July 5, 2022 • 34 mins
Tammy Jo Blanton's body is found in her bathtub by police responding to a welfare check request. Just the night before, September 10th, 2014, Blanton called 911, saying that her ex-boyfriend, Joseph Oberhandsley, would not leave the front of her home. The welfare check had been requested by Blanton's friend and co-worker when Blanton did not show up for work. When police arrive at the home, Joseph Oberhandsley answers the door, covered in blood. Police find signs of a forced entry, and ultimately Tammy Jo Blanton's body. She has not only been stabbed repeatedly, but her body mutilated and also cannibalized.
In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the differences between dismemberment and mutilation, the perspective of the judge and jury when it is revealed that injuries to the body are post-mortem, and the horrific details in the case of Tammy Jo Blanton’s murder.
Show Notes:
0:30 - Introducing Tammy Jo Blanton’s murder
1:30 - Tammy Jo Blanton calls the police because her ex-boyfriend, Joseph Oberhansley would not leave her home
3:00 - Describing the initial murder scene
5:00 - Cause of death: sharp force injuries. Multiple stab wounds all over her body.
10:00 - How exactly does the body stop functioning when you are stabbed to death?
12:30 - Post-mortem vs Antemortem
13:30 - The additional “twisting of the knife” when injuries to a deceased body are post-mortem
14:00 - Section 2: Walking into the crime scene
16:30 - A section of Tammy Jo’s chest is open, a parts of her heart and a lung are missing
18:00 - The differences between dismemberment and mutilation
20:00 - A jigsaw was found on the scene. This continues to show evidence of how much time it took to mutilate the body
23:00 - Section 3: Joseph Oberhansley’s mental state and the trial for this case
27:00 - Oberhansley’s criminal record included shooting his own mother, shooting and killing the teenage mother of his child. He had also shot himself, attempting suicide in the past.
29:30 - An exploration into the different types of cannibalism
33:00 - Joseph Oberhansley was sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of parole
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan because time goes by you.
If you're all alone, you you long for companionship. Many
of us do, I think, And it's tough. It's tough
(00:29):
to try to discern who you're gonna let into your
little bubble. You don't know, you know, particularly the world
that we live in nowadays, you don't know who's gonna
show up at your door. You don't know who's on
the island line, you don't know who you're texting with.
Today on body Bags, I want to talk about a
young lady Hammy Joe Blant. I want to talk about
(00:49):
her murder. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags.
Joining me is Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories.
Would Nancy Grace scary world out there, Jackie? When it
comes to dating, wouldn't you agree? Oh? Absolutely? Joe Tammy
(01:14):
Joe Blanton was dating forty one year old Joseph over
Handsley and it was a very volatile relationship and she
broke up with him. She was so afraid of over
Handsley that she had the locks changed on her home.
And here is an example of why. The day before
Tammy Joe Blanton was found murdered. She had made a
(01:36):
call to at two fifty two a m. She made
the call reporting that her ex boyfriend, Joseph over Handsley
was outside her home and wouldn't leave. When officers arrived,
Joseph was still outside. He said that his key would
not work. When police asked to see over Handsley's identification,
it listed a different address than Tammy Joe Blanton's home.
(02:00):
Tammy Joe Blunton explained to police that she had ended
her relationship with ober Hansley, had her locks changed again,
and that she wanted him to leave. He did, but
the next morning, officers came back to Tammy Joe Blanton's house.
That's because her friend and colleague, Sabrina Hall, had called
police to ask them to do a welfare check on
Tammy Joe Blanton. Tammy worked with Sabrina and was supposed
(02:23):
to work that day, but when she didn't arrive to
the office, Sabrina called her phone and a man answered.
The man told Sabrina that he was Tammy's brother and
that she was caring for their ill father. Sabrina Hall
did not believe the man and made the phone call
for police. To check on Tammy. At that point, when
the officers showed up at Blanton's home and knocked on
(02:43):
the door, ober Hansley answered the door. The detectives noticed
a cut on ober Hansley's hand and they searched him
and at that point they found a brass knuckle knife
in his pocket that appeared to have hair and blood
on it. At that point, infust gators obtained a warrant
for the home and inside it's where they found the
(03:05):
body of Tammy Joe Blanton in the bathroom. And police
at that point described it this is their words, not mine,
A big bloody mound of something in the bathtub. That
phrase right there tells me that this poor woman's body
has just been mutilated terribly. Yeah, that's a big indication there,
(03:30):
because you know you should not just if you're a
young police officer that shows up and and these are
what we refer to as beat cops. They're the folks
that are out riding around their car, they're patrolling, they're
responding to a call. It's always amazed me with these
cases that I've worked and I've covered now in the
media for a number of years, where you're a beat cop,
and you've maybe you've you've gone out to a noise
(03:52):
disturbance or police officers. My friends that are police officers,
one of the biggest annoyances that they have are responding
to alarms on buildings. You hear it all the time
on police radio. It turns out to be nothing most
of the time. The winds blowing the door. You imagine
coming off of a call like that, and you're summoned
to this location and you've just been doing something that
(04:14):
seems so innocuous in your standard workaday world. And we're
not talking about a place that's we're not talking about
a place that's a huge urban center here. We're just
talking about suburban America. And you'll walk into an environment
that is bathed in blood and you're thinking, what planet
(04:37):
am I on? All of a sudden, and that's the
world that cops live in, where they just kind of
have to throw the brakes on and readjust very quickly,
and they begin to assist. When they showed up at
the door and he wouldn't show the hands, that's that's
a big indication for them. They call it putting the
bracelets on. Bracelets are going to come out the handcuffs
and you're you're going into custody at that moment time.
You're gonna be arrested at that moment time because you're
(04:59):
non compliant with a lawful order. And I gotta tell
you thank God that they did, because as was mentioned,
he had these I've heard people refer to them as
a knucklebuster knife, which is it's kind of a if
you think of what a brass knuckle looks like, it's
something you can have your fingers going through and there's
a contact edge where you can strike an individual with
(05:21):
his metallic surface. But in addition to the brass knuckle,
you've actually got a sharp edged instrument on the other
end of it. And this, this is a highly lethal
weapon he could have at that moment time with these
police officers. He could have attacked them. He could have
(05:42):
ripped them to shreds or done great bodily harm and
thank God that they weren't hurt. I can't say the
same Tammy Joe Blant. As investigators are starting to look
at what had happened to Tammy Joe Blanton, they discovered
that she had been stabbed repeatedly. So is this her
of death? Absolutely her cause of death is sharp force injuries.
(06:04):
That is this knife being driven into her body. Not
just once or twice three times. I'm talking multiple times.
She had multiple stab wounds all over her body. And
it is absolutely horrific. And I've said this over and
over again and I'll never tire of saying it, But
out of all of the causes of death that are
(06:25):
out there, sharp force injuries, when you take that in
a homicide, in the context of a homicide, is the
manner of death. It is the most personal. It is
the most personal thing that can happen, with maybe the
exception of strangulation, but there's there's a level of violence
that goes in too. Sharp force injury, particularly stab wounds,
(06:47):
because you're it's an action where and particularly in this case,
and you begin to think about the how this this
weapon is set up where your fingers are are threaded
through this thing and you've got this blade, so you've
created a fist where you're you're gripping this this blade
with this brass knuckle handle and you're driving it over
(07:08):
and over and over. There's a tremendous amount of force here.
Here's here's the key though. With stab wounds, it's not
like you're one and done. In many of these cases,
this is a frenzied event. You're withdrawing the blade and
then you make a conscious effort. That that's important to
emphasize you you're making a conscious effort to now reinsert
(07:30):
this weapon into someone's body. It's not like you strike
them a single time on the head with a club
or something like that. It's not like you shoot them
a single time. This is withdrawing an edged weapon and
then reinserting it. With drawing reinserting it, and there's a
pain response. If you're face to face with this victim,
(07:52):
that is should should potentially register with you. You're witnessing
their life just kind of fade being away before you.
Maybe they're gasping, maybe they're fighting you. Because in a
normal primal response, you're going to try to fend this
person off. But yet that knife is being plunged into
(08:12):
this individual every single time, and lots of times with
sharp force injury victims. We examine the palms of their
hands very carefully, and this is absolutely horrific, but it's reality.
The individual, in order to fend off the subject will
grasp the blade and the perpetrator with again will withdraw
the blade from the individual's hand, and you'll have these
(08:34):
large slice marks that you can appreciate on the palms
of the hands in between the fingers. Particularly, one of
the biggest area is the webbing between the thumb and
the index finger. You'll see that slice down to the
bone many times, and that's the individual trying in that
at that primal level to try to fend off this attacker.
(08:55):
I've seen blades actually pass through hands, all the way
through hands and then into bodies and because the person
is putting their hand up in response. But this amount
of force, and it's I think that it's it's interesting
in this case because of the structure of this weapon
that he could generate a lot of force. As he's
driving this into her body, he's in a dominant position
(09:18):
over her. My assumption is that she would be essentially
in a supine position, which means face up. He's face
to face with her. He's on top of her all right,
and straddling her perhaps, and he's plunging this knife over
and over and over again. There's nothing she can do
to escape this event. But from a forensic standpoint, every
(09:40):
time this occurs, this event there's a transference of evidence.
You have her bodily fluids, the blood transferring onto him,
perhaps her hair we talked about there was actually hair
that was found on the surface of the knife. And
many times the perpetrators will in fact cut themselves. This
is not like shooting where you're at a distance, you
(10:00):
pop off around at somebody. Now you're up close and personal,
and as they're fighting, you're fighting, and many times the
perpetrator will cut themselves and so that blood leaches onto
the body of the victim and also all of the
surrounding area on the floor of the surfaces of any
kind of furniture that happens to be there, seeing a
(10:21):
toilet or a sofa, even you'll find what's referred to,
and this is an important word, a co mingling. A
co mingling a blood that occurs. And so we have
to kind of separate that out and you begin to
look at that, and suddenly a narrative develops scientifically, at
least because we're not there to witness this event, but
we can understand this narrative as it's being played out
(10:44):
of what the dynamics of this event were. The dynamics
I want to talk about that a little bit, Joe,
because I don't understand, and you and I have talked
about blunt force sharp force injuries often, but when you
are stabbed like so many times, is it a process
of you bleeding out over time or did they actually
(11:06):
hit the heart in your heart stopped immediately? I mean,
is there ever a way to know which incident actually
caused the death? Knol? I absolutely love this question, and
this is why when when and I urge anybody that's
truly interested in medical legal death investigation, find an autopsy
report that involves multiple stab wounds, and one of the
(11:30):
little caveats is always contained in these autopsy reports is
that the pathologists will say something like, even though these
injuries are enumerated, you know one through I don't know,
or one through a hundred, this does not imply sequencing.
(11:51):
There's no way to tell. The only dividing line that
you have and these kind of cases is is there
hemorrhage associated with this injury or is there no hemorrhage?
And again that's our big demarcation there between life and death.
That means that if there is hemorrhage present, we know
(12:12):
that the individual was insulted prior to death that means
their heart is still beating and you've got blood coursing
through the body, and you have this kind of hemorrhage
that's into the soft tissues. And and then we look
at it from the other perspective, where we have injuries
where there is no hemorrhage whatsoever. And so you have
(12:32):
to wait, wait, So how can that be? How can
you have an injury and there not be a hemorrhage. Well,
you can have a post mortem injury. You can have
post mortem injury. You made a good point just a
second ago when you talk about you plunge the knife
into the heart and suddenly, because there's mechanical damage to
the heart, at that point in time, the individual is
(12:54):
going to go into arrest. They're going to die, all right,
and it will be immediate in that case. So anything
that might follow after that. And I know some people
will argue with this because there's this kind of agonable
thing that goes on, but it if the heart mechanically
is damaged to the point where the individual goes into rest,
the logical assumption is is that there's no longer blood
(13:16):
coursing through the body, So you're not necessarily going to
present with hemorrhage in any kind of post mortem wound,
because you're not going to have no longer the physical
facility to hemorrhage into that specific area. And that's that's
very important because it goes into when you begin to
look at this from the perspective of not just the forensics,
(13:38):
but also kind of mindset of the individual that was
perpetrating this crime, because these are gonna be questions that
that you're gonna be asked on the stand if you're
forensic pathologist or forensic specialists. They're going to ask you, well,
you know, in your opinion, how many of these injuries
were anti mortem before death and how many were after Well,
(13:59):
if you've an anti mortem, which means before death, you're
talking about bringing about the death. But then from a
lawyer's perspective, if they can demonstrate a prosebratorial perspective, they
can demonstrate that there's all these post mortem injuries. Suddenly,
suddenly the accused becomes such a bigger monster at that
point in time because now you weren't you weren't satisfied
(14:23):
with killing or ending this person's life. You went to
rip on to shreds and destroy what was left of
their body. When you walk onto a scene involving sharp
(14:52):
force injuries, I gotta tell you, out of all the
cases I've worked, when you're in this environment where there's
so much blood, it's it's very perplexing. It's a it's
a daunting task because you're sitting there and you're saying, oh,
my Lord, where where do I begin? Where do I begin?
Because everything is literally and I mean this in the
(15:15):
literal sense. Our friends in Great Britain use this term
all the time, but in the literal sense, everything is
a bloody mess. I don't even think that begins to
cover what went on in this case. Joe. This is
going to be so disturbing, and I want to warn
people now what we're going to talk about is truly disturbing.
If you have children in the room. I can't imagine
(15:35):
anybody would listen to us with children in the room.
But if there are children in the room, you might
want to put on some headphones because this is truly disturbing.
Tammy Joe Blanton's body had been heavily mutilated. Not only
was she stabbed in the head, chest, and neck, the
front portion of her skull had been opened, A portion
(15:57):
of her brain, lungs, and most of her heart had
been damaged or removed. Joe, I really don't even know
what kind of question to ask you about this, because
how can somebody do that? And what kind of force
would it take to crack open somebody's skull to remove
the brain. It's important that you and it's easy. This
(16:22):
is easier said than done. Trust me, we're not the
people who go out on these scenes were not super people,
all right. We're not. We're not immune to the things
that we're seeing, all right, because that's at that point
in time. You've checked your humanity out a long time ago.
We're still impacted by this. But you have to be
focused on this scientifically and to try to understand what
(16:43):
what you're seeing relative to the findings, the physical findings
that's seen. Okay, you can't just check out and say
I'm not gonna do this. I mean you have to
do this. You have to to understand what's going on.
You mentioned that, yes, the frontal portion of her skull
is missing at this point in time when they observed her,
(17:03):
but also we have to explain that her chest was
open to the point where the majority of her heart
was absent. As well as a segment of her long.
I I believe it's probably the left long, probably the
upper lobe of the left long, because it's immediately adjacent
(17:24):
to the heart, and so you have a large gaping
area there. Because it's not easy to get to. I mean,
it's you might think that it would be. You see
movies and all that stuff, and forget all the nonsense.
It's not an easy undertaking this. This takes work. It
takes a determined person in order to do this, particularly
(17:45):
if you're not equipped with the tools, say for instance,
that you know you might find in in surgery or
in the autopsy suite. Remember when when they're doing surgery,
they actually have an instrument that's referred to as a
rib spreader, all right, And these things have been developed
for this particular type of event as it applies to
(18:09):
therapeutic surgeries that take place. Not in this sense, though,
this is this is a mutilation. I'm I'm hesitant to
refer to this as a dismemberment where the body is
taken apart in segments. Necessarily, this is an attempt to
remove specific parts of the body, all right. When I
(18:32):
think of dismemberment, I think about essentially taking apart at
the joints, the risk the elbows, shoulders, those sorts of
that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about
a mutilation at this point. We're talking about mutilation. And
to your point, it's you would have to sit there
and think, well, what in the world am I looking
(18:52):
at here? Because you know, with a dismemberment, for instance,
you're thinking, if there is obviously side that's been committed, well,
why would somebody dismember somebody? Most of the time, people
dismember bodies in order to make it easier to transport
individual pieces so that they can dispose of them in
a manner which they put as much distance between themselves
(19:14):
and the bodies. They can make it easily transportable those
sorts of things. You've entered into a different sphere here
when you begin to think about mutilation and you're facilitating
this to get someone's skull open. And when I use
the term daunting task, it's something that I worked for
(19:35):
many years as an autopsy assistant path assistant and participated in,
you know, roughly seven thousand autopsies during that period of time.
And if you do a complete autopsy, you you open
them would be very frankly. You open the skull. That's
what you do. But we have a very specific instrument
that we use for that. It's called a bone saw,
and it's an agitating saw. So you hear in the
(19:58):
movies they use this high hitched buzzing sound that will
simulate but one of the saws being used on bodies
and that sort of thing, and it agitates. It's if
people have ever had a cast removed. Okay, if you've
ever had a cast remove you had a broken bone,
that's very very similar to this agitating saw. So just
think about that for a second. That's not what was
utilized here got kind of a reveal here is the
(20:20):
fact that they found a jigsaw. A jigsaw president scene.
And this is not something with a big, robust blade,
and it's something that's normally placed on a flat surface.
You think about the shape of the skull, and the
shape of the skull is is around it. So if
you're using a jigsaw, say to cut a piece of
plywood or something like that, you place it on the
(20:41):
edge and you move forward with it and you can
cut out and that sort of thing. But you've got
that under control to utilize a jigsaw. In this particular case,
in order to open say this frontal bone, which is
arguably the most robust bone in the human skull, you
just tap your forehead that sort of area, very thick,
very hard to get an edge on it. You've got
(21:02):
this this saw blade that is going up and down
kind of like the only thing I can really equate
it to is almost like the needle on a sewing
machine that's going up and down like that, as opposed
to the agitating saw that you used to remove a
cast or a bone. Saw it kind of goes backwards
and forth like that, and then the blades are around it.
It's easy to use. In this case, this would have
(21:23):
taken so much time. I mean, it would have taken
a protracted period of time. And again there's a certain
amount of soft tissue dissection that would probably have to
go on. That means you have to remove most of
the time any kind of soft tissue that would impede
that blade's ability to cut through that bony surface. And
then once you have at least made a single entrance
(21:46):
into that bony surface, how how exactly what direction are
you going to go? Now? Are you going to take
the tip of this, you know, Remember it's acting like
a sewing machine, going up and down, up and down,
up and down. Do you insert into this little defect
that you've created and then kind of buzz it out
along that area? If this is something that you have
(22:07):
no experience within, let's face it, I can't imagine there's
a lot of people out there that have experience with
mutilation of human remains. What do you do as you're
sitting there in this world that you have painted with
another human beings blood and you're holding this individual's head
in your lap as you're doing this, do you have
(22:29):
it braced in some way? When she was found, she
was actually found in the tub covered with what turned
up to be a tarp, And so the workings of
the scene are going to be very complicated from a
forensic standpoint to understand what was physically done there, what
the position of her body was at that particular time,
what the position of the perpetrators body was relative to
(22:53):
her body, and the rest of the environment. You're gonna
have a lot of transfer of blood evidence and trace
evidence and everything else. It would be an absolute nightmare
to figure yourself in my wild streams. I can't even
(23:24):
begin to kind of understand how you prepare yourself if
you're the perpetrator of a of the mutilation, how do
you prepare yourself? But you know, how how do you
determine what tools to show up with? How do you
how do you figure out the logistics of it? Is
this is something that is done at the spur of
the moment and you grab whatever is handy, or is
(23:45):
this something that you're pre prepared to do at that
given time. I don't know. It boggles the mind, it does,
and I think the jury and the judge when over
Hansley was charged in Dammy jumb Letton's death, it was
something they truly had to consider because over Handsley claimed
to be incompetent, and in fact was deemed incompetent to
(24:09):
stand trial. So there were claims that over hands lewis schizophrenic.
He had in the past, Joe, you can kind of
weigh in on this here in just a second. He
had been accused and convicted of shooting his high school girlfriend.
She died. He had also shot his mother, so he
had been convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to twelve years
(24:32):
where he had killed the mother of his child. He
said he was in a meth rage. He also shot
his mother and ultimately, though over Hansley was deemed sane
at the time of Tammy Joe Blnton's murder. But here's
the truly horrendous as if we have not talked about
(24:54):
a terrible crime here, Joe Joseph over Handsley was a cannibal.
He ate Timmy Joe Blanton's brain, parts of her heart,
and parts of her lawn. I'm really truly at a
loss for words. Joe talked about plumbing the depths of depravity.
(25:16):
You begin to think about this and you say, well,
we've got a mutilation. Now we've got an individual that
has taken organs from somebody that they were involved in
a relationship with. And not only had he eviscerated her,
which means removal of organs, but he had prepared to organs.
(25:37):
He essentially prepared them on stove and then he ingested again.
I think our default position here has to be the
science behind this, because I don't know that it is
even possible to explain the rationale for having done this.
But what we do know is that these elements were
(25:58):
in fact consumed. And uh, there's one part of this
is kind of kind of fascinating to me. I guess
as fascinating it could possibly be was the fact that
he had claimed at one point in time that the
removal of the brain essentially was his attempt two find
(26:19):
her third eye. And this is a very metaphysical thing,
and it's not something I fully grasp, but the at
a base level, the third eye is this metaphysical presence
that's within the brain and can see things on a
different plane in these sorts of things. I do know
that some of the items that were found at the
(26:41):
at the scene included tongs and they were covered with blood,
and I think these are tongs very similar to maybe
salad tongs or tongs that you would use when preparing
a meal on a grill. This word of thing, and
if you have to understand with human anatomy, if you're
opening up just one portion of the skull and removing
that and then going into that, there is an attempt
(27:03):
on the part of the person because you can't remove
it the way we do at autopsy. There is a
process where you would literally have to dig out the
brain or scoop out the brain in order to make
this happen, and then purpose to prepare the brain so
that you can ingested. And one point that we need
(27:24):
to go back to here is that at a very
early age, when he was still in Utah, he had
demonstrated a very violent behavior. If you're to the point
where you can shoot the mother of your own child
and she's just a teenager, she's just a teenager, he
(27:46):
cold bloodedly shot her and then shot his own mother.
And then I guess when he began to assess that
at that particular time, decided that he was going to
take his own life and shot himself as well. So
that gives you an indication as to mindset, you know,
because people I hate the word why it's I don't.
(28:08):
I don't particularly like it because it's not very scientific
most of the time, because you know, why is is?
There are many degrees to why. We'll just say that
it's hard to to quantify why. Um. But you sit
there and you begin to think, well why. I think
that we have to fall back to how how was
(28:29):
this done or how could he have done this? And
we have indications that he was very violent in the past,
But yet here he is, he's out, he's out of incarceration,
he's made his way to Indiana, and when his trial
was going on, and when he was initially charged, there
was some indication that he was perfectly lucid. He had
(28:51):
attempted to have a spontaneous news conference at one point
time as he's shackled walking around. I can only think,
can you imagine and being the the the deputies that
are having to escort this guy around. You think he's
in shackles there and what he's perpetrated, and you're conveying
this guy from one area to another, and again it
(29:12):
goes back to the people that initially showed up at
the scene, uh, Tammy Joe's homicide. I can I think
that that would transfer over to these individuals too. They're
having to deal with him on a regular basis, and
he seemed perfectly lucid. He's he's saying that he is not.
He is not, in fact, in saying that there are
other people to blame. He even stated that he gave
(29:33):
them an alternative reason for what happened, that he was
knocked out at the scene and there were two people
that entered her home and did this horrible deed to
Tammy Joe. But yet they let him survive. Okay, So
You're gonna have to teach me here, Joe, because I'm
hearing everything that you're saying. But I can't get past
(29:54):
the part of the word eat. Okay, he ate her organs.
So hannibalism why I get Well, I can't ask you
why because you don't like the word whine. Tell me
about cannibalism? Is it just you? People who do this
(30:15):
have a desire to taste the flesh? Do they have
a desire to you know? I I understand in some
other cultures in ancient times, the idea was if you
killed someone a warrior and you ate their organs, that
it gave you power. I mean, what is it with cannibalism. Yeah,
(30:36):
it's from an anthropological standpoint where these people are studied,
you have what's referred to as kind of a ritualized cannibalism,
like you you had mentioned, you know, where you're gonna
eat a portion of your enemy's body and give you
strength and all the sorts of things. I think, if
I'm not mistaken, I think that there's one tribe that
still participates in cannibalism in New Guinea, a very isolated
(30:59):
group of people. And again it's a form of ritualized
ingestion of human remains. You have a separate section that
is survival. You have people that that are depended upon
another human beings body as sustenance. We think back to
the dinner party. That's many people for them, that's their
their default position back in the eighteen hundreds when they
(31:20):
were trying to get across the past and they were
frozen in and they had they had nothing to nourish
themselves with. There's a number of people that have been
at sea. I think that had to resort to cannibalism.
And of course famously we've we've got the the athletic
team that crash and the Andies back in the seventies.
The book was written about them alive, I think. But
that's for survival, all right, What what's the really curious group?
(31:44):
Here are these homicidal cannibals And how do you study this?
Because yeah, there are there are stories of this. There
are certainly cases, you know, I guess famously the most
obvious one is Damer That comes to mind, you know,
in the last forty years, and he's he again he
was the reason he made the news like he did,
(32:06):
I think is because it was it was so shocking,
so and the public couldn't get enough of it. They
were watching this day after day. I had friends that
were involved in the investigation up in Milwaukee in this
in this case, and yeah, it was absolutely horrific. And
he but he was very systematic about this. He would
choose victims and this sort of thing, and there's all
(32:28):
kinds of psychopathology that went on with him. But still
he was deemed saying he was deemed saying he wasn't.
He wasn't a raving maniac. He was very much in control.
It's very difficult I think for us to get past
this as well, it should be past this idea of
consumption of another person's body. Again, back to the why question.
(32:52):
I don't know that we will ever have an answer
to why. That is purely definitive. I would think at
least that there's some kind of power thing that's going on.
Not only am I going to stab you to death?
Not only am I gonna sexually assault you? And again
that's another piece to Tammy Joe's case. There's also evidence
(33:12):
that he sexually assaulted her. And again we don't know
if that was anti mortem before death or if it
was postmortem. Where you have a necrophiliac event that's going on.
And again that's something that Doahmer did. He was a necrophile,
which means he had a sexual orientation toward the dead.
We don't know what the status was with that. Again,
power control and then total dominance. Maybe in these individuals
(33:38):
minds is the consumption of the remains. They've dominated this
individual in every other way possible, and I'll show you.
I'll even bring it down to the point where I'm
going to ingest your mortal remains. I don't know that
there's any any kind of peace anybody could have over this,
but just know this, Joseph Overhands Lee was convicted. He
(34:01):
was convicted, and he's been sentenced to life in prison
without the possibility of parole. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is Body backsh
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan because time goes by you.
If you're all alone, you you long for companionship. Many
of us do, I think, And it's tough. It's tough
(00:29):
to try to discern who you're gonna let into your
little bubble. You don't know, you know, particularly the world
that we live in nowadays, you don't know who's gonna
show up at your door. You don't know who's on
the island line, you don't know who you're texting with.
Today on body Bags, I want to talk about a
young lady Hammy Joe Blant. I want to talk about
(00:49):
her murder. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags.
Joining me is Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories.
Would Nancy Grace scary world out there, Jackie? When it
comes to dating, wouldn't you agree? Oh? Absolutely? Joe Tammy
(01:14):
Joe Blanton was dating forty one year old Joseph over
Handsley and it was a very volatile relationship and she
broke up with him. She was so afraid of over
Handsley that she had the locks changed on her home.
And here is an example of why. The day before
Tammy Joe Blanton was found murdered. She had made a
(01:36):
call to at two fifty two a m. She made
the call reporting that her ex boyfriend, Joseph over Handsley
was outside her home and wouldn't leave. When officers arrived,
Joseph was still outside. He said that his key would
not work. When police asked to see over Handsley's identification,
it listed a different address than Tammy Joe Blanton's home.
(02:00):
Tammy Joe Blunton explained to police that she had ended
her relationship with ober Hansley, had her locks changed again,
and that she wanted him to leave. He did, but
the next morning, officers came back to Tammy Joe Blanton's house.
That's because her friend and colleague, Sabrina Hall, had called
police to ask them to do a welfare check on
Tammy Joe Blanton. Tammy worked with Sabrina and was supposed
(02:23):
to work that day, but when she didn't arrive to
the office, Sabrina called her phone and a man answered.
The man told Sabrina that he was Tammy's brother and
that she was caring for their ill father. Sabrina Hall
did not believe the man and made the phone call
for police. To check on Tammy. At that point, when
the officers showed up at Blanton's home and knocked on
(02:43):
the door, ober Hansley answered the door. The detectives noticed
a cut on ober Hansley's hand and they searched him
and at that point they found a brass knuckle knife
in his pocket that appeared to have hair and blood
on it. At that point, infust gators obtained a warrant
for the home and inside it's where they found the
(03:05):
body of Tammy Joe Blanton in the bathroom. And police
at that point described it this is their words, not mine,
A big bloody mound of something in the bathtub. That
phrase right there tells me that this poor woman's body
has just been mutilated terribly. Yeah, that's a big indication there,
(03:30):
because you know you should not just if you're a
young police officer that shows up and and these are
what we refer to as beat cops. They're the folks
that are out riding around their car, they're patrolling, they're
responding to a call. It's always amazed me with these
cases that I've worked and I've covered now in the
media for a number of years, where you're a beat cop,
and you've maybe you've you've gone out to a noise
(03:52):
disturbance or police officers. My friends that are police officers,
one of the biggest annoyances that they have are responding
to alarms on buildings. You hear it all the time
on police radio. It turns out to be nothing most
of the time. The winds blowing the door. You imagine
coming off of a call like that, and you're summoned
to this location and you've just been doing something that
(04:14):
seems so innocuous in your standard workaday world. And we're
not talking about a place that's we're not talking about
a place that's a huge urban center here. We're just
talking about suburban America. And you'll walk into an environment
that is bathed in blood and you're thinking, what planet
(04:37):
am I on? All of a sudden, and that's the
world that cops live in, where they just kind of
have to throw the brakes on and readjust very quickly,
and they begin to assist. When they showed up at
the door and he wouldn't show the hands, that's that's
a big indication for them. They call it putting the
bracelets on. Bracelets are going to come out the handcuffs
and you're you're going into custody at that moment time.
You're gonna be arrested at that moment time because you're
(04:59):
non compliant with a lawful order. And I gotta tell
you thank God that they did, because as was mentioned,
he had these I've heard people refer to them as
a knucklebuster knife, which is it's kind of a if
you think of what a brass knuckle looks like, it's
something you can have your fingers going through and there's
a contact edge where you can strike an individual with
(05:21):
his metallic surface. But in addition to the brass knuckle,
you've actually got a sharp edged instrument on the other
end of it. And this, this is a highly lethal
weapon he could have at that moment time with these
police officers. He could have attacked them. He could have
(05:42):
ripped them to shreds or done great bodily harm and
thank God that they weren't hurt. I can't say the
same Tammy Joe Blant. As investigators are starting to look
at what had happened to Tammy Joe Blanton, they discovered
that she had been stabbed repeatedly. So is this her
of death? Absolutely her cause of death is sharp force injuries.
(06:04):
That is this knife being driven into her body. Not
just once or twice three times. I'm talking multiple times.
She had multiple stab wounds all over her body. And
it is absolutely horrific. And I've said this over and
over again and I'll never tire of saying it, But
out of all of the causes of death that are
(06:25):
out there, sharp force injuries, when you take that in
a homicide, in the context of a homicide, is the
manner of death. It is the most personal. It is
the most personal thing that can happen, with maybe the
exception of strangulation, but there's there's a level of violence
that goes in too. Sharp force injury, particularly stab wounds,
(06:47):
because you're it's an action where and particularly in this case,
and you begin to think about the how this this
weapon is set up where your fingers are are threaded
through this thing and you've got this blade, so you've
created a fist where you're you're gripping this this blade
with this brass knuckle handle and you're driving it over
(07:08):
and over and over. There's a tremendous amount of force here.
Here's here's the key though. With stab wounds, it's not
like you're one and done. In many of these cases,
this is a frenzied event. You're withdrawing the blade and
then you make a conscious effort. That that's important to
emphasize you you're making a conscious effort to now reinsert
(07:30):
this weapon into someone's body. It's not like you strike
them a single time on the head with a club
or something like that. It's not like you shoot them
a single time. This is withdrawing an edged weapon and
then reinserting it. With drawing reinserting it, and there's a
pain response. If you're face to face with this victim,
(07:52):
that is should should potentially register with you. You're witnessing
their life just kind of fade being away before you.
Maybe they're gasping, maybe they're fighting you. Because in a
normal primal response, you're going to try to fend this
person off. But yet that knife is being plunged into
(08:12):
this individual every single time, and lots of times with
sharp force injury victims. We examine the palms of their
hands very carefully, and this is absolutely horrific, but it's reality.
The individual, in order to fend off the subject will
grasp the blade and the perpetrator with again will withdraw
the blade from the individual's hand, and you'll have these
(08:34):
large slice marks that you can appreciate on the palms
of the hands in between the fingers. Particularly, one of
the biggest area is the webbing between the thumb and
the index finger. You'll see that slice down to the
bone many times, and that's the individual trying in that
at that primal level to try to fend off this attacker.
(08:55):
I've seen blades actually pass through hands, all the way
through hands and then into bodies and because the person
is putting their hand up in response. But this amount
of force, and it's I think that it's it's interesting
in this case because of the structure of this weapon
that he could generate a lot of force. As he's
driving this into her body, he's in a dominant position
(09:18):
over her. My assumption is that she would be essentially
in a supine position, which means face up. He's face
to face with her. He's on top of her all right,
and straddling her perhaps, and he's plunging this knife over
and over and over again. There's nothing she can do
to escape this event. But from a forensic standpoint, every
(09:40):
time this occurs, this event there's a transference of evidence.
You have her bodily fluids, the blood transferring onto him,
perhaps her hair we talked about there was actually hair
that was found on the surface of the knife. And
many times the perpetrators will in fact cut themselves. This
is not like shooting where you're at a distance, you
(10:00):
pop off around at somebody. Now you're up close and personal,
and as they're fighting, you're fighting, and many times the
perpetrator will cut themselves and so that blood leaches onto
the body of the victim and also all of the
surrounding area on the floor of the surfaces of any
kind of furniture that happens to be there, seeing a
(10:21):
toilet or a sofa, even you'll find what's referred to,
and this is an important word, a co mingling. A
co mingling a blood that occurs. And so we have
to kind of separate that out and you begin to
look at that, and suddenly a narrative develops scientifically, at
least because we're not there to witness this event, but
we can understand this narrative as it's being played out
(10:44):
of what the dynamics of this event were. The dynamics
I want to talk about that a little bit, Joe,
because I don't understand, and you and I have talked
about blunt force sharp force injuries often, but when you
are stabbed like so many times, is it a process
of you bleeding out over time or did they actually
(11:06):
hit the heart in your heart stopped immediately? I mean,
is there ever a way to know which incident actually
caused the death? Knol? I absolutely love this question, and
this is why when when and I urge anybody that's
truly interested in medical legal death investigation, find an autopsy
report that involves multiple stab wounds, and one of the
(11:30):
little caveats is always contained in these autopsy reports is
that the pathologists will say something like, even though these
injuries are enumerated, you know one through I don't know,
or one through a hundred, this does not imply sequencing.
(11:51):
There's no way to tell. The only dividing line that
you have and these kind of cases is is there
hemorrhage associated with this injury or is there no hemorrhage?
And again that's our big demarcation there between life and death.
That means that if there is hemorrhage present, we know
(12:12):
that the individual was insulted prior to death that means
their heart is still beating and you've got blood coursing
through the body, and you have this kind of hemorrhage
that's into the soft tissues. And and then we look
at it from the other perspective, where we have injuries
where there is no hemorrhage whatsoever. And so you have
(12:32):
to wait, wait, So how can that be? How can
you have an injury and there not be a hemorrhage. Well,
you can have a post mortem injury. You can have
post mortem injury. You made a good point just a
second ago when you talk about you plunge the knife
into the heart and suddenly, because there's mechanical damage to
the heart, at that point in time, the individual is
(12:54):
going to go into arrest. They're going to die, all right,
and it will be immediate in that case. So anything
that might follow after that. And I know some people
will argue with this because there's this kind of agonable
thing that goes on, but it if the heart mechanically
is damaged to the point where the individual goes into rest,
the logical assumption is is that there's no longer blood
(13:16):
coursing through the body, So you're not necessarily going to
present with hemorrhage in any kind of post mortem wound,
because you're not going to have no longer the physical
facility to hemorrhage into that specific area. And that's that's
very important because it goes into when you begin to
look at this from the perspective of not just the forensics,
(13:38):
but also kind of mindset of the individual that was
perpetrating this crime, because these are gonna be questions that
that you're gonna be asked on the stand if you're
forensic pathologist or forensic specialists. They're going to ask you, well,
you know, in your opinion, how many of these injuries
were anti mortem before death and how many were after Well,
(13:59):
if you've an anti mortem, which means before death, you're
talking about bringing about the death. But then from a
lawyer's perspective, if they can demonstrate a prosebratorial perspective, they
can demonstrate that there's all these post mortem injuries. Suddenly,
suddenly the accused becomes such a bigger monster at that
point in time because now you weren't you weren't satisfied
(14:23):
with killing or ending this person's life. You went to
rip on to shreds and destroy what was left of
their body. When you walk onto a scene involving sharp
(14:52):
force injuries, I gotta tell you, out of all the
cases I've worked, when you're in this environment where there's
so much blood, it's it's very perplexing. It's a it's
a daunting task because you're sitting there and you're saying, oh,
my Lord, where where do I begin? Where do I begin?
Because everything is literally and I mean this in the
(15:15):
literal sense. Our friends in Great Britain use this term
all the time, but in the literal sense, everything is
a bloody mess. I don't even think that begins to
cover what went on in this case. Joe. This is
going to be so disturbing, and I want to warn
people now what we're going to talk about is truly disturbing.
If you have children in the room. I can't imagine
(15:35):
anybody would listen to us with children in the room.
But if there are children in the room, you might
want to put on some headphones because this is truly disturbing.
Tammy Joe Blanton's body had been heavily mutilated. Not only
was she stabbed in the head, chest, and neck, the
front portion of her skull had been opened, A portion
(15:57):
of her brain, lungs, and most of her heart had
been damaged or removed. Joe, I really don't even know
what kind of question to ask you about this, because
how can somebody do that? And what kind of force
would it take to crack open somebody's skull to remove
the brain. It's important that you and it's easy. This
(16:22):
is easier said than done. Trust me, we're not the
people who go out on these scenes were not super people,
all right. We're not. We're not immune to the things
that we're seeing, all right, because that's at that point
in time. You've checked your humanity out a long time ago.
We're still impacted by this. But you have to be
focused on this scientifically and to try to understand what
(16:43):
what you're seeing relative to the findings, the physical findings
that's seen. Okay, you can't just check out and say
I'm not gonna do this. I mean you have to
do this. You have to to understand what's going on.
You mentioned that, yes, the frontal portion of her skull
is missing at this point in time when they observed her,
(17:03):
but also we have to explain that her chest was
open to the point where the majority of her heart
was absent. As well as a segment of her long.
I I believe it's probably the left long, probably the
upper lobe of the left long, because it's immediately adjacent
(17:24):
to the heart, and so you have a large gaping
area there. Because it's not easy to get to. I mean,
it's you might think that it would be. You see
movies and all that stuff, and forget all the nonsense.
It's not an easy undertaking this. This takes work. It
takes a determined person in order to do this, particularly
(17:45):
if you're not equipped with the tools, say for instance,
that you know you might find in in surgery or
in the autopsy suite. Remember when when they're doing surgery,
they actually have an instrument that's referred to as a
rib spreader, all right, And these things have been developed
for this particular type of event as it applies to
(18:09):
therapeutic surgeries that take place. Not in this sense, though,
this is this is a mutilation. I'm I'm hesitant to
refer to this as a dismemberment where the body is
taken apart in segments. Necessarily, this is an attempt to
remove specific parts of the body, all right. When I
(18:32):
think of dismemberment, I think about essentially taking apart at
the joints, the risk the elbows, shoulders, those sorts of
that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about
a mutilation at this point. We're talking about mutilation. And
to your point, it's you would have to sit there
and think, well, what in the world am I looking
(18:52):
at here? Because you know, with a dismemberment, for instance,
you're thinking, if there is obviously side that's been committed, well,
why would somebody dismember somebody? Most of the time, people
dismember bodies in order to make it easier to transport
individual pieces so that they can dispose of them in
a manner which they put as much distance between themselves
(19:14):
and the bodies. They can make it easily transportable those
sorts of things. You've entered into a different sphere here
when you begin to think about mutilation and you're facilitating
this to get someone's skull open. And when I use
the term daunting task, it's something that I worked for
(19:35):
many years as an autopsy assistant path assistant and participated in,
you know, roughly seven thousand autopsies during that period of time.
And if you do a complete autopsy, you you open
them would be very frankly. You open the skull. That's
what you do. But we have a very specific instrument
that we use for that. It's called a bone saw,
and it's an agitating saw. So you hear in the
(19:58):
movies they use this high hitched buzzing sound that will
simulate but one of the saws being used on bodies
and that sort of thing, and it agitates. It's if
people have ever had a cast removed. Okay, if you've
ever had a cast remove you had a broken bone,
that's very very similar to this agitating saw. So just
think about that for a second. That's not what was
utilized here got kind of a reveal here is the
(20:20):
fact that they found a jigsaw. A jigsaw president scene.
And this is not something with a big, robust blade,
and it's something that's normally placed on a flat surface.
You think about the shape of the skull, and the
shape of the skull is is around it. So if
you're using a jigsaw, say to cut a piece of
plywood or something like that, you place it on the
(20:41):
edge and you move forward with it and you can
cut out and that sort of thing. But you've got
that under control to utilize a jigsaw. In this particular case,
in order to open say this frontal bone, which is
arguably the most robust bone in the human skull, you
just tap your forehead that sort of area, very thick,
very hard to get an edge on it. You've got
(21:02):
this this saw blade that is going up and down
kind of like the only thing I can really equate
it to is almost like the needle on a sewing
machine that's going up and down like that, as opposed
to the agitating saw that you used to remove a
cast or a bone. Saw it kind of goes backwards
and forth like that, and then the blades are around it.
It's easy to use. In this case, this would have
(21:23):
taken so much time. I mean, it would have taken
a protracted period of time. And again there's a certain
amount of soft tissue dissection that would probably have to
go on. That means you have to remove most of
the time any kind of soft tissue that would impede
that blade's ability to cut through that bony surface. And
then once you have at least made a single entrance
(21:46):
into that bony surface, how how exactly what direction are
you going to go? Now? Are you going to take
the tip of this, you know, Remember it's acting like
a sewing machine, going up and down, up and down,
up and down. Do you insert into this little defect
that you've created and then kind of buzz it out
along that area? If this is something that you have
(22:07):
no experience within, let's face it, I can't imagine there's
a lot of people out there that have experience with
mutilation of human remains. What do you do as you're
sitting there in this world that you have painted with
another human beings blood and you're holding this individual's head
in your lap as you're doing this, do you have
(22:29):
it braced in some way? When she was found, she
was actually found in the tub covered with what turned
up to be a tarp, And so the workings of
the scene are going to be very complicated from a
forensic standpoint to understand what was physically done there, what
the position of her body was at that particular time,
what the position of the perpetrators body was relative to
(22:53):
her body, and the rest of the environment. You're gonna
have a lot of transfer of blood evidence and trace
evidence and everything else. It would be an absolute nightmare
to figure yourself in my wild streams. I can't even
(23:24):
begin to kind of understand how you prepare yourself if
you're the perpetrator of a of the mutilation, how do
you prepare yourself? But you know, how how do you
determine what tools to show up with? How do you
how do you figure out the logistics of it? Is
this is something that is done at the spur of
the moment and you grab whatever is handy, or is
(23:45):
this something that you're pre prepared to do at that
given time. I don't know. It boggles the mind, it does,
and I think the jury and the judge when over
Hansley was charged in Dammy jumb Letton's death, it was
something they truly had to consider because over Handsley claimed
to be incompetent, and in fact was deemed incompetent to
(24:09):
stand trial. So there were claims that over hands lewis schizophrenic.
He had in the past, Joe, you can kind of
weigh in on this here in just a second. He
had been accused and convicted of shooting his high school girlfriend.
She died. He had also shot his mother, so he
had been convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to twelve years
(24:32):
where he had killed the mother of his child. He
said he was in a meth rage. He also shot
his mother and ultimately, though over Hansley was deemed sane
at the time of Tammy Joe Blnton's murder. But here's
the truly horrendous as if we have not talked about
(24:54):
a terrible crime here, Joe Joseph over Handsley was a cannibal.
He ate Timmy Joe Blanton's brain, parts of her heart,
and parts of her lawn. I'm really truly at a
loss for words. Joe talked about plumbing the depths of depravity.
(25:16):
You begin to think about this and you say, well,
we've got a mutilation. Now we've got an individual that
has taken organs from somebody that they were involved in
a relationship with. And not only had he eviscerated her,
which means removal of organs, but he had prepared to organs.
(25:37):
He essentially prepared them on stove and then he ingested again.
I think our default position here has to be the
science behind this, because I don't know that it is
even possible to explain the rationale for having done this.
But what we do know is that these elements were
(25:58):
in fact consumed. And uh, there's one part of this
is kind of kind of fascinating to me. I guess
as fascinating it could possibly be was the fact that
he had claimed at one point in time that the
removal of the brain essentially was his attempt two find
(26:19):
her third eye. And this is a very metaphysical thing,
and it's not something I fully grasp, but the at
a base level, the third eye is this metaphysical presence
that's within the brain and can see things on a
different plane in these sorts of things. I do know
that some of the items that were found at the
(26:41):
at the scene included tongs and they were covered with blood,
and I think these are tongs very similar to maybe
salad tongs or tongs that you would use when preparing
a meal on a grill. This word of thing, and
if you have to understand with human anatomy, if you're
opening up just one portion of the skull and removing
that and then going into that, there is an attempt
(27:03):
on the part of the person because you can't remove
it the way we do at autopsy. There is a
process where you would literally have to dig out the
brain or scoop out the brain in order to make
this happen, and then purpose to prepare the brain so
that you can ingested. And one point that we need
(27:24):
to go back to here is that at a very
early age, when he was still in Utah, he had
demonstrated a very violent behavior. If you're to the point
where you can shoot the mother of your own child
and she's just a teenager, she's just a teenager, he
(27:46):
cold bloodedly shot her and then shot his own mother.
And then I guess when he began to assess that
at that particular time, decided that he was going to
take his own life and shot himself as well. So
that gives you an indication as to mindset, you know,
because people I hate the word why it's I don't.
(28:08):
I don't particularly like it because it's not very scientific
most of the time, because you know, why is is?
There are many degrees to why. We'll just say that
it's hard to to quantify why. Um. But you sit
there and you begin to think, well why. I think
that we have to fall back to how how was
(28:29):
this done or how could he have done this? And
we have indications that he was very violent in the past,
But yet here he is, he's out, he's out of incarceration,
he's made his way to Indiana, and when his trial
was going on, and when he was initially charged, there
was some indication that he was perfectly lucid. He had
(28:51):
attempted to have a spontaneous news conference at one point
time as he's shackled walking around. I can only think,
can you imagine and being the the the deputies that
are having to escort this guy around. You think he's
in shackles there and what he's perpetrated, and you're conveying
this guy from one area to another, and again it
(29:12):
goes back to the people that initially showed up at
the scene, uh, Tammy Joe's homicide. I can I think
that that would transfer over to these individuals too. They're
having to deal with him on a regular basis, and
he seemed perfectly lucid. He's he's saying that he is not.
He is not, in fact, in saying that there are
other people to blame. He even stated that he gave
(29:33):
them an alternative reason for what happened, that he was
knocked out at the scene and there were two people
that entered her home and did this horrible deed to
Tammy Joe. But yet they let him survive. Okay, So
You're gonna have to teach me here, Joe, because I'm
hearing everything that you're saying. But I can't get past
(29:54):
the part of the word eat. Okay, he ate her organs.
So hannibalism why I get Well, I can't ask you
why because you don't like the word whine. Tell me
about cannibalism? Is it just you? People who do this
(30:15):
have a desire to taste the flesh? Do they have
a desire to you know? I I understand in some
other cultures in ancient times, the idea was if you
killed someone a warrior and you ate their organs, that
it gave you power. I mean, what is it with cannibalism. Yeah,
(30:36):
it's from an anthropological standpoint where these people are studied,
you have what's referred to as kind of a ritualized cannibalism,
like you you had mentioned, you know, where you're gonna
eat a portion of your enemy's body and give you
strength and all the sorts of things. I think, if
I'm not mistaken, I think that there's one tribe that
still participates in cannibalism in New Guinea, a very isolated
(30:59):
group of people. And again it's a form of ritualized
ingestion of human remains. You have a separate section that
is survival. You have people that that are depended upon
another human beings body as sustenance. We think back to
the dinner party. That's many people for them, that's their
their default position back in the eighteen hundreds when they
(31:20):
were trying to get across the past and they were
frozen in and they had they had nothing to nourish
themselves with. There's a number of people that have been
at sea. I think that had to resort to cannibalism.
And of course famously we've we've got the the athletic
team that crash and the Andies back in the seventies.
The book was written about them alive, I think. But
that's for survival, all right, What what's the really curious group?
(31:44):
Here are these homicidal cannibals And how do you study this?
Because yeah, there are there are stories of this. There
are certainly cases, you know, I guess famously the most
obvious one is Damer That comes to mind, you know,
in the last forty years, and he's he again he
was the reason he made the news like he did,
(32:06):
I think is because it was it was so shocking,
so and the public couldn't get enough of it. They
were watching this day after day. I had friends that
were involved in the investigation up in Milwaukee in this
in this case, and yeah, it was absolutely horrific. And
he but he was very systematic about this. He would
choose victims and this sort of thing, and there's all
(32:28):
kinds of psychopathology that went on with him. But still
he was deemed saying he was deemed saying he wasn't.
He wasn't a raving maniac. He was very much in control.
It's very difficult I think for us to get past
this as well, it should be past this idea of
consumption of another person's body. Again, back to the why question.
(32:52):
I don't know that we will ever have an answer
to why. That is purely definitive. I would think at
least that there's some kind of power thing that's going on.
Not only am I going to stab you to death?
Not only am I gonna sexually assault you? And again
that's another piece to Tammy Joe's case. There's also evidence
(33:12):
that he sexually assaulted her. And again we don't know
if that was anti mortem before death or if it
was postmortem. Where you have a necrophiliac event that's going on.
And again that's something that Doahmer did. He was a necrophile,
which means he had a sexual orientation toward the dead.
We don't know what the status was with that. Again,
power control and then total dominance. Maybe in these individuals
(33:38):
minds is the consumption of the remains. They've dominated this
individual in every other way possible, and I'll show you.
I'll even bring it down to the point where I'm
going to ingest your mortal remains. I don't know that
there's any any kind of peace anybody could have over this,
but just know this, Joseph Overhands Lee was convicted. He
(34:01):
was convicted, and he's been sentenced to life in prison
without the possibility of parole. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is Body backsh
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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