March 11, 2026 • 41 mins
Three men over the age of 60 found beaten to death in the basement of a house in a quite neighborhood in south Detroit. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack talk about the type of crime scene police described, the suspect caught with a hammer and a bat, the possible forensic evidence, and try to find an explanation for three men who died in the most brutal way possible
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.00 Introduction - Detroit
01:54.55 Death by Hammer
06:16.89 Man tells police he was beat with hammer, dead bodies in the house
10:39.91 CID or Homicide Division
15:11.64 History of Hammers in war
20:09.82 Old family neighborhood
25:08.44 Suspect not charged with murders, yet
30:06.23 Types of DNA found on hammer
34:55.48 Generate more energy with a bat
39:39.34 3 people dead for a day
41:20.61 Conclusion
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Quody Dinas, but Joseph's gotten more. A couple of years back,
I had a television producer reach out to me and listen,
I'm going to give you a little dirty inside secret here. Yeah.
I get these calls right from various producers with these
(00:22):
different platforms that are out there, and they say, hey,
we're looking for a forensics guy, hoping you could join
us and come to this location and here read over
this document and we want you to make an appearance.
You know. It's like where you're a talking head, and
sometimes I'll even go out to scenes. But there was
(00:44):
one that had actually intrigued me that I was supposed
to be going to and it never happened. As a
matter of fact, if you tune in, I think this year,
I'm actually on for like the third or fourth year
in a row on Buried in the Backyard on Oxygen,
and they had they had me going to Detroit because
(01:06):
there was a body that was actually buried in a basement.
I've never been to Detroit, and it gets a bad rap,
I know, and maybe justly I have no idea, but
I've always wanted to go because I've always been fascinated
with cars and just that world up there just to
see it, but it didn't happen. But you know, today
(01:29):
we're going to talk about some cases, and I say
cases that originate out of Detroit that I have just
found out about, and it involves a house again and
possibly abasement. The only difference is is that these remains
are not buried. And guess what the cause of death
(01:54):
involves a hammer. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body bags, David. I want to tell you a story
real quick, one of the worst cases. And I say worst,
(02:15):
it's you know, that's highly subjective, okay, but I think
that there are cases out there that I handled as
an investigator that kind of sent a chill up my
spond because I would see I wouldn't just see the
victims dead at the scene, and that they're like, you know,
subjects that I have to examine every now and then
(02:37):
I'd see a peak of humanity that would come through.
And this case that I'm referring to right now is
something I worked on, and it did involve three guys
and they were all forced to sit on a love seat,
which generally accommodates two people, right, and these are grown
men this is a drug hit. I've never had anything
(03:01):
like this. And they were made to interlock arms at
the elbows, and each one of them were executed. They
were each shot in the forehead with a three point
fifty seven magnum. Now that's a revolver, and I've seen
a lot of bloody scenes, but I've never seen anything
(03:22):
with this kind of projected deposition. Because each one of
these rounds on, all three of these guys exited, and
it painted the walls all behind them and on the
back of the love seat, and they were leaning into
one another. And I always thought, you know, a revolver
is not a semi automatic weapon, so it takes a
(03:44):
bit longer to actuate the trigger. You know, it's double action.
So you pull the trigger, the revolver portion of it,
the cylinder actually spins, and then the hammer drops and
this is done over and over. And I thought, well,
if you're the first guy, it's kind of merciful, but
if you're the third guy, you know it's coming. And
(04:05):
that it got me into that mindset with that case.
And you know, for years, I've still thought about that case.
Into the best of my knowledge. That case has never
been solved.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
We're gonna have to look that one up.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Yeah, I know, no kidding. And so when stay arm
in arm were they still linked when the bodies were found.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
They were still linked. And that's why I always thought
it was a drug hit. And I'm not going to
go into the organization that it was linked to at
the time, but I've always felt as though there were
like because these guys were big dudes. Man, I've always
thought that there was like a large group of people
that were in the room, because how are you going
(04:45):
to force three guys to interlock arms and sit in
that one position. If there's one guy holding a gun
on you, you would think that the other two could get
up and bomb rush the guy. That didn't happen. I
always thought that there was like a group of people
and dude, there was weed everywhere apartment and they were
making they were making blunts. Blunts are the cigars where
(05:06):
you pull out the tobacco and you restuff it with weed.
And apparently they were what's it called they were shorting
the supplier, like they were not paying over their due
to the supplier. And you know, this is what wound
up happening. But you know, the case that we're covering
out of Detroit today. I'm not going to say it's
equally as horrific because I wasn't at this house in Detroit,
(05:30):
but I got to tell you it kind of had
echoes in my brain as we were reading over this.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
It's interesting that this this case actually began with police
on a missing person's case. The police show up on
the south side of Detroit in and they're looking for
a missing person. And while they're asking neighbors. It's an
old neighborhood. As a matter of fact, one of the
(05:57):
neighbors has been there for sixty years, other has been
there for twelve, So you're talking people who know one another.
They know one another's routines. And when the police were talking,
while they're trying to find out about the missing person,
somebody walks up to him and he says he has
just been assaulted. The man does this guy has just
(06:20):
been beating me with a hammer. And by the way,
there's some dead bodies in that house right there. He
points to the house that they're standing in front of
the cops like, wait a minute, I did beat you
with a hammer, yeah, and now there's dead bodies in
that house.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
And so the police go into the house Joe, and
the home was on Edsel Street and being Detroit for
motor company the Edzel. I wonder how many other streets
are named like that. I don't I have no.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Idea fair Lane anyway, I don't know. Yeah, there's Lane a.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Movie in the early nineties. Right.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
At any rate, the man tells the officers about the
dead guys in the house, So the officers go inside. Now,
to be honest with you, they don't really know what
they're walking into. They just know that this guy claims
he was beaten, he's been assaulted, and there's dead bodies
in the house. The police described this Joe in such
a way that I made a note to ask you
(07:19):
about it, because I don't recall seeing police officers when
they tell you about a crime scene. They might talk
about very obvious evidence. They might give you an idea
of where a victim was standing or laying when they
were found, give you a basic lay of the land,
But rarely did they go so far as to describe
(07:43):
blood or even the extents of the brutality that you're
walking into.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Again, this is.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Just what normal police, how they talk to the press,
and what have you in this particular case, Joe. The
police described this as the victims were brutally assaulted, their
bodies wrapped in towels and carpeting. And actually it wasn't
tows and carpeting. Some of it was just old clothing.
It was just nasty stuff. But there was blood everywhere.
(08:14):
The bodies were in the basement, but they had been
dead for at least a day, Joe, and there was
blood everywhere. Now, if police know people are dead, you
know in this case, they're not going anywhere and we've
got a massively bloody crime scene. Is that when you
get the call to come in or do they Is
there another pathway to that?
Speaker 1 (08:35):
No? No, that would be when we would come in.
That call would be initiated with in a case like this.
The beat officer that responded, he wouldn't even have to
wait to call the detectives and say, hey, should I
call the medical examiner. And by the way, they've got
a fantastic medical examiner's office in Detroit. As matter of fact,
that's the home of the home of the man that
(08:58):
we did a profile on, m Doctor Werner Spitz. He
was the chief MEE in Detroit. I think that's is
that wing? I think that's Wayne County. So yeah, they've
got a great reputation up there. But yeah, the EMMY
would have been notified. I would imagine by the beat unit,
the uniform officer out there. They would have said, look,
get me the emmy, get me CID, and get me
(09:19):
crime scene and route immediately forthwith as they say, and
they would have locked this thing down. The good thing
about it is with a scene like CID, c IDEA
is Criminal Investigation Division, and you'll see, you'll hear CID.
But in Detroit they actually have a homicide division. Many
people don't understand that even medium sized police departments, they
(09:42):
don't have homicide detectives. They will have it's broken down
into two groups. Many times they'll have crimes against persons
and crimes against property, and so the detectives that work
crimes against persons will do assaults, batteries, sexual assault, rate
and homicide okay, and then crimes property you know, might
(10:04):
be burglary, car theft, any number of things like that,
because they don't they don't have enough personnel to sub specialize.
You get into a larger department like Detroit and they've
got a very well known homicide bureau. Okay, do you
remember old dragnet Joe Friday would say it was a
Friday and I was working out of the Robbery homicide division,
(10:28):
you know. And so robbery has always been considered a
violent crime. It's a personal crime. Robbery is different than burglary.
So robbery means that you are taking physically taking something
from somebody, and so that's indicative of the personal crime there.
So yeah, so and it's interchangeable. You'll hear people say CID,
(10:48):
You'll hear people say homicide. In this case, I probably
even spoke. He's probably going to call the homicide division
and they're going to roll out there. And in this
type of situation, I would imagine that once the detective
arrives and the EMMY investigator is there, they're going to
(11:09):
do what is called an initial scene walkthrough. That means
you're not necessarily going to take any photographs, you're not
going to do any kind of measurements. It'll be the
EMMY investigator, the detective, and probably the first responding officer,
and you will do a very cursory walk through the scene.
(11:32):
And that way you can get that space kind of
organized in your brain, you see what I'm saying, and
then you step back out. Now, this is going to
be in the wake of probably ordering up a warrant,
to have the warrant written up because and then they'll
do do the walk through at that point in time,
because you can't really search a scene without a warrant.
It doesn't matter if bodies are there. There is no
(11:53):
there is no constitutional exception for homicide, which is something
that people need to get into their brain. And you
people that lose their minds over this thing. They think
that just because just because there's a dead body at
the scene, that the constitution suddenly melts away.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
It doesn't.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
As a matter of fact, it needs to be further
enforced at that point in time. But so that's kind
of the that's kind of what happens. And when you
would walk into this, when I would do initial scene walkthroughs,
it really steadies your mind and gives you an idea
as to what I'm going to be faced with. And
(12:30):
there might be certain things you see in there that
when you exit, before you actually do start your investigation internally,
you might have to call on other resources, like do
I have enough lights? For instance, we're in a basement.
Does this house even have electricity or were going to
have to call the fire department to bring a light
truck out. Does cromp scene have portable lights that can
(12:51):
put up? Where can we position them so we're not
going to disrupt any kind of evidence? Do I need
to call specialists in forensics? You know those sorts of things.
Do I have all the tools that I need with
me to process that scene? And it's not just one body, Dave.
We're talking about three bodies here, all right, and according
to what we're hearing, there's been an effort to hide
(13:13):
these bodies. Okay, it's not like they're sitting on the
front porch, all right. And I'm not being disrespectful by
saying that somebody has gone and taken these bodies and
placed them into this basement. And I would imagine that
before the detective when they arrive after having heard this
story from this police officer that it was first reported
(13:36):
to believing had to be seen, Dave. When it comes
to hammers, I've had a fascination. I have to My
(13:59):
inner nerd comes out, and this is why it does.
I don't people, you know, people will ask me, you
know what true crime shows do you watch? You know,
what what things do you listen to? And you know,
podcasts and all that stuff. And no insult to any
of my colleagues out there in the world of true crime.
I don't. I just don't. I do it so much
(14:20):
and I love doing it. But when I when I
watched stuff, you know, Kim, You'll say, what are you
watching on YouTube? I'm like, it's a medieval history thing.
It's just say, how do you watch that? And one
of the things that that I do enjoy watching is
is kind of the story of England and France and
their development and also their the armor that there that
(14:43):
their armies wore, some of the weapons and things. You know.
The hammer itself is an ancient weapon that has been used.
I don't know since well, I'll put it to you
this way. I don't think he necessarily had a hammer.
If you've ever heard of Judah Accabe, who's a grand
hero of of of the Jews, I think and uh uh,
(15:09):
I've got a rabbi friend out there in in Mobile, Alabama.
Big shout out to him. I hope, I hope him
I'm saying this correctly. Rabbi, the word or the name
maccabee I think actually translates roughly uh in Hebrew to hammer,
and it's almost like hammer of God. And so the
name has been around for a while.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
We have.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
The prevalence of the weapon. You've got it going back
as far as like the fourth or fifth century uh
In uh in in the Common era. But you know,
the hammer itself came in two forms, the war hammer.
You had a shorter war hammer that guys on horseback
(15:54):
the cavalry would carry and guess what it had, Dave
as we developed armor, it had a bike on one end,
and then it had the blunted edge. So the idea
was to with the blunted edge, you would concuss the
person like you would strike them in the head and
kind of knock them silly, say if they had a
helmet on. And then they had this really I'm gonna
(16:15):
send you a photo of this. Afterwards, they had this
really nasty spike on one end. And so you can
imagine you're running full tilt. Imagine these guys on horseback
and a battlefield going full tilt, and they've got a
hammer that's probably about three feet the handles might be
two and a half three feet in length. And it's
got this huge head on it, and they just swing
(16:37):
down with that spike and it would penetrate just about
any kind of armor. So not only are.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
These guys late at night sitting around the campfire telling tales,
they're not sitting there singing if I had a hammer.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
No no, this is not Peter, Paul and Mary. No no, no, no, no,
this is scary. But you're describing to me is a
hammer like no other. But it's a hammer that's a weapon.
And the hamrhage that we have now are not that dissimilar.
It's got no no on the end and a flat
end too.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
No, they're not you know, anti wax what you want.
You know, this is what Joseph Scott Morgan watches at.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Home on YouTube.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
You know, there's utilities, there's there's utility with weapons. What's
what's the verse in the Bible? It talks about you're
going to uh beat your beat your swords into uh
plowshares or whatever it is that you know, time of
peace and all that.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Well.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Conversely, you know, there are a lot of things that
are out there. I think that even in some Asian cultures,
the scythe itself, you know, which is that reaping tool
that you use that was actually adopted and used as
a weapon of war. So yeah, there's a lot of
there's kind of a lot of cross cross communication between weapons,
(17:54):
weapons and stuff that we have used in the field, uh,
to build houses and grow crops and all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Ye, that's what I say, was cloudshares.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
That's what I was thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Was it a weapon or was it a tool? First?
Speaker 3 (18:05):
That's the thing is if it was a tool first,
then what kind of sicko turned it into a weapon?
Speaker 2 (18:11):
And hey, wall it was a weapon first? What sicko
turned it into a tool?
Speaker 1 (18:18):
I got a great one for you while we're going
down this road. And I'll be quiet after this, but
you remember, and I can't remember this guy's first the name,
but I know you're going to remember the case. Do
you remember the case out of Iowa where the guy
took the corn rake? Yes, he killed his wife with it,
all right?
Speaker 3 (18:37):
He did.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
That is a nasty bit of business, you guys are not.
I did an episode on this case, Todd I think
was his first name, the perpetrator. I did an episode
of Bodybacks early early on about this case. And when
you see this corn i didn't really know what a
corn rake was, and when I saw this thing, it
was just absolutely hideous. And the pain that this woman
(19:02):
must have gone through because I think he took it
out and then stuck it in again. A horrible way
to die. But yeah, all of these tools, some tools
have multiple utility. And in this case, the police are
saying that there has been a hammer used. And I've
worked hammer cases. I've worked cases where people have been
(19:23):
beaten to death. But when I say people, I mean
people in the Let's see, how can I rephrase this
of my English teacher from high school won't get on
to me. People in the singular, like a person, not
three people, right, you know, And we're talking about three
people here, Dave.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
And they're all over sixty. Now.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
The reason that's important, okay, is because when you think
of three people dying in such a bloody manner and
having their bodies covered, you know, to disguise them in
some way, to hide them in a basement in a
neighborhood that has people who've been living there for decades.
The idea that there were sixty year old plus men
(20:03):
and they were all older, and what could have been
what happened before you know what transpired to make this
event take place in this home? And all I could
think of is, does anybody know where the devil was
the day this happened? Because we're talking about the devil himself?
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Who would do?
Speaker 3 (20:25):
What kind of person looks at Norman Hamlin sixty six
years old, Mark Barnett sixty five years old, and William
Barrett seventy two years old.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Those were the.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Three men, the youngest of them sixty five, all of
them dead, all of them slaughtered in that basement in
that house.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Did that happen one at a time? Were they you know?
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Or were they all like you mentioned, the guys on
the couch on the love seat locking arms?
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah, I mean what happened? How are you going to
find out who got first?
Speaker 2 (20:59):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (20:59):
My lord, it's going to be very difficult. And when
you said, you know, you'd mentioned one day that they were,
they were throwing out the idea that this is one
day down range from when the bodies are found. They
think they've been dead for that period of time. Okay,
with an attack like this, the first word that comes
to mind for me is luring. I'm wondering how these
(21:21):
men of a certain age and have are You know,
you got to you got to think, you know, when
you get to be this age or rather worldly, how
do you get these worldly guys that have been around
the block? And trust me, dude, they've been living in Detroit.
You're telling me that you're going to entice them to
come into the house. What would entice them to come
(21:42):
into that house? Did they know? Were they familiar with
the home? Were there things that went on that home
that they had in common? Uh? Did they live in
the neighborhood? Did they have connectivity with anybody that was
that was capable of this level of violence? And who
(22:02):
in the world, How in the world could these three
men elicit such violence from a person upon them? What
in the world did they do to deserve to be
beaten to death with a hammer? Not just one guy,
not just two, but three? And look you started off
(22:25):
the show, Dave talking about you got one guy walking
down the street. He's the one that approaches the cops
and says, hey, I was just being an attacked with
a guy with a hammer. You know that's not a
story you hear every day.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Man.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
No, And the thing is is that's where But it's
so weird when I was looking at this because normally,
you know, we have the crime scene, and we have
the victims, and we know who the suspect is. But
in this case, the cops are there for a totally
different reason. They're not there for this crime. They're they're
looking for a missing person, you know. And in this
(22:56):
particular case, we've got a man named Lance Clowney the second.
He's twenty seven years old, and mister Clowney the second
was arrested on the assault charge on the guy that
came out to the cops. Hey, this guy was beating me.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Now, when they arrested mister Clowney, they found him with
a hammer in his car. They found out a number
of things about mister Clowney.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
They found out that mister Clowney Joseph Scott Morgan. Mister
Clowney had been arrested by twenty seven years old. Now
in twenty twenty six, right, so think about this for
just a minute. In twenty seventeen, that would be nine
years ago, when the young man was eighteen years old.
When mister Clowney was eighteen years old, he was convicted
of armed robbery and carjacking. Sent this to five to
(23:53):
fifteen years in prison. He got out on parole. While
out on parole, he was picked up possession of a
firearm unlawfully because who's not allowed to have a firearms? Yeah,
convicted Fellains and Pearles Cabin. He was also convicted of
evading police during his time on parole. And by the way,
(24:15):
mister Clowney the second was still on parole for the
carjacking arm robbery case in twenty seventeen when he was
arrested for the brutal assault of the man who wasn't dead. Now,
let me add this to everything. Joe Clowney. He pleaded
(24:36):
guilty to that assault and the car jacking years ago.
But here we have him in twenty twenty six. He
was released in January of twenty twenty five. Didn't even
make it a full year. Really, well, I guess he did.
He did make it a year before he allegedly beat
somebody so bad. He has not yet been charged with
(25:01):
the murders of the three men. I want to point
that out. Yeah, now he has been arrested and he
is currently charged with the assault with intent to murder
and assault with a dangerous weapon the hammer on the
man who found the police and told him there's dead
bodies in there. The charges related to the homicide have
(25:23):
not been filed yet, but Judge has denied bond and
Clowney was deemed a threat to the community by the prosecutors,
and so he's not getting out on bond.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
He's not getting.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Out, Thank the Lord. I mean, you know, you know,
you got two choices in life. You can either second
hammer and you beat your neighborhood or beat your neighbors
to death with her. You can get a job and
swing your hammer as a finishing hammer on a construction crew.
You know what's your choice here? And so you think
about this, and you think about the harm that has
been done in David. If I'm not mistaken. They also
(25:59):
found him in possession of a baseball bat as well.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
And by the way, yeah, three phones in his car.
The hammer, the baseball bat, and three phones. Oh wait
a minute, how many dead bodies do we have in
the basement.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Joe, Oh, We've got three, Yeah, we do. I got
to tell you this hammer. I'm really hoping, you know
where I'm going to go with this, But I'm really
hoping that the hammer has been appropriately taken care of
because you talk about an evidence rich item, not to
(26:38):
mention any kind I mean, any kind of clothing that
mister Clowney may have had on his person, because let
me tell you, oh, in the baseball bat too, because
I got to tell you I've worked to baseball bat
cases and they are a highly effective bludgeon, all right.
I mean you can really go to work on somebody
with one of these things and in their life as
(26:59):
a matter. I think I've told you this. The first
homicide I ever participated in the autopsy of was a
guy that had been beaten to death by his brother
with a baseball bat in the front yard. That was
a long, long time ago. So yeah, I mean I've
had experience in this, and you've got all these multiple
surfaces relative to these items. So let's kind of break
(27:19):
down the hammer. You think about the hammer, and we've
got four people. Okay, We've got the living guy that
reports this, and then we've got the three guys down
in the basement. So right now, there are a number
of cases out there in the public where people are
(27:41):
talking about DNA mixtures. Okay, you talk about a prime
example here, because if this hammer has been used multiple times,
and let me throw this at you if you think
that's interesting. What if there's somebody else out there that
is I'd accounted for at this point in time, somebody
(28:02):
else that may have been walking down the street. Maybe
there's another victim somewhere in some other location that's dead,
and this guy never cleans the hammer up, or the perpetrator,
alleged perpetrator might not ever clean the hammer up. You're
going to have a DNA mixture on the surface. It'll
be on the head of the hammer, the claw if
(28:24):
it is a claw hammer, the actual blunt surface, You're
going to have it on the handle. It'll be everywhere.
The single will just be covered in DNA and it's
going to be a mixture, and it will take time.
It will take time in order to try to unspool
that because when you read when you read the examination
(28:49):
of sourcing of DNA out of something like this DNA
I was just talking about this earlier this week in
regards to the gu three case. DNA acts works on
a frequency kind of like a radio frequency, and it's
a one way frequency that kind of goes down as
you'll just imagine coaxial cable, and it's only going in
one direction. Okay, So you know how radio waves have peaks,
(29:12):
peaks and valleys, you know if you look at them
like on an ascilloscope or whatever. Well, DNA when it's
being processed actually has peaks and valleys, and different DNA
from different subjects peaks at different locations. Okay, So what
you have to do is these things are overlapping and overlying,
so you have to kind of it's like an exploded view.
(29:36):
You have to separate out those peaks, okay, and that
will delineate between whose DNA this is all right and
so and not one person. I forgot to mention whoever's
wielding the hammer, So you might have degraded DNA from
that person because if they're not cut and they don't
have a rich source of DNA, let's say it's touched
(29:57):
DNA like skin, dead skin cells, that DNA is going
to be on there as well.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
What about spit and sweat and everything else from the suspect.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Yeah, it very well could be. You could have not
just blood deposition. Oh let me tell you what else
you find on hammers too. And I have seen this
over and over, Dave, and it's because of blood has
attackiness to it's I'm not going to say it's exactly
like glue, but if you've ever been around blood, you'll
notice that blood will capture other items. With hammers in particular,
(30:30):
this is what I found on them. I found bone yards,
I found scalp, pieces of scalp, tissue, found muscle, oh
and hair. Entire clumps of hair where the scalp, for instance,
has been lacerated to the point where the hair completely
comes out on a piece of lacerated scalp where it's
(30:52):
attached to Now I find singular strands of hair as well.
It gets, It gets so incredibly. It's overwhelming when you
think about everything kind of has to be worked apart
in this case just on the hammer loan, I'm thinking
about the baseball bat as well, and then anything that's
contained because I think that he has a vehicle. This
(31:15):
individual has a vehicle and these items along you said
the three phones they're going to be in there. I
want to know if there's any trace blood on the
phone's Dave, because here's what I'm thinking, is this guy
allegedly attack these guys and he's not wearing he's not
wearing gloves. Then after he's attacked each person. Just follow
(31:40):
me here, give me a little rope. If he attacks
each person and he goes back and pulls the phone
out of their pocket, does that phone have blood deposition
from the non owner of the phone, Let's say one
of the other victims, because he's gone by with his
filthy hands and he's pulled the phones out of their
post after he's killed him. And maybe he killed him
(32:02):
in a short period of time, you know, And that's
a great explainer there, you know, like maybe you could
get down to sequencing with that. You know, when you
think about it, you know, we know that this man
was dead by the time he got his phone. It
had this fella's phone, this fellaw's blood on it. You
see what I'm saying, And so you can kind of
sequence this thing out. There's going to be a myriad
(32:23):
of physical evidence in this case. And I'm not just
talking about the hammer. The hammer, injuries that have left
behind and anything else that happened. I can tell you though,
that whatever happened in that house or in that basement
will have left a mark on the floors and the walls,
(32:43):
and you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about blood, Dave.
This is a for these cops that went into this
(33:05):
environment to the EMMY personnel. Even by AMMY personnel standards,
this is a horror show. This is a nightmare. I
can tell you just you know, just by virtue of
what they're seeing in there.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
I asked you about this before we started because I
wanted to know. It really did strike me as odd
the way the police officers described the scene in such
bloody terms. We just don't normally hear that, And that's
why I asked you about it if that was common,
because I didn't think it was. But what are they
talking about? How bloody is this going to be? With
(33:37):
three three men? Now we're going to assume a couple
of things here, okay, because we do have three dead men.
They were disguised by wrapping in clothing, carpet, what have you,
anything that could be managed to real you know, put
on top of them and around them. But there's enough
blood that two officers have said this is horror scene.
We've got another man who was assaulted with a hand
(34:00):
who runs down the cops. And we have our suspect
who we know has assaulted in battery before. He has
used a hammer before, and we know that he is
in the suspect's car, is a hammer, a bat, and
three phones. Now as I need to know how much
blood we're talking about, because I don't know. But on
top of that, how are you going to tell Joe
(34:22):
the way that the cast off comes from a baseball
bat versus a hammer. I'm just curious, morbidly curious, because
even if he cleans those up, there's still going to
be blood mixed on the bat and the hammer, right.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Yeah, there would be. I think that that would be
kind of difficult to discern. When you think about a
bat and swinging a bat, and you're an old baseball player,
you know that with a bat, when you swing a bat,
you can probably generate more energy than you can with
a hammer, all right, And this is why, because you've
got this long lever essentially that you're swinging, so it
(35:01):
builds up velocity, you know, when you like, if you
think of some guy while we're in Detroit, we'll talk
about Cecil Fielder when he was the king of swat there,
you know, and he's crushing the ball. When Cecil would
hit that ball, all right, and he would crush that ball,
the velocity of his back contacting that ball and sending it,
you know, four hundred and twenty feet out in the outfield.
(35:22):
Oh my lord, I can't even imagine is something to behold.
You're not going to achieve that same amount of velocity,
would say a hammer, all right, because the lever is
not as not as long now, as far as the
cast off and everything, that would really be a bit
outside of my baileywick. Relative to how that deposition is
going to occur, I'm sure that it would probably be
(35:45):
a bit more broad ranging. And here's why a bat
has more surface area than a hammer does. So ergo
if I took a paint brush, if I took a
tiny okay, let's just say that I took a medium
sized paintbrush that I'm going to do trim work with,
dipped it in the paint bucket, and slashed it. As
opposed to taking the paint brush I'm going to you know, Tom,
(36:07):
saw your paint brush that I'm painting a fenced with
big wide whitewashing bra You know, I've got more volume
of blood on there. So but I think that that
that find detail would be very difficult to discern. The
key here, though, is to get those items and test
them as quickly as you possibly can't well secure them,
(36:28):
make sure that they're you know that they're they're solid
as far as security goes that there's no chance they're
going to degrade or anything like that. As far as
the scene itself, though, this is going to be so
highly complex, Dave, Let's just say that the attacks started upstairs.
We know that they happened downstairs, so let's just for
(36:51):
a moment, let's say that they're attacked upstairs well in
order to convey these bodies, and they will be bleeding
or oozing blood. Okay, I hate to say bleeding, as
you're assuming that somebody's been beaten to death with a hammer.
They're no longer pumping blood, but they're dripping blood. That
blood at the initial attack, you're going to see this
dynamic distribution all over the place. It will be on
(37:13):
the ceilings, it will be on the walls, it will
be on any items that are in there. Just say,
if you're in an upper room and you've got a
you've got an ash tray, you've got a coffee table,
you've got an old mug laying around, you can find
cast off there. You know it'll be everywhere. And if
they're all attacked in the same spot. Again, you're going
(37:35):
to have commingling of the blood there, and then with
the blood the dynamic blood deposition there, you might have
overlay of blood from one person to the next, where
because the dynamic is completely different, you're doing this kind
of dance of death. A person doesn't want to get
hit with the with the hammer, so they're kind of
(37:56):
twisting and turning. Nobody stands still to be hit with
a hammer. Even the first strike is generally not going
to take somebody down. It's like the guy that walked
up right. You'll have a sudden awareness and you'll flinch
and you'll readjust their body and this guy is on
top of you like a wild man. So this is
going to be very dynamic. And then you've got to
get those bodies down to the basement. So how do
(38:19):
you do that? Well, do you cradle them in your
arms or do you drag them by their ankles where
they're going boom boom boom boom boom down the staircase
and every little bump and jostle along the way, you're
depositing blood. But that's not going to be like real dynamic.
It'll just be kind of a transfer blood. Then you've
got these wrappings day. Which is kind of fascinating because
(38:41):
when this case first came out, and I think I
told you this when the first reports came out, they
said the bodies were wrapped in carpet, and I was thinking, gee, whiz,
how much carpet does this person have if they're going
to wrap three individual bodies.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
I was thinking the same thing when you told me carpet,
and I'm like, I'll have to So I started. I
found the article that you were talking about with the
carpeting and what it was. It appears that the clothing
and the rags and things that were thrown on the men,
on the three dead bodies and they were kind of
rolled around in them that because there was so much blood, Joe,
(39:15):
that it was mistaken for carpeting, because it didn't look
like separately it didn't look like separate pieces of cloth
or shirts or whatever.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
And so I'm thinking blood covered.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Yeah, And here's another thing. This is really horrible, and
I hope this isn't the case. You know, I don't
wish for death for anybody, but I wish for a
painless death and a quick death. Dave he took. If
this perpetrator took those guys down there and they were
still alive, they could have very well have been bleeding
out into those rags and the carpeting, as you know,
(39:48):
the last bits of life left them. We don't know.
We do know that they believe that these individuals were
down for at least a day, so they've done some
kind of post mortem interval assessment on the Thank goodness,
Dave that they have somebody in custody. Now, this individual,
according to what we're hearing, has not been charged with
(40:10):
three homicides. He's been charged with the assault on the
other gentleman, correct.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
And attempt to murder, assault and assault with intent to murder,
and assault with a dangerous weapon.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Right, Yeah, and thank the Lord, he's he's off the streets.
And do we know what the status is. I would
assume that they're going to have some kind of appearance
coming up in the next week or so.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
Yeah, he's going to be back in front of a
judge in May, and I'll follow up on it.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Yeah, we need to about this case because I got
to tell you, I just I'm so fascinated by the
fact that you would have It's one thing. You know,
we go back to the earlier thing that I you know,
that case that I told you about with the three
guys on the on the love seat. Gunschat wounds are
one thing, but to have three individuals that are deceased
(41:02):
and one that was grievously injured by hammer, I gotta
know more. Friends. We're going to keep you up to
speed on this case, and until then, I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is Body Backs
Quody Dinas, but Joseph's gotten more. A couple of years back,
I had a television producer reach out to me and listen,
I'm going to give you a little dirty inside secret here. Yeah.
I get these calls right from various producers with these
(00:22):
different platforms that are out there, and they say, hey,
we're looking for a forensics guy, hoping you could join
us and come to this location and here read over
this document and we want you to make an appearance.
You know. It's like where you're a talking head, and
sometimes I'll even go out to scenes. But there was
(00:44):
one that had actually intrigued me that I was supposed
to be going to and it never happened. As a
matter of fact, if you tune in, I think this year,
I'm actually on for like the third or fourth year
in a row on Buried in the Backyard on Oxygen,
and they had they had me going to Detroit because
(01:06):
there was a body that was actually buried in a basement.
I've never been to Detroit, and it gets a bad rap,
I know, and maybe justly I have no idea, but
I've always wanted to go because I've always been fascinated
with cars and just that world up there just to
see it, but it didn't happen. But you know, today
(01:29):
we're going to talk about some cases, and I say
cases that originate out of Detroit that I have just
found out about, and it involves a house again and
possibly abasement. The only difference is is that these remains
are not buried. And guess what the cause of death
(01:54):
involves a hammer. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is
body bags, David. I want to tell you a story
real quick, one of the worst cases. And I say worst,
(02:15):
it's you know, that's highly subjective, okay, but I think
that there are cases out there that I handled as
an investigator that kind of sent a chill up my
spond because I would see I wouldn't just see the
victims dead at the scene, and that they're like, you know,
subjects that I have to examine every now and then
(02:37):
I'd see a peak of humanity that would come through.
And this case that I'm referring to right now is
something I worked on, and it did involve three guys
and they were all forced to sit on a love seat,
which generally accommodates two people, right, and these are grown
men this is a drug hit. I've never had anything
(03:01):
like this. And they were made to interlock arms at
the elbows, and each one of them were executed. They
were each shot in the forehead with a three point
fifty seven magnum. Now that's a revolver, and I've seen
a lot of bloody scenes, but I've never seen anything
(03:22):
with this kind of projected deposition. Because each one of
these rounds on, all three of these guys exited, and
it painted the walls all behind them and on the
back of the love seat, and they were leaning into
one another. And I always thought, you know, a revolver
is not a semi automatic weapon, so it takes a
(03:44):
bit longer to actuate the trigger. You know, it's double action.
So you pull the trigger, the revolver portion of it,
the cylinder actually spins, and then the hammer drops and
this is done over and over. And I thought, well,
if you're the first guy, it's kind of merciful, but
if you're the third guy, you know it's coming. And
(04:05):
that it got me into that mindset with that case.
And you know, for years, I've still thought about that case.
Into the best of my knowledge. That case has never
been solved.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
We're gonna have to look that one up.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Yeah, I know, no kidding. And so when stay arm
in arm were they still linked when the bodies were found.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
They were still linked. And that's why I always thought
it was a drug hit. And I'm not going to
go into the organization that it was linked to at
the time, but I've always felt as though there were
like because these guys were big dudes. Man, I've always
thought that there was like a large group of people
that were in the room, because how are you going
(04:45):
to force three guys to interlock arms and sit in
that one position. If there's one guy holding a gun
on you, you would think that the other two could get
up and bomb rush the guy. That didn't happen. I
always thought that there was like a group of people
and dude, there was weed everywhere apartment and they were
making they were making blunts. Blunts are the cigars where
(05:06):
you pull out the tobacco and you restuff it with weed.
And apparently they were what's it called they were shorting
the supplier, like they were not paying over their due
to the supplier. And you know, this is what wound
up happening. But you know, the case that we're covering
out of Detroit today. I'm not going to say it's
equally as horrific because I wasn't at this house in Detroit,
(05:30):
but I got to tell you it kind of had
echoes in my brain as we were reading over this.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
It's interesting that this this case actually began with police
on a missing person's case. The police show up on
the south side of Detroit in and they're looking for
a missing person. And while they're asking neighbors. It's an
old neighborhood. As a matter of fact, one of the
(05:57):
neighbors has been there for sixty years, other has been
there for twelve, So you're talking people who know one another.
They know one another's routines. And when the police were talking,
while they're trying to find out about the missing person,
somebody walks up to him and he says he has
just been assaulted. The man does this guy has just
(06:20):
been beating me with a hammer. And by the way,
there's some dead bodies in that house right there. He
points to the house that they're standing in front of
the cops like, wait a minute, I did beat you
with a hammer, yeah, and now there's dead bodies in
that house.
Speaker 2 (06:35):
Yep.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
And so the police go into the house Joe, and
the home was on Edsel Street and being Detroit for
motor company the Edzel. I wonder how many other streets
are named like that. I don't I have no.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
Idea fair Lane anyway, I don't know. Yeah, there's Lane a.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
Movie in the early nineties. Right.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
At any rate, the man tells the officers about the
dead guys in the house, So the officers go inside. Now,
to be honest with you, they don't really know what
they're walking into. They just know that this guy claims
he was beaten, he's been assaulted, and there's dead bodies
in the house. The police described this Joe in such
a way that I made a note to ask you
(07:19):
about it, because I don't recall seeing police officers when
they tell you about a crime scene. They might talk
about very obvious evidence. They might give you an idea
of where a victim was standing or laying when they
were found, give you a basic lay of the land,
But rarely did they go so far as to describe
(07:43):
blood or even the extents of the brutality that you're
walking into.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
Again, this is.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Just what normal police, how they talk to the press,
and what have you in this particular case, Joe. The
police described this as the victims were brutally assaulted, their
bodies wrapped in towels and carpeting. And actually it wasn't
tows and carpeting. Some of it was just old clothing.
It was just nasty stuff. But there was blood everywhere.
(08:14):
The bodies were in the basement, but they had been
dead for at least a day, Joe, and there was
blood everywhere. Now, if police know people are dead, you
know in this case, they're not going anywhere and we've
got a massively bloody crime scene. Is that when you
get the call to come in or do they Is
there another pathway to that?
Speaker 1 (08:35):
No? No, that would be when we would come in.
That call would be initiated with in a case like this.
The beat officer that responded, he wouldn't even have to
wait to call the detectives and say, hey, should I
call the medical examiner. And by the way, they've got
a fantastic medical examiner's office in Detroit. As matter of fact,
that's the home of the home of the man that
(08:58):
we did a profile on, m Doctor Werner Spitz. He
was the chief MEE in Detroit. I think that's is
that wing? I think that's Wayne County. So yeah, they've
got a great reputation up there. But yeah, the EMMY
would have been notified. I would imagine by the beat unit,
the uniform officer out there. They would have said, look,
get me the emmy, get me CID, and get me
(09:19):
crime scene and route immediately forthwith as they say, and
they would have locked this thing down. The good thing
about it is with a scene like CID, c IDEA
is Criminal Investigation Division, and you'll see, you'll hear CID.
But in Detroit they actually have a homicide division. Many
people don't understand that even medium sized police departments, they
(09:42):
don't have homicide detectives. They will have it's broken down
into two groups. Many times they'll have crimes against persons
and crimes against property, and so the detectives that work
crimes against persons will do assaults, batteries, sexual assault, rate
and homicide okay, and then crimes property you know, might
(10:04):
be burglary, car theft, any number of things like that,
because they don't they don't have enough personnel to sub specialize.
You get into a larger department like Detroit and they've
got a very well known homicide bureau. Okay, do you
remember old dragnet Joe Friday would say it was a
Friday and I was working out of the Robbery homicide division,
(10:28):
you know. And so robbery has always been considered a
violent crime. It's a personal crime. Robbery is different than burglary.
So robbery means that you are taking physically taking something
from somebody, and so that's indicative of the personal crime there.
So yeah, so and it's interchangeable. You'll hear people say CID,
(10:48):
You'll hear people say homicide. In this case, I probably
even spoke. He's probably going to call the homicide division
and they're going to roll out there. And in this
type of situation, I would imagine that once the detective
arrives and the EMMY investigator is there, they're going to
(11:09):
do what is called an initial scene walkthrough. That means
you're not necessarily going to take any photographs, you're not
going to do any kind of measurements. It'll be the
EMMY investigator, the detective, and probably the first responding officer,
and you will do a very cursory walk through the scene.
(11:32):
And that way you can get that space kind of
organized in your brain, you see what I'm saying, and
then you step back out. Now, this is going to
be in the wake of probably ordering up a warrant,
to have the warrant written up because and then they'll
do do the walk through at that point in time,
because you can't really search a scene without a warrant.
It doesn't matter if bodies are there. There is no
(11:53):
there is no constitutional exception for homicide, which is something
that people need to get into their brain. And you
people that lose their minds over this thing. They think
that just because just because there's a dead body at
the scene, that the constitution suddenly melts away.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
It doesn't.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
As a matter of fact, it needs to be further
enforced at that point in time. But so that's kind
of the that's kind of what happens. And when you
would walk into this, when I would do initial scene walkthroughs,
it really steadies your mind and gives you an idea
as to what I'm going to be faced with. And
(12:30):
there might be certain things you see in there that
when you exit, before you actually do start your investigation internally,
you might have to call on other resources, like do
I have enough lights? For instance, we're in a basement.
Does this house even have electricity or were going to
have to call the fire department to bring a light
truck out. Does cromp scene have portable lights that can
(12:51):
put up? Where can we position them so we're not
going to disrupt any kind of evidence? Do I need
to call specialists in forensics? You know those sorts of things.
Do I have all the tools that I need with
me to process that scene? And it's not just one body, Dave.
We're talking about three bodies here, all right, and according
to what we're hearing, there's been an effort to hide
(13:13):
these bodies. Okay, it's not like they're sitting on the
front porch, all right. And I'm not being disrespectful by
saying that somebody has gone and taken these bodies and
placed them into this basement. And I would imagine that
before the detective when they arrive after having heard this
story from this police officer that it was first reported
(13:36):
to believing had to be seen, Dave. When it comes
to hammers, I've had a fascination. I have to My
(13:59):
inner nerd comes out, and this is why it does.
I don't people, you know, people will ask me, you
know what true crime shows do you watch? You know,
what what things do you listen to? And you know,
podcasts and all that stuff. And no insult to any
of my colleagues out there in the world of true crime.
I don't. I just don't. I do it so much
(14:20):
and I love doing it. But when I when I
watched stuff, you know, Kim, You'll say, what are you
watching on YouTube? I'm like, it's a medieval history thing.
It's just say, how do you watch that? And one
of the things that that I do enjoy watching is
is kind of the story of England and France and
their development and also their the armor that there that
(14:43):
their armies wore, some of the weapons and things. You know.
The hammer itself is an ancient weapon that has been used.
I don't know since well, I'll put it to you
this way. I don't think he necessarily had a hammer.
If you've ever heard of Judah Accabe, who's a grand
hero of of of the Jews, I think and uh uh,
(15:09):
I've got a rabbi friend out there in in Mobile, Alabama.
Big shout out to him. I hope, I hope him
I'm saying this correctly. Rabbi, the word or the name
maccabee I think actually translates roughly uh in Hebrew to hammer,
and it's almost like hammer of God. And so the
name has been around for a while.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
We have.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
The prevalence of the weapon. You've got it going back
as far as like the fourth or fifth century uh
In uh in in the Common era. But you know,
the hammer itself came in two forms, the war hammer.
You had a shorter war hammer that guys on horseback
(15:54):
the cavalry would carry and guess what it had, Dave
as we developed armor, it had a bike on one end,
and then it had the blunted edge. So the idea
was to with the blunted edge, you would concuss the
person like you would strike them in the head and
kind of knock them silly, say if they had a
helmet on. And then they had this really I'm gonna
(16:15):
send you a photo of this. Afterwards, they had this
really nasty spike on one end. And so you can
imagine you're running full tilt. Imagine these guys on horseback
and a battlefield going full tilt, and they've got a
hammer that's probably about three feet the handles might be
two and a half three feet in length. And it's
got this huge head on it, and they just swing
(16:37):
down with that spike and it would penetrate just about
any kind of armor. So not only are.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
These guys late at night sitting around the campfire telling tales,
they're not sitting there singing if I had a hammer.
Speaker 4 (16:49):
No no, this is not Peter, Paul and Mary. No no, no, no, no,
this is scary. But you're describing to me is a
hammer like no other. But it's a hammer that's a weapon.
And the hamrhage that we have now are not that dissimilar.
It's got no no on the end and a flat
end too.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
No, they're not you know, anti wax what you want.
You know, this is what Joseph Scott Morgan watches at.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Home on YouTube.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
You know, there's utilities, there's there's utility with weapons. What's
what's the verse in the Bible? It talks about you're
going to uh beat your beat your swords into uh
plowshares or whatever it is that you know, time of
peace and all that.
Speaker 2 (17:32):
Well.
Speaker 1 (17:33):
Conversely, you know, there are a lot of things that
are out there. I think that even in some Asian cultures,
the scythe itself, you know, which is that reaping tool
that you use that was actually adopted and used as
a weapon of war. So yeah, there's a lot of
there's kind of a lot of cross cross communication between weapons,
(17:54):
weapons and stuff that we have used in the field, uh,
to build houses and grow crops and all that stuff.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
Ye, that's what I say, was cloudshares.
Speaker 1 (18:02):
That's what I was thinking about it.
Speaker 2 (18:03):
Was it a weapon or was it a tool? First?
Speaker 3 (18:05):
That's the thing is if it was a tool first,
then what kind of sicko turned it into a weapon?
Speaker 2 (18:11):
And hey, wall it was a weapon first? What sicko
turned it into a tool?
Speaker 1 (18:18):
I got a great one for you while we're going
down this road. And I'll be quiet after this, but
you remember, and I can't remember this guy's first the name,
but I know you're going to remember the case. Do
you remember the case out of Iowa where the guy
took the corn rake? Yes, he killed his wife with it,
all right?
Speaker 3 (18:37):
He did.
Speaker 1 (18:38):
That is a nasty bit of business, you guys are not.
I did an episode on this case, Todd I think
was his first name, the perpetrator. I did an episode
of Bodybacks early early on about this case. And when
you see this corn i didn't really know what a
corn rake was, and when I saw this thing, it
was just absolutely hideous. And the pain that this woman
(19:02):
must have gone through because I think he took it
out and then stuck it in again. A horrible way
to die. But yeah, all of these tools, some tools
have multiple utility. And in this case, the police are
saying that there has been a hammer used. And I've
worked hammer cases. I've worked cases where people have been
(19:23):
beaten to death. But when I say people, I mean
people in the Let's see, how can I rephrase this
of my English teacher from high school won't get on
to me. People in the singular, like a person, not
three people, right, you know, And we're talking about three
people here, Dave.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
And they're all over sixty. Now.
Speaker 3 (19:43):
The reason that's important, okay, is because when you think
of three people dying in such a bloody manner and
having their bodies covered, you know, to disguise them in
some way, to hide them in a basement in a
neighborhood that has people who've been living there for decades.
The idea that there were sixty year old plus men
(20:03):
and they were all older, and what could have been
what happened before you know what transpired to make this
event take place in this home? And all I could
think of is, does anybody know where the devil was
the day this happened? Because we're talking about the devil himself?
Speaker 2 (20:24):
Who would do?
Speaker 3 (20:25):
What kind of person looks at Norman Hamlin sixty six
years old, Mark Barnett sixty five years old, and William
Barrett seventy two years old.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
Those were the.
Speaker 3 (20:37):
Three men, the youngest of them sixty five, all of
them dead, all of them slaughtered in that basement in
that house.
Speaker 2 (20:47):
Did that happen one at a time? Were they you know?
Speaker 3 (20:50):
Or were they all like you mentioned, the guys on
the couch on the love seat locking arms?
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Yeah, I mean what happened? How are you going to
find out who got first?
Speaker 2 (20:59):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (20:59):
My lord, it's going to be very difficult. And when
you said, you know, you'd mentioned one day that they were,
they were throwing out the idea that this is one
day down range from when the bodies are found. They
think they've been dead for that period of time. Okay,
with an attack like this, the first word that comes
to mind for me is luring. I'm wondering how these
(21:21):
men of a certain age and have are You know,
you got to you got to think, you know, when
you get to be this age or rather worldly, how
do you get these worldly guys that have been around
the block? And trust me, dude, they've been living in Detroit.
You're telling me that you're going to entice them to
come into the house. What would entice them to come
(21:42):
into that house? Did they know? Were they familiar with
the home? Were there things that went on that home
that they had in common? Uh? Did they live in
the neighborhood? Did they have connectivity with anybody that was
that was capable of this level of violence? And who
(22:02):
in the world, How in the world could these three
men elicit such violence from a person upon them? What
in the world did they do to deserve to be
beaten to death with a hammer? Not just one guy,
not just two, but three? And look you started off
(22:25):
the show, Dave talking about you got one guy walking
down the street. He's the one that approaches the cops
and says, hey, I was just being an attacked with
a guy with a hammer. You know that's not a
story you hear every day.
Speaker 2 (22:35):
Man.
Speaker 3 (22:36):
No, And the thing is is that's where But it's
so weird when I was looking at this because normally,
you know, we have the crime scene, and we have
the victims, and we know who the suspect is. But
in this case, the cops are there for a totally
different reason. They're not there for this crime. They're they're
looking for a missing person, you know. And in this
(22:56):
particular case, we've got a man named Lance Clowney the second.
He's twenty seven years old, and mister Clowney the second
was arrested on the assault charge on the guy that
came out to the cops. Hey, this guy was beating me.
Speaker 2 (23:15):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Now, when they arrested mister Clowney, they found him with
a hammer in his car. They found out a number
of things about mister Clowney.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
They found out that mister Clowney Joseph Scott Morgan. Mister
Clowney had been arrested by twenty seven years old. Now
in twenty twenty six, right, so think about this for
just a minute. In twenty seventeen, that would be nine
years ago, when the young man was eighteen years old.
When mister Clowney was eighteen years old, he was convicted
of armed robbery and carjacking. Sent this to five to
(23:53):
fifteen years in prison. He got out on parole. While
out on parole, he was picked up possession of a
firearm unlawfully because who's not allowed to have a firearms? Yeah,
convicted Fellains and Pearles Cabin. He was also convicted of
evading police during his time on parole. And by the way,
(24:15):
mister Clowney the second was still on parole for the
carjacking arm robbery case in twenty seventeen when he was
arrested for the brutal assault of the man who wasn't dead. Now,
let me add this to everything. Joe Clowney. He pleaded
(24:36):
guilty to that assault and the car jacking years ago.
But here we have him in twenty twenty six. He
was released in January of twenty twenty five. Didn't even
make it a full year. Really, well, I guess he did.
He did make it a year before he allegedly beat
somebody so bad. He has not yet been charged with
(25:01):
the murders of the three men. I want to point
that out. Yeah, now he has been arrested and he
is currently charged with the assault with intent to murder
and assault with a dangerous weapon the hammer on the
man who found the police and told him there's dead
bodies in there. The charges related to the homicide have
(25:23):
not been filed yet, but Judge has denied bond and
Clowney was deemed a threat to the community by the prosecutors,
and so he's not getting out on bond.
Speaker 2 (25:35):
He's not getting.
Speaker 1 (25:36):
Out, Thank the Lord. I mean, you know, you know,
you got two choices in life. You can either second
hammer and you beat your neighborhood or beat your neighbors
to death with her. You can get a job and
swing your hammer as a finishing hammer on a construction crew.
You know what's your choice here? And so you think
about this, and you think about the harm that has
been done in David. If I'm not mistaken. They also
(25:59):
found him in possession of a baseball bat as well.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
And by the way, yeah, three phones in his car.
The hammer, the baseball bat, and three phones. Oh wait
a minute, how many dead bodies do we have in
the basement.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Joe, Oh, We've got three, Yeah, we do. I got
to tell you this hammer. I'm really hoping, you know
where I'm going to go with this, But I'm really
hoping that the hammer has been appropriately taken care of
because you talk about an evidence rich item, not to
(26:38):
mention any kind I mean, any kind of clothing that
mister Clowney may have had on his person, because let
me tell you, oh, in the baseball bat too, because
I got to tell you I've worked to baseball bat
cases and they are a highly effective bludgeon, all right.
I mean you can really go to work on somebody
with one of these things and in their life as
(26:59):
a matter. I think I've told you this. The first
homicide I ever participated in the autopsy of was a
guy that had been beaten to death by his brother
with a baseball bat in the front yard. That was
a long, long time ago. So yeah, I mean I've
had experience in this, and you've got all these multiple
surfaces relative to these items. So let's kind of break
(27:19):
down the hammer. You think about the hammer, and we've
got four people. Okay, We've got the living guy that
reports this, and then we've got the three guys down
in the basement. So right now, there are a number
of cases out there in the public where people are
(27:41):
talking about DNA mixtures. Okay, you talk about a prime
example here, because if this hammer has been used multiple times,
and let me throw this at you if you think
that's interesting. What if there's somebody else out there that
is I'd accounted for at this point in time, somebody
(28:02):
else that may have been walking down the street. Maybe
there's another victim somewhere in some other location that's dead,
and this guy never cleans the hammer up, or the perpetrator,
alleged perpetrator might not ever clean the hammer up. You're
going to have a DNA mixture on the surface. It'll
be on the head of the hammer, the claw if
(28:24):
it is a claw hammer, the actual blunt surface, You're
going to have it on the handle. It'll be everywhere.
The single will just be covered in DNA and it's
going to be a mixture, and it will take time.
It will take time in order to try to unspool
that because when you read when you read the examination
(28:49):
of sourcing of DNA out of something like this DNA
I was just talking about this earlier this week in
regards to the gu three case. DNA acts works on
a frequency kind of like a radio frequency, and it's
a one way frequency that kind of goes down as
you'll just imagine coaxial cable, and it's only going in
one direction. Okay, So you know how radio waves have peaks,
(29:12):
peaks and valleys, you know if you look at them
like on an ascilloscope or whatever. Well, DNA when it's
being processed actually has peaks and valleys, and different DNA
from different subjects peaks at different locations. Okay, So what
you have to do is these things are overlapping and overlying,
so you have to kind of it's like an exploded view.
(29:36):
You have to separate out those peaks, okay, and that
will delineate between whose DNA this is all right and
so and not one person. I forgot to mention whoever's
wielding the hammer, So you might have degraded DNA from
that person because if they're not cut and they don't
have a rich source of DNA, let's say it's touched
(29:57):
DNA like skin, dead skin cells, that DNA is going
to be on there as well.
Speaker 3 (30:03):
What about spit and sweat and everything else from the suspect.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Yeah, it very well could be. You could have not
just blood deposition. Oh let me tell you what else
you find on hammers too. And I have seen this
over and over, Dave, and it's because of blood has
attackiness to it's I'm not going to say it's exactly
like glue, but if you've ever been around blood, you'll
notice that blood will capture other items. With hammers in particular,
(30:30):
this is what I found on them. I found bone yards,
I found scalp, pieces of scalp, tissue, found muscle, oh
and hair. Entire clumps of hair where the scalp, for instance,
has been lacerated to the point where the hair completely
comes out on a piece of lacerated scalp where it's
(30:52):
attached to Now I find singular strands of hair as well.
It gets, It gets so incredibly. It's overwhelming when you
think about everything kind of has to be worked apart
in this case just on the hammer loan, I'm thinking
about the baseball bat as well, and then anything that's
contained because I think that he has a vehicle. This
(31:15):
individual has a vehicle and these items along you said
the three phones they're going to be in there. I
want to know if there's any trace blood on the
phone's Dave, because here's what I'm thinking, is this guy
allegedly attack these guys and he's not wearing he's not
wearing gloves. Then after he's attacked each person. Just follow
(31:40):
me here, give me a little rope. If he attacks
each person and he goes back and pulls the phone
out of their pocket, does that phone have blood deposition
from the non owner of the phone, Let's say one
of the other victims, because he's gone by with his
filthy hands and he's pulled the phones out of their
post after he's killed him. And maybe he killed him
(32:02):
in a short period of time, you know, And that's
a great explainer there, you know, like maybe you could
get down to sequencing with that. You know, when you
think about it, you know, we know that this man
was dead by the time he got his phone. It
had this fella's phone, this fellaw's blood on it. You
see what I'm saying, And so you can kind of
sequence this thing out. There's going to be a myriad
(32:23):
of physical evidence in this case. And I'm not just
talking about the hammer. The hammer, injuries that have left
behind and anything else that happened. I can tell you though,
that whatever happened in that house or in that basement
will have left a mark on the floors and the walls,
(32:43):
and you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking about blood, Dave.
This is a for these cops that went into this
(33:05):
environment to the EMMY personnel. Even by AMMY personnel standards,
this is a horror show. This is a nightmare. I
can tell you just you know, just by virtue of
what they're seeing in there.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
I asked you about this before we started because I
wanted to know. It really did strike me as odd
the way the police officers described the scene in such
bloody terms. We just don't normally hear that, And that's
why I asked you about it if that was common,
because I didn't think it was. But what are they
talking about? How bloody is this going to be? With
(33:37):
three three men? Now we're going to assume a couple
of things here, okay, because we do have three dead men.
They were disguised by wrapping in clothing, carpet, what have you,
anything that could be managed to real you know, put
on top of them and around them. But there's enough
blood that two officers have said this is horror scene.
We've got another man who was assaulted with a hand
(34:00):
who runs down the cops. And we have our suspect
who we know has assaulted in battery before. He has
used a hammer before, and we know that he is
in the suspect's car, is a hammer, a bat, and
three phones. Now as I need to know how much
blood we're talking about, because I don't know. But on
top of that, how are you going to tell Joe
(34:22):
the way that the cast off comes from a baseball
bat versus a hammer. I'm just curious, morbidly curious, because
even if he cleans those up, there's still going to
be blood mixed on the bat and the hammer, right.
Speaker 1 (34:38):
Yeah, there would be. I think that that would be
kind of difficult to discern. When you think about a
bat and swinging a bat, and you're an old baseball player,
you know that with a bat, when you swing a bat,
you can probably generate more energy than you can with
a hammer, all right, And this is why, because you've
got this long lever essentially that you're swinging, so it
(35:01):
builds up velocity, you know, when you like, if you
think of some guy while we're in Detroit, we'll talk
about Cecil Fielder when he was the king of swat there,
you know, and he's crushing the ball. When Cecil would
hit that ball, all right, and he would crush that ball,
the velocity of his back contacting that ball and sending it,
you know, four hundred and twenty feet out in the outfield.
(35:22):
Oh my lord, I can't even imagine is something to behold.
You're not going to achieve that same amount of velocity,
would say a hammer, all right, because the lever is
not as not as long now, as far as the
cast off and everything, that would really be a bit
outside of my baileywick. Relative to how that deposition is
going to occur, I'm sure that it would probably be
(35:45):
a bit more broad ranging. And here's why a bat
has more surface area than a hammer does. So ergo
if I took a paint brush, if I took a
tiny okay, let's just say that I took a medium
sized paintbrush that I'm going to do trim work with,
dipped it in the paint bucket, and slashed it. As
opposed to taking the paint brush I'm going to you know, Tom,
(36:07):
saw your paint brush that I'm painting a fenced with
big wide whitewashing bra You know, I've got more volume
of blood on there. So but I think that that
that find detail would be very difficult to discern. The
key here, though, is to get those items and test
them as quickly as you possibly can't well secure them,
(36:28):
make sure that they're you know that they're they're solid
as far as security goes that there's no chance they're
going to degrade or anything like that. As far as
the scene itself, though, this is going to be so
highly complex, Dave, Let's just say that the attacks started upstairs.
We know that they happened downstairs, so let's just for
(36:51):
a moment, let's say that they're attacked upstairs well in
order to convey these bodies, and they will be bleeding
or oozing blood. Okay, I hate to say bleeding, as
you're assuming that somebody's been beaten to death with a hammer.
They're no longer pumping blood, but they're dripping blood. That
blood at the initial attack, you're going to see this
dynamic distribution all over the place. It will be on
(37:13):
the ceilings, it will be on the walls, it will
be on any items that are in there. Just say,
if you're in an upper room and you've got a
you've got an ash tray, you've got a coffee table,
you've got an old mug laying around, you can find
cast off there. You know it'll be everywhere. And if
they're all attacked in the same spot. Again, you're going
(37:35):
to have commingling of the blood there, and then with
the blood the dynamic blood deposition there, you might have
overlay of blood from one person to the next, where
because the dynamic is completely different, you're doing this kind
of dance of death. A person doesn't want to get
hit with the with the hammer, so they're kind of
(37:56):
twisting and turning. Nobody stands still to be hit with
a hammer. Even the first strike is generally not going
to take somebody down. It's like the guy that walked
up right. You'll have a sudden awareness and you'll flinch
and you'll readjust their body and this guy is on
top of you like a wild man. So this is
going to be very dynamic. And then you've got to
get those bodies down to the basement. So how do
(38:19):
you do that? Well, do you cradle them in your
arms or do you drag them by their ankles where
they're going boom boom boom boom boom down the staircase
and every little bump and jostle along the way, you're
depositing blood. But that's not going to be like real dynamic.
It'll just be kind of a transfer blood. Then you've
got these wrappings day. Which is kind of fascinating because
(38:41):
when this case first came out, and I think I
told you this when the first reports came out, they
said the bodies were wrapped in carpet, and I was thinking, gee, whiz,
how much carpet does this person have if they're going
to wrap three individual bodies.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
I was thinking the same thing when you told me carpet,
and I'm like, I'll have to So I started. I
found the article that you were talking about with the
carpeting and what it was. It appears that the clothing
and the rags and things that were thrown on the men,
on the three dead bodies and they were kind of
rolled around in them that because there was so much blood, Joe,
(39:15):
that it was mistaken for carpeting, because it didn't look
like separately it didn't look like separate pieces of cloth
or shirts or whatever.
Speaker 2 (39:24):
And so I'm thinking blood covered.
Speaker 1 (39:28):
Yeah, And here's another thing. This is really horrible, and
I hope this isn't the case. You know, I don't
wish for death for anybody, but I wish for a
painless death and a quick death. Dave he took. If
this perpetrator took those guys down there and they were
still alive, they could have very well have been bleeding
out into those rags and the carpeting, as you know,
(39:48):
the last bits of life left them. We don't know.
We do know that they believe that these individuals were
down for at least a day, so they've done some
kind of post mortem interval assessment on the Thank goodness,
Dave that they have somebody in custody. Now, this individual,
according to what we're hearing, has not been charged with
(40:10):
three homicides. He's been charged with the assault on the
other gentleman, correct.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
And attempt to murder, assault and assault with intent to murder,
and assault with a dangerous weapon.
Speaker 1 (40:21):
Right, Yeah, and thank the Lord, he's he's off the streets.
And do we know what the status is. I would
assume that they're going to have some kind of appearance
coming up in the next week or so.
Speaker 3 (40:34):
Yeah, he's going to be back in front of a
judge in May, and I'll follow up on it.
Speaker 2 (40:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:40):
Yeah, we need to about this case because I got
to tell you, I just I'm so fascinated by the
fact that you would have It's one thing. You know,
we go back to the earlier thing that I you know,
that case that I told you about with the three
guys on the on the love seat. Gunschat wounds are
one thing, but to have three individuals that are deceased
(41:02):
and one that was grievously injured by hammer, I gotta
know more. Friends. We're going to keep you up to
speed on this case, and until then, I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is Body Backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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