get
lost out there.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
And that's what Karen Pieas did. She worked in the yard,
not just the flowers, but the yard, I mean the grass,
the you know, the edging, every aspect of the guard
of her yard was important to her. And living in Florida,
she spent a lot of time working in the yard.
But let me give you a little background on Karen Joe.
Because Karen Pieas was known by neighbors as very friendly, loving,
(02:45):
just a wonderful nice person. They knew her as the
person working in the yard. When they didn't see her
in the yard for a couple of days and couldn't
get her on the phone. They knew something was wrong,
so they called their friends called used to do a
welfare check. Hey man, just go check on our friend.
Now when police shop up, I'm gonna give you the
(03:05):
backstory in just a minute, okay, because there's so much
There is so much more to this. The friends didn't
just make one phone call, okay, but to cut to
the nitty gritty, police show up to do a welfare check.
Karen is not in the house. They can't find her
and her sister, Deborah Patton, who lives with Karen. They
live in this house together in Florida, and she's giving
(03:30):
answers Joe to the questions police are asking and they're
not right. They're not right, and the police know she's lying.
They know that the person talking into them is lying
to them, and so they started looking around and one
thing leads to another, and they notice that there's like
(03:50):
a hole that's been dug in the backyard. You know
how when you dig a hole and you put the
dirt back in, it never levels out, you know. So
while one of the deputy he's just standing there, you know, watching,
they went ahead and got a warrant to do a
search and to make sure nothing else could go on.
And sure enough, Karen Paie is was found buried in
(04:12):
the backyard in about a two foot hole, and her
sister was arrested. Karen Patten was arrested in charge. Now,
by the way, I was looking at their ages, Joe
seventy two years old, sixty seven at the time. They're
not twins. The girls, the sisters were born thirteen months apart,
(04:34):
so kind of keep that in mind. These are sisters
who really are close in age, were raised very close
in age, but their adult lives total opposites. Joe and
I mean total opposites. So if you can imagine where
Karen Paie has stayed near the family home, she cared
(04:56):
for her adult parents as they got older. Karen maintained
a career on her own. She saved money. She was
known as a penny pincher. Okay, she was very concerned
about financial stability, and she took care of her parents
as they slipped into Alzheimer's dementia into Alzheimer's, and she
was there caring for their parents.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
Well.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Deborah Patten meanwhile had married and was gone. She was
living in Louisiana with her husband for twenty eight years.
Never came back to help care for the elder adult parents.
That was Karen's job. But once the parents died, Deborah
shows up and moves in with Karen. Now I mentioned
(05:42):
Karen Pius has taken care of this house. She took
care of the parents. Everything is owned by her. She
owns this. Deborah shows up having done nothing and moves in.
Neighbors are like, you know, Deborah's not really nice to you.
They heard arguments, They knew Deborah just pushed Karen every
which way. Joe, to give you an example, I mentioned
(06:05):
Karen stays home to take care of mom and dad
as they go through. I don't know how many of
y'all understand how bad Alzheimer's is. It's really really rough.
On my hat's off to you if you've heard for
an adult, it's just rough. But Karen stayed, took care
of both mom and dad. Deborah didn't have any to
do with them. She shows up after they're gone and
(06:29):
she's left her husband of twenty eight years. Deborah has
and moves in with Karen. They don't get along. Now,
when I say they don't get along, Joe. I'm thinking,
if Karen has been living in this community her whole
adult life and taking care of the house and the
family and all that, and then somebody else moved, that
new person coming into the mix is the one causing
(06:51):
the problems, not the person that's been there the whole time.
So when I say they didn't get along on something
of no, Deborah did not get along with Karen. She
wanted what Karen had. Deborah had nothing, no money, no nothing.
She never kept a job for very long, did not
proceed very long. She couldn't, you know. So here's Karen,
who has taken care of everything, had her own career
(07:11):
and took care of mom and dad. Now she owns
her own house, she proud of her yard, and here
comes her sister with nothing. Debrah has nothing, but Karen
puts her up.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
Well, you know this dynamic started. Uh, you know, it's
amazing as a death investigator when I always tell I
always tell students, I've given interviews where they say, well,
what's the most interesting interesting thing about being a death
investigator aside from being around the dead. And this is
(07:48):
going to be really this is going to sound really,
really creepy, but I'm going to go ahead and go ahead.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
And say it.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
What's really cool about it is that you literally get
to peek in people's closets, and if you want a
good story, suddenly, because of the intimate access that you
have behind the scenes kind of seeing the way things
develop in that world, you have this narrative that's laid out,
(08:18):
you know, and suddenly, and many times it'll burst on
the scene. You'll have this kind of moment of clarity
when you're working a case and you begin to understand
interpersonal dynamics. And let me tell you something, when you're
dealing with uh, with sick parents, when you're dealing with
the death of a parent, there is nothing like the
(08:43):
stimulus that that is interjected into the relationship between siblings,
because if there is something ugly there, it's going to
pop up. But you know, I submit to you that
this ugliness has it far. It extends way way back
into the past. It wasn't just the moment she shows
(09:04):
up on the doorstep here, and there's probably been ongoing
tension over the years. There's probably been resentment, you know,
from the perspective of this sister that just you know,
kind of floats in from Louisiana, incredible jealousy. You know,
(09:25):
parents always preferred you over me.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
All the while.
Speaker 1 (09:30):
You know she's not doing anything to lift her finger
to help, And you're right, it's a There are people, Dave,
I don't see how they keep from cracking under the burden.
And if you've got two parents that are affected by
any kind of dementia, it is exhausting. I don't see
(09:53):
how people do it. And you're having to bear that
burden day in and day out, shifting from one to
the other to try to keep control over it, try
to manage it. Just the finances alone. I can see
why she would retreat to a garden day. I really can.
For those few precious moments she might be able to
(10:13):
go out there and retrieve some bit of sanity, some
bit of solemnity, some bit of peace, maybe hoping that
she would walk back into that house where her parents
had been, in the state that they were in, and
something magical would have happened. But I got to tell you,
(10:36):
in the case of Karen, after her sister shows up,
it was anything but magical. Because when the sister showed up,
Hell followed with her. It amazes me, Brother, Dave, that
(11:07):
we've had this conversation before about deposited remains. The dynamic
that interests me the most from a forensic well, it's
behavioral and it's also forensics as well as kind of
this interesting blend because I could I could sit there
and look at a depressed area in the ground, do
(11:31):
do a retrieval of remains and excavation if you will,
of remains. But I always always think, why do people
why do people take not just bodies but evidence and
hang on to them in there in their environment. And
that's that's always been a very fascinating dynamic. I think
(11:53):
it has something to do I've always thought this. I
think it has something to do with potential perpetrator wanting
to have constant control and watchcare over what they've done.
You know, isn't it interesting, Dave? How many cases that
you and I have covered over the years now where
(12:15):
you will have a perpetrator that will take a human remain,
for instance, and just discarded like it's rubbish, you know,
out in some horrible area. But yet we have these
others that kind of latch on to these and literally
hang on to them and continue to exist, perhaps in
(12:36):
the same environment where just out your front door or
your kitchen window. You pull the curtains aside, and there's
active decomposition going on in your backyard. Think about that
just for a second. I mean, that's a real I think.
I think that there could be an academic study actually
(12:57):
that could be applied to this. You begin to look
at depositive remains and kind of the relationship between the
perpetrators and remains, and to see kind of how they
you know, how how did all this come together? What
was your rationale for hanging on us.
Speaker 2 (13:15):
I have a theory, well, pretty much the same thing
of what you were saying about control. I think that
when you have somebody that commits a murder and they
just discard the body to get away from it because
they have no connection to it, it is just an it.
They don't have a connection to that person. They might
even know the name, you know, They just they did
their thing, they killed them whatever, and now I'm getting
(13:35):
rid of the body. But when it comes to this
type of a situation where a sister has killed a
sister and put her remains in the backyard in a
hole two foot hole, and she's right there, I think
it's because that way her body is there in the backyard.
And in this case, I think Debra had control over,
you know, anybody that wants to see. She knows nobody's
(13:58):
discovered the body. Yet if no wo he discovers the body,
I'm free and clear, you know, and that way, and
I think that's the case with others who keep somebody
close to them where they can watch over the remains,
because it's like, if somebody goes near it, I can
go out there and I can get them looking someplace else.
I control the remains. I can keep somebody from finding it.
(14:18):
But if I don't see them, if I bury it
out in the middle of nowhere, I don't know, one
hundred might fall over it or something. But Joe, my
question for you about this. Okay, you get the cops
in the backyard, they get a warrant, they see that
there has been there's disturbed ground in the backyard. Not unique,
and that is kind of unique. When you have two
elderly women at the time, both they're sixty seven years old,
(14:41):
You're not going to see them out there digging a
hole for no reason. So there had to be a
reason for it, and they want to look, how do
law enforcement because they're going to be the first ones
to look at something like this. How did they go
about digging what they believe? You know, hey, we got
to find out what's in this area before we call
because it could be nothing, you know, But do you
(15:03):
have to like dig up and see if there's something
in there?
Speaker 1 (15:05):
What?
Speaker 2 (15:05):
How does that start? Do I have as a cop
with a gun and a badge writing tickets? One minute?
Am I in the backyard digging this with a tan traw?
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Okay, excellent question, and kind of let me break it
down to you this way. I know people use use
motorized augers now too to put in post dig post
holes with. Okay, but let's go back in time and
think about a and lord knows I've had to use
these over the years. I used to work on a
(15:34):
fencing crew when I was in college, one of the
toughest jobs I ever had. Think about an old uh
uh posthold digger. You know it's got the two you
know it's got the the the two spoons. They look
like gigantic spoon driving it into the round, into the ground.
(15:55):
You're pinching it bringing it out. So if you're if
you're trying to analyze this from a forensic standpoint, and
you're looking at a defect in the ground, you look at,
say the space, and think about kind of the cylindrical
hole that you would generate with a posthole digger or
even an augur Anythink, now, if I'm going to search
(16:18):
that area and I'm looking for somebody that is missing,
what's the potential that they could be in a hole
with a caliber the size of a coffee can probably
probably not much. Now, could you discard evidence in there?
Speaker 2 (16:37):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (16:37):
Yeah, you could put a weapon in there, or you
could just be planting trees for all I know. But
if I see some kind of irregularity, and this is
one of the things that in what's referred to as
forensic tafonomy, which is a study of the ground, you
look at the ground from the perspective of the potential
(17:01):
of what you could harvest out of it from an
evidentary standpoint, and also are the dimensions of this thing?
Are they very uniformed? Are they irregular? Because when you
start to look at uniformity. Okay, and let's say you
want to you want to dig a hole. I keep
using hole. Everybody thinks that it's you know, you're talking
(17:23):
about a circle. But let's just say you're pulling the
earth out of it. Do you have definitive margins here
where you can say, okay, yeah, ge way, is that
looks like a rectangle? It looks like a square, but
you've kind of got this randomized thing. And if you're
using kind of like a spade spade shaped shovel, this
(17:44):
comes to a point at the bottom. You've got square
bottom shovels, you've got spade shaped shovels, and it's got
these kind of curved edges around. Not a lot of
care has been given to that. This is just one
thing that we look for. What is the potential that,
first off, this was dug for some other purpose, or
(18:05):
does it have the potential the dimensions here for discarding
human remains or covering up human remains. One of the
things that's fascinating to me about this.
Speaker 2 (18:16):
Is that.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
When you think about the size and the only dimension
that they are giving us, Dave is two feet Well,
it's two feet two feet wide, two feet long. Is
it two feet deep? I'm going with two feet deep. Okay,
so we don't really know what the outer perimeter is.
Two feet deep is insufficient to the task I'll put
(18:42):
it to you that way, and let me flip this
around and let me throw this out to you. Okay,
that hole in and of itself is accusatory. It's accusatory
to let's just say it's the sister and she's looking
out the window at it. It's accused tory in the
(19:04):
sense that Karen the gardener had a real sense of
the yard of the esthetic that whole screams at a
potential perpetrator and says, even in digging a hole, you're insufficient.
And everything you've done in life, and this is a
great example of it. You're talking about a two foot
(19:25):
hole to get rid of your sister's body. Here is
such a loser because the sister would not have done this.
You know what she would have done. She probably would
have got steaks, and I mean that you can drive
in the ground. She would have gotten kite string, she
would have tied it off, she would have carefully measured
(19:46):
it because of the aesthetic of it, because she saw beauty.
But you know, you have to plan beauty. And what
it comes down to with this is this is pure horror.
I think, Dave that once they begin to look at this,
and I've actually had this happen. People think that you
can take dirt and shovel it over human remains and
(20:12):
you're not gonna smell anything. That is not the case.
That's one of the many reasons. There are other there
are other reasons. But you know, in funerary practices in
America and worldwide, you go deep. Okay, so and six
(20:32):
feet is kind of you know, it's kind of the
standard measurement, six feet deep, and then you cover it, right,
you have to cover it and you're not going to
have some kind of smell emanated. And I know people
are saying, well, Morgan, what about in balm bodies. We're
not talking about in BALMD bodies. We're just talking about
because not everybody's inbalm. Embalming is one of the things
(20:52):
that is it's very unique to Western culture. There's a
whole other world out there. There are people that bury
non embalmed bodies.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
You know, Griffith wasn't involved.
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Yeah, yeah, there you go.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
I mean seven thirty that morning, ten thirty that morning
they were burying him.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And you know, my wife and I
are talking about, you know, into the ground. We're talking
about natural burial here with no preservation. You know what,
you know, what's kind of what's the point?
Speaker 2 (21:22):
You know what you would I always thought you would
like dedicate your body to your skills and let them.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
Know that's not going to happen.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Okay, let me go back to this real quick, Joe.
You've got the two cops and they're looking for Karen.
They talked to her sister, and they know sister Deborah
is lying to them that she doesn't know where her
sister is. Her sister's car is in the garage, her
sister's phone, her sister's while it's all still here, Karen's
stuff is here, and the woman who lives with her,
(21:53):
her sister says, I don't know where she is, and
the cops know she's lying. They see this disturbed ground
in the backyard. They decide they, being the police, they
want to look at it. They get a warrant. Now
do the police do the officers do this on their own?
Do they go out there and just you know, with
their hands, start, you know, scrubbing away. Let's see what
we got here, because you're only going to be we
(22:15):
know postfact, we know after the fact that it's only
two feet deep. That's what we're told, But Karen's body
was placed in trash bags, in a black trash bag
with bungee cords wrapped around it and duct tape. So
if her body is placed in there, are the police
(22:35):
going to be able to smell, you know, the body
and realize we got something here we need to explore.
Are they going to get on their hands and knees
and start pulling dirt? No?
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Okay, no, I if if they were, if I were
whispering in their ear as an advisor, I'd say freeze. Okay,
because okay, so this is kind of interesting. I gotta,
I gotta, I gotta tell you this, this is kind
of cool. Well, I'm so glad you brought this up.
Does smell equal probable cause? Kind of fascinating, right, I
(23:07):
mean when you think, yeah, because you know, we think
many times if we see blood coming Okay, let's just
say we've got a closed door in a closet and
we see blood coming out from beneath in a house,
I would think that if I'm a police officer and
I'm clearing the house and I see blood what appears
to be blood, right, I can't fall into that trap. Forensically,
(23:29):
you're going to nail me. So if I if I
look down and I see what appears to be blood
coming from beneath a door, first off, I'm going to
have my weapon out, and secondly, I'm going to carefully
open the door and I see a body in there,
after I check them to see if they have any vitals.
I'm not pulling the body out, Okay, I'm backing out
(23:53):
because that's a matter of public safety with a body
or let's just say, we don't know it's a body yet.
All we all we have is smell. We have a dimension.
Remember we got to go back to the dimensional aspect
of this. Could it contain a body? Yeah, potentially if
they smell it, which I submit to you that you
(24:15):
could through trashbacks. Just think about this. How many times
have you ever walked to your garbage can outside, okay,
and you've got your kitchen garbage bagged up, and you
lift the lid on that puppy and all of a sudden,
it's like, what was it the Thriller song? The funk
of forty thousand years rushes out, you know, and distraction
(24:37):
in the face. Yeah, dude, yeah, it's foul. But here's
here's the slippery slope because we know lawyers are watching
everything we do. Right, if I don't secure a warrant
before I start moving earth on this thing, anything that
I uncover relative to this has the potential of being
(24:59):
thrown out out so and it has gotten to the
point now in the world that we exist in that
if you do not secure a warrant before you get
your trial out, you get your brushes out, You've literally
got you know. Now, they were kind of like people
that you've seen guys that do ceramic tiles, that are
(25:22):
wearing those knee pads. You know, you've got all your
equipment out Before you do that, you better have a
magistrate or judge sign off on this thing. Because here's
the thing, just because it smells bad doesn't necessarily mean
that there is something there. But what they found when
they finally excavated the spot was quite shocking. Thing about
(26:03):
criminals is they don't think things through and when it
comes to buried remains, the last thing on their mind
is vegetation. And it has been It's been one of
those things that has caught people in the past. When
(26:26):
I'm thinking about digging a hole in the yard, Dave,
I'm you know, if I'm just going out in my
backyard to dig a hole, I know that I have
to refill the hole or pack the dirt around a
tree I'm planning, or whatever it is I'm doing. From
an excavation standpoint, crooks don't do that. Did you know that.
(26:48):
Let's say they will dig a hole and bury, say
like a body in an area, and they'll put the
same dirt back in. They don't take time to pull
the grass out, shake the grass off grass because you
can actually look down and I've seen this happen and
you've got roots staring back up at your face. And
as you well know, we were talking about things that
(27:09):
the cops would have seen out there. I think that
that's something that's significant. If you've got roots, if you're
looking at roots, you should not be looking at roots. Okay,
you've got Saint Augustine grass. We're talking about Florida. Saint
Augustine grass is everywhere, a thick lush, you know, really green,
loves that tropical environment. Those roots are staring you in
(27:30):
the face. You know, when did grass start growing inverted?
Speaker 2 (27:33):
You know?
Speaker 1 (27:34):
So you're thinking, you're thinking, okay, this is just not
the case. So you have to be very careful because
it's not just if somebody is doing this in a frenzy.
You might see something on the surface that should not
be there like it can be. You know, I had
a couple of guys that we caught in New Orleans
(27:54):
that killed a photographer out of the French court. They
had escaped from Florida State pen. Actually everybody winds up
in the French French Quarter or Vegas, right, And so
they took this guy out that was a cameraman and
beat him to death with his camera tripod and buried
him out in the marsh. And I caught this case.
(28:16):
And you know, we caught that guy. We caught those
guys because they flicked a cigarette butt down into the hole.
Wow yeah yeah, And it had DNA deposition on it.
So you know, you have to look for those tiny
little things like that, and you really as an investigator,
you have to adjust your lens because it's really easy
(28:40):
to kind of take a bulldozer approach here when you
should be doing surgery to observe and to document an area.
You begin to look at this and you think, Okay,
what is it that I need to see? And you
have to be patient. You have to be so patient
out here because it's so tempting, and just.
Speaker 2 (29:01):
Think about it.
Speaker 1 (29:01):
It's like a god. This is a bad example, but
I'll go ahead and say it. It's like a kid
on Christmas morning that's unwrapping a present. That same part
of your brain is stimulated out and seen. I know
that sounds grotesque, but it really is. You're thinking, Okay,
I know in my heart of hearts that there's probably
a body down here. Okay, you have to resist the urge.
(29:25):
You have to resist the urge. This is why I
always recommend that you have a forensic anthropologist on site
with you, because they can kind of throw the brakes
on there. You leave them to be in charge. This
is what they do because if you don't, well, if
you don't, I mean, like me, I'm going to go in,
(29:46):
you know, with no breaks on. I will, but not
to the degree of friends of anthropologists, because they start
off in like one inch squares, brushing things away and
it can get really tedious. But there's a lot of
importance here because they don't want to miss a single thing. Dave,
And in this case, I think that I think that that.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
That was it was.
Speaker 1 (30:08):
I'll put it through this way. They aired on the
cautious side here as opposed to just going in like
a bull in a china shop.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
And you know, interesting, as I was digging into this,
digging digging into this story and found out, you know,
the neighbors called for the because they weren't getting responses
on the phone, they weren't getting answers from Devon Patten,
and they called police to do the welfare check, and
that's what led to the finding of the disturbed ground
in the backyard that leads to Karen being found in
(30:38):
these garbage bags, black garbage bags with the bungee cords
and duct tape. But I just give you an idea.
When all of this is going on, you know, as
they're working the investigation, neighbors are saying, hey, man, they
didn't get along. Karen had been here for years. We've
known her for a long time, and she told us
if she ever went missing or that her sister probably
(31:01):
did it, because her sister said had told her to
her face. She's like, Karen is telling friends, Deborah said
she's gonna kill me. Deborah's got a gun, Deborah is
gonna And so as police are getting this information, and
they're looking at the lives of the sisters. Karen, consistent
with mom and dad their whole lives, you know, took
care of them, and she owns this house. Deborah in
(31:24):
a twenty eight year marriage, couldn't keep a job and
walks away from her husband in New Orleans or Louisiana,
pardon me, Louisiana, and comes to Florida to crash in
her sister's house, you know, something, Joe, to make her
sister happy. And Karen owned this home outright, it was
her home. She built Deborah a luxury chef's kitchen inside
(31:46):
that home, just a beautiful, a gourmet kitchen. This is
what Karen did for her sister, to make her sister happy.
And Karen, who owns the home, she actually has a
small little kitchen that type thing set up for herself
in the garage. That's what Karen did, bending over backwards
to make Deborah happy. And eventually, you know, Karen ends
(32:09):
up in the hole in the backyard. But as they
as they being the investigators, Joe, all right, we have
found Karen's body in the backyard. What do we do
now we see that we have a body in the
garbage bags, yep. And the bungee cords are wrapped around
her body and then the bags are secure with a
(32:31):
duct tape. So tell me about this. How are you
going to unroll all? Are you going to take this
whole thing out of the ground with dirt back to
the lab?
Speaker 1 (32:40):
Yes? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I can't guarantee that
they did that. This is one of the things that
is really hard to get across to crom scene investigators.
You do not, under any circumstances want to practice bag open.
(33:01):
And here's the thing. You remember JJ and Tylely right?
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Ohious? Yet yeah, I had to bring that up right.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
So with JJ, one of the problems I had with
that case is that you know, you remember he was
cocooned in bags and he was buried adjacent to that
empty pond. Yes, And I remember the investigators it seems
like it was during the trial and it was like
one of these cringe moments for me. They said, we
(33:32):
opened the bag and could see his head or see
his hair, And I'm thinking, why the hell you open
in the bag?
Speaker 2 (33:38):
Yeah? Why?
Speaker 1 (33:40):
I mean, you know that the subject that's inside the
bag is to cease. Now you know that something horrible
has happened. Where are you going to risk everything by
not taking the remains to a controlled environment. Okay, you
have to be able to restrain yourself to the point,
(34:01):
because anything you do out there, it's like I was
just saying a second about the you know, I know
it's not necessarily the same thing, but with a cigarette butt, Okay,
if you just kind of blast through this thing, there's
no confirmatory thing here going on. You know that you've
got somebody that's deceased for my money, Okay. And how
I would instruct people is, ye know, we can kind
(34:25):
of palpate the outside of this bag very very carefully.
It feels like human form. I think we're going to
go to the medical examiner's office and which they have there.
The state of Florida is broken down into medical examiner districts,
and they're pretty dark on good at what they do.
They're used to this sort of thing. You roll in
(34:45):
there with that bag and you don't try to listen.
You try to do everything you can to not brush
away dirt. Period end of paragraph. I don't care how
dirty it is. I don't care if they're mag it's
crawling all over the place. You take everything to the lab,
(35:06):
specifically the Medical Examiner's office, and you put it in
that controlled environment because just by okay, just by splitting
the bag open, let's say that there were points of
contact there relative to layton prints. You say, Morgan, it's
been buried in the earth. It rains in Florida. I
don't care, because you don't know what layton prints might
(35:30):
might have been preserved on the outside. You don't know
what's under under the surface. I mean, how many Let
me ask you this, my friends, how many times have
you taken a garbage bag and I know you're thinking,
I'm gonna pop it like this, I'm gonna get it open. Okay,
guess what you do that you don't think about? You
(35:51):
readjust your hands many times and put them on the
inside of the bag. Well, that's a point of contact.
And guess what else? If you like that one, I
got another one for you. You leave behind latent, Prince,
and particularly in this day and age, you leave behind
DNA deposition as well, just by touching the inside. So
(36:12):
if you're going to cowboy it up as an investigator
and go in there and you begin to at the
scene and you begin to manipulate the bag in some way.
You know, you pull out your buck knife that you
got on the side, or your spider coat knife out
of your pocket. You flick it open dramatically and you
begin to slice open the bag like you're in some
episode of some ridiculous television show. Well, it's not controlled.
(36:38):
You have got to remain maintain control. And that's why
it's you cannot go into this haphazardly. You don't want
to cut through the tape. You don't want to dislodge
any of the bungee cords. And sometimes, you know, bungee
cords failed, they become unattached. Lord knows, I've had I've
had them pop me in the face when I'm trying
(36:58):
to tie things down my truck. No pain like it
in the world.
Speaker 2 (37:02):
My brother lost an eye to a buncht ye.
Speaker 1 (37:06):
Lord.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (37:07):
Yeah, they're so dangerous man, and and and they're un
there's they're not predictable. Don't touch them. Don't touch them
in any way again until you get back to the
controlled area. Now, I am sure that the authorities down
in Florida they do enough of these. They would have
They're not in some rural location.
Speaker 2 (37:28):
It's just outside of Tampa. Bay.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
Yeah, they're there. I have I would bet money on
these people that they took due care with this, and
we're trying to be very, very careful because there's all
kinds of things you can get off of plastic bags.
And at this point, all you know, after you've served
a warrant on this property, all you know is that
(37:50):
you've got a body that's wrapped in a bag. You
haven't hooked anybody up on charges yet, so you have
to collect. You're trying to build a case and build
it out. But daved, I got tell you when they
finally got those bags off of this poor woman's body, who,
by the way, I haven't said this. You know she
was a retired engineer for Verizon.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
I know that.
Speaker 1 (38:12):
And she's nobody's fool.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
No that is think. She was such a nice She's nice, brilliant,
took care of herself, took care of her parents, took
care of her money, and then here comes her thirteen
month old You know the difference in age thirteen months Yeah, yeah,
and Deborah was thirteen months older than Karen. Karen was
professional and was just wonderful and everybody loved her and
(38:36):
then never do well, Deborah shows up and it all
goes to hell in a handbasket.
Speaker 1 (38:42):
You're right, Dave, it does. It goes downhill really quickly.
When this I don't know, I don't know how to
put it. This human leech shows up, because that's kind
of the way it feels at this point in tom.
You know when you can tell that. I think anytime
you can learn a lot about a person that perpetrates
(39:07):
a homicide by the way they treat remains. This seems
to be rather frenzied. I would think maybe spontaneous. It
happened in a flash. And you know when she when
she was killed, Karen still had a necklace around her
(39:28):
neck with the name Karen on it. So in the
course of this crime and the cocooning of her body,
there was no effort to try to take eyes off
of who this was. Because granted, listen, I know that
(39:49):
many people think that when you see a necklace that
says Karen on it, that's a positive idea. I don't
trust things like that. I have to have it scientifically
verified because too many times I've personally been burned. There
are other people that have been burned, and you have
to take doe care with all of this that's very important.
(40:12):
And in this particular case, when they finally got Karen's
body out of this, these bags got the tape detached.
She sustained a single gsw to the chest. And you know,
just think about this woman's lovely woman that has and
(40:33):
she shot like an animal yep, and then her remains
are treated like she's an animal and buried literally adjacent
to this place that she loves. I guess that, you know,
there's nothing ironic about it, but you have to look
at it and you think, you know, all of this
love and care that she's put into this home, she's created,
the care that she gave to her parents, the beautiful
(40:55):
garden that she had, she worked in daily. She worked
toward retirement. Anybody that gets to retirement, God bless everybody
out there. You know what a labor this is. And
to have it all just taken from her in a
flash because somebody is jealous of her, somebody has got
(41:16):
issues with her that cannot live their own life on
their own.
Speaker 2 (41:21):
Dave, I'm you know you you actually laid it all
out perfectly. Joe and I did look at something on
this because they never found they being investigators, never found
the murder weapon. They were never able to determine, you know,
what gun was used, what type of gun. But I'm
(41:41):
gonna read you something here. While the specific murder weapon
was not explicitly identified, evidence included DNA from Deborah Patten
on blood covered latex gloves found with the body, and
surveillance footage showing Deborah Patten the shovel. Now, this surveillance
(42:02):
footage was from a next door neighbor, Joe, we should
all have this type of individual as our next door neighbor.
I made a note when I sent this because the
surveillance video from the neighbor was a Hillsboro County deputy
who has this surveillance video showing the victim, Karen, entering
(42:26):
her home on May twenty fourth, twenty twenty one, last
time she has seen alive. The video also depicts Deborah
Patten throwing several large trash bags into the garbage and
shows Deborah Patten walking with a shovel. After everything was
(42:48):
said and done, Joe, Deborah Patton is charged with murder.
But the reason it took so long and the reason
we're talking about this today, because this just got adjudicated.
It's gone on this long because you cannot you cannot
(43:10):
try somebody who is incompetent stand trial. And over the years,
Devora Patten was deemed incompetent to stand trial. She remained
in the state mental hospital for treatment for a couple
of years. It wasn't until February last year that a
(43:31):
judge ruled Debora Patent competent to stand trial. And when
she finally went to trial last month, the jury did
not have to deliberate long. I think it was an hour,
and they judged her guilty of second degree murder of
her own little sister. Little sister who took care of
(43:56):
her when she had nothing, fed her when she had
no food, gave her a place to stay when she
had nowhere to stay, Joe. And by the way, you
know what police found, Well, they found a note written
by Deborah Paton describing how she was going to kill
(44:17):
her ex husband in Louisiana, how she was going to
drive there and kill him and then she was going
to kill herself. Actually took everybody out.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
But yeah, you know, Dave, what was really horrific about this?
I think during the period of time, first off, she
stated to the court that that she was blameless here. Yeah,
blame completely blameless. If that's not bad enough. She smiled
(44:48):
and laughed during this period of tom in court saying
that she's not blameless, and she offered up some kind
of half hearted prayer that was directed toward the judge,
talked about how the world is populated with evil people,
this sort of thing. Well, on that count, she's right,
(45:09):
because I got to tell you, at the end of
the day, Deborah Patten is a glaring example of pure,
unadulterated evil. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is bodybags
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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