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- [00:03]
Troy Taylor
Please note, this podcast contains references to physical and sexual assault and graphic depictions of violence. Listener discretion is advised. The views and opinions expressed throughout this podcast are solely those of the individuals expressing them and do not necessarily align with the opinions or beliefs of the host or producers. I'm on a zoom call with a woman named Anna. She's in a different state. She's a forensic pathologist. She doesn't know Faith, she doesn't know Ryan, and she doesn't really know me. But what she does know is autopsies. And right now, she's sitting in front of Faith's autopsy, breaking it down for me line by line. And what she's telling me could change everything about the way we've been looking at Faith's case.
- [01:01]
Anna
A beating cannot cause this. A bludgeoning cannot cause this. She was hit by a very large force all at once. All of the coloring of her injuries indicate that they were acute or recent and that she was alive when this impact occurred. If the truck that he was in had some sort of aftermarket brush guard type situation going on, that could be investigated and see if it, you know, correlates with that linear abrasion on the backs of her legs. Yeah, I can't fathom that that leads me to believe that they think this might come open again. I don't believe that any other scenario is possible. To me, it's vehicular homicide versus accidental hit and run, without question.
- [02:33]
Rosemary
Right after, you know, our last message, I managed to get a copy of Faith's autopsy report, and things aren't really adding up for me. I mean, I have a lot of questions, and I am no medical professional, but it just screams that something isn't right. I was wondering if you knew if the family or anybody have gotten an independent review of this. I mean, I think when you sit down and you look at this, you'll see it yourself. I don't think this is an accident. I just don't think it's an accident.
- [03:10]
Troy Taylor
I sit down at my desk with a copy of the report Rosemary sent me open on my laptop. Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Case number 2101939. Decedent Faith Morgan Ely, eight pages long. Cause of death, multiple blunt force trauma due to probable automobile versus pedestrian manner of death. Accident. Two of those words stop me. Probable and accident. But it's the absence of words that has me truly confused. As Amanda's mentioned before, there's no road rash. There's very little in the way of secondary injuries at all. Almost nothing. You'd expect to see in an automobile versus pedestrian collision, particularly one that occurred on a rural highway with a speed limit of 65 miles per hour. You don't get hit at that speed without catastrophic body wide damage. And the file I have in front of me describes nothing like that.
- [04:06]
Amanda
If the truck's doing the speed limit, then it's not getting there. Like, the odds of her getting there at the same time as the truck does is slim because not only is she somewhat inebriated, but she's walking barefoot. You know, she's not in sneakers, she's not running. So it's gonna take her the better part of that 12 to 18 minutes rather than the lower part.
- [04:28]
Rosemary
Exactly. And you know, in the medical examiner's report, there was nothing notable on the bottom of her feet. So if she was doing a brisk walk, you would expect to see some possible bruising and maybe cause, you know, she's walking barefoot on.
- [04:47]
Sue
In some brambles.
- [04:48]
Rosemary
And it's just, you know, it's rough. It's not, it's not. You're not walking on the sidewalk. It's not even, even. It kind of slopes, you know, down on the side of the highway. The fact that there's nothing notable on the bottom of her feet, it's kind of like, whoa, wow. I mean, walk a half mile barefoot on a highway and they just looked a little dirty. It's a little odd. I would think you would see something.
- [05:15]
Troy Taylor
Rosemary's right. Things aren't adding up. And the more we sit with it, the less seems to add up.
- [05:21]
Rosemary
Is it possible for somebody to have that many broken ribs and lacerated spleen? It's a horrible thing to think about. I mean, it's horrible to think about. It's even horrible to talk about. But could she have walked, you know, any distance with an injury like that?
- [05:42]
Amanda
Right. So what we need is we need someone that has a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience in this kind of thing to look at the medical examiner's report and say to us, hey, this is possible, or this isn't possible, and break that down for us. I think we need to find someone that can do that for us.
- [05:58]
Troy Taylor
Before I take this anywhere else, I need to speak to Amanda.
- [06:02]
Amanda
I have a list of questions like, I don't understand why this is a vehicle versus pedestrian. You know, why was there not more broken bones? And they just absolutely refused to review. I mean, getting no answers. I was having to do a lot of research on my own, like all the way down to the medical aspects. You know, the Diagram with the rib cage so I could understand which ribs were broken, where's the spleen located, How. How does this happen? You know, she's got a slight indentation. Wouldn't that be something to take in consideration of, like a point of impact? Your ribs don't do that just naturally from a layman's everyday civilian. None of that made sense to me. Once I finally got to see what truly all the injuries were, it still didn't make sense because. Right. Shouldn't there have been more?
- [07:07]
Troy Taylor
They're all questions we really need to ask an expert to answer because despite Amanda's requests, it's clear the state isn't going to do it. Luckily, I know someone. She's helped me out on autopsy reports before on other cases, and forensic pathology is her world. Just a side note here, she's still actively working in forensics. It's a tight knit industry where everyone knows everyone. And for that reason, she only agreed to do this if she had full anonymity. So the voice you hear isn't her real voice and she isn't going by her real name. We'll just call her Anna.
- [07:47]
Anna
I'm sort of limited by the information that I can ascertain from the autopsy report alone. I didn't have access to photographs of the body or police reports, and my opinions on the case come from analysis of the autopsy report, evidence based forensic literature, and my experience from working similar cases in the past.
- [08:05]
Troy Taylor
Anna opens our conversation with a preamble. She wants to make it clear that she doesn't have all of the information, that her thoughts and opinions are only based on the one document that she does have, the medical examiner's report.
- [08:17]
Anna
Thorough investigation of a pedestrian versus vehicle case relies heavily on findings at the scene and on the clothing. So my first impressions of the report part is that such information is sort of limited.
- [08:32]
Troy Taylor
We dive headfirst into the detail of it.
- [08:36]
Anna
You know, the cause of death in this case is blunt force trauma, which can occur in a variety of death scenarios, but almost always in traffic fatalities. So forensic experts or police at the scene will document scene findings such as blood staining on the road, the presence or absence of glass, car parts, the position of the body, the distance from the site of impact, the road surface, skid marks, weather conditions. All these things help piece together the death story. So most of this information I did not have access to. But what I love about forensic autopsy is that the body truly does tell the story and we can determine a lot from the decedent's body in this Case, the most notable scene finding was present in this report, and that is, was in regards to the shoes or lack thereof. So she was barefoot when she was discovered with visible dirt on the soles of her feet. So this is very significant because the presence or absence of shoes that a pedestrian versus vehicle death can signify the position that the person was in before or after they were hit, as well as the velocity in which they were struck. So the shoes found at the scene being knocked off of a person is a sign of a high velocity impact. And as far as I can see from the report, no shoes were recovered from the scene. So this would indicate that the. This would indicate that she was walking barefoot down the road, and this indicates that she either left in a hurry or was possibly in distress. What was the weather like? That would be more telling. Was it a cold evening? Was it warm? Was it raining? I didn't see any weather reporting in this whole entire report. And that would be very significant, especially to the vehicular aspect of this as well. Okay.
- [10:30]
Amanda
Yeah, right.
- [10:31]
Troy Taylor
It was. I just had a quick look. It was.
- [10:33]
Amanda
It was 56. Around 56 degrees.
- [10:35]
Anna
So that's a little. That's a little cool to just be out walking barefoot down the road. Unless she was. Was that her habit? Was she a barefoot walker? Did she. You know, if that wasn't. If that wasn't something that she did regularly, then I would call that out of the ordinary.
- [10:52]
Troy Taylor
Anna goes on to drop one of the many bombs that explode during our conversation. And it's one that takes me completely by surprise.
- [11:01]
Anna
When we're talking about vehicle versus pedestrian cases, we talk about primary injuries, which are injuries due to the body hitting the vehicle. And then we have secondary injuries which are caused by the body hitting the road and the surroundings. So the injuries in this type of case are produced in a progressive manner upwards from the site of impact and typically start at or or below the knee. The height, weight, position at the time of impact and road conditions, speed, all factor into the physics of this almost conclusive evidence of an auto pedestrian collision is a spiral fracture of the lower leg called a tibia fibular fracture. So this is a spiral fracture of the bones originating below the site of impact on the weight bearing leg. So by analyzing this type of fracture, we can determine if the pedestrian was struck by a vehicle and whether or not they were standing still or walking when they were hit. The most notable thing about Faith's autopsy to me is that she did not sustain this type of fracture. Forensic literature will show that the tibiofibular fractures occur in about 97% of cases where, where the vehicle is traveling over 25 miles an hour, and 40% of the time when the vehicle is traveling under 25 miles an hour. So the absence of these fractures in Face's case may indicate that the vehicle in question was traveling at a much lower rate of speed than the posted 65 mile an hour speed limit.
- [12:34]
Troy Taylor
97% of pedestrians headed over 25 miles an hour have this fracture. 97%. And faith doesn't. And that says if she was hit by a vehicle, then the vehicle that hit her was driving somewhere under 25 miles per hour on a 65 mile an hour highway. And that poses the question, how does someone accidentally hit another person on the edge of the highway going 40 miles an hour under the speed limit on a straight road on a clear night with full visibility?
- [13:10]
Anna
When we get to her actual injuries, she had multiple left sided rib fractures of the anterior and posterior ribs along with left sided hemothorax. So about 1,200 cubic centimeters of blood was collected from her chest cavity. And that internal bleeding, along with the laceration of her spleen were the primary injuries and the cause of her death. And this is caused by a high velocity impact.
- [13:39]
Amanda
In terms of like high velocity, is there a, a definition of what would be considered high velocity?
- [13:45]
Anna
So something can have a higher velocity if it's big and heavy and be traveling at a lower speed. I believe that her injury sort of showcased this type of phenomenon. Something large and heavy, but hitting her at a lower speed.
- [13:58]
Amanda
So still consistent with a vehicle.
- [14:00]
Anna
Oh, 100%. We talk about the injuries that she had, they were all on the left side. So she had multiple left sided rib fractures. And when I say anterior, posterior, that means in the front and the back they were broken. And the blood that was collected so that internal bleeding, that can only be caused by a very high velocity impact. A beating cannot cause this. A bludgeoning cannot cause this. She was hit by a very large force all at once.
- [14:30]
Amanda
Can you tell from this report whether that was initiated from the, from the front or the, or the back?
- [14:36]
Anna
Yes. She had more posterior rib fractures than anterior, which indicates that she was most likely hit from behind on the left side, probably by a vehicle with a higher floorboard, because she had the absence of those lower leg fractures. So she was hit first, the impact hit her in the chest. It was probably a high floorboard car, like an SUV or a light truck. So it takes a ton of force to break ribs on both sides and to lacerate the spleen, that's going to be caused by the high velocity and the weights sort of this, like shaking up the. Of the internal organs that happens when you're hit by a large force.
- [15:15]
Troy Taylor
There's a single line in the autopsy report I haven't mentioned yet. It's easy to miss. Tucked into the evidence of injury section,
- [15:22]
Anna
there was a linear abrasion noted on the backs of her legs, which is an example of a pattern's abrasion, which is common and transferred usually by like a sliding movement of a narrow object. So in this case, it likely could have been part of the vehicle and likely something like a brush guard. So if the truck that he was in had some sort of aftermarket brush guard type situation going on, that could be investigated and see if it, you know, correlates with that linear abrasion on the backs of her legs. So essentially the internal blood loss of like one and a half liters, that was only about 30% of her blood volume. So that is within fatal range, but also a survivable injury if it was it. If it would have been treated promptly.
- [16:15]
Troy Taylor
Survivable if treated promptly. I sit with that for a second, just breathing and trying to process it. It's a devastating thought.
- [16:24]
Anna
I don't see any friction or grinding injuries, so I don't think that she was dragged by the vehicle. And typically if a person is hit while they're standing, they are thrown clear and not run over. Typically I don't see any avulsions to the body. So I don't believe that she was rolled over with the vehicle.
- [16:44]
Troy Taylor
And then about 20 minutes into our call, Anna lands on something we've all been wondering about. Could Faith have died elsewhere and been moved?
- [16:52]
Anna
So there is this phenomenon called livor mortis. And so if a body is on its back, for example, when they die, then their blood will pool to the back, the posterior, and they'll have this like purplish coloring called livor. And it's sort of like a pooling of the blood and you can tell the position of a body when they die or after they. So if a person dies on their back, they're going to have that liver pattern on the backside of them. If they die on their front, they're going to have that liver pattern on the front side of them. Now, when someone is moved after death, they can have a secondary liver pattern. So if someone dies on their back and they have a posterior liver pattern and then they're moved to their front, then you can see a secondary pattern sort of show up now. I didn't see anything noted in the report about liver at all, so I would have to go back and look it.
- [17:43]
Amanda
It is there.
- [17:44]
Troy Taylor
It's on page two.
- [17:45]
Amanda
And it was posterior. There's nothing about a secondary lie, but
- [17:49]
Troy Taylor
I flick back through my notes as we talk, trying to find what I'd written down. When I'd spoken to Caitlin about the night Faith died. When she'd arrived on the scene, I find what I'm looking for. Caitlin told me that when she first arrived, it looked like Faith had simply laid down on her side and gone to sleep. Her knees were facing away from the highway and her back was facing toward it. She wasn't laying on her back, she was on her side. Yet the lividity was fixed posterior and there was no note of a secondary lividity. Anna goes on to explain to me that livoris generally starts to set in around the 20 to 30 minute mark after death. It's visible around two hours after death and it becomes fixed and immovable at around the six to eight hour mark. Faith's body was taken away from the scene by the medical examiner around midnight, roughly four hours after the official story has her being hit by the truck. Longer than it would take for lividity to be visible to the human eye, but not long enough for it to become fully fixed. The lividity finding and what it means poses a lot of questions, things that warrant a much deeper investigation. What it doesn't do, not right now anyway, is rule out the possibility that Faith died elsewhere and was moved.
- [18:58]
Amanda
So your take as well is that. Is that without question, it's a vehicle.
- [19:02]
Troy Taylor
It's just without question, the Right.
- [19:05]
Amanda
Okay, okay, but. But it's not consistent with a vehicle traveling at speed.
- [19:10]
Anna
No.
- [19:11]
Troy Taylor
I ask Anna about something that's been bugging me from the moment I opened the report. How does the medical examiner come to the conclusion that this was an accident, not homicide, not even undetermined, but an accident.
- [19:24]
Anna
Sufficient evidence is required in order to call a death a homicide. So the medical examiner in this case did not find sufficient evidence of homicide in order to rule in that manner. So the default sort of goes to acc. But I will say that there are cases where a medical examiner will change their minds. They can go back and rerule the manner, a homicide in the future, pending that more evidence comes out into the open. So if you're bringing more evidence out, they can always go back and re read and change the manner in the future.
- [20:00]
Troy Taylor
So when the medical examiner ruled this as an accident, they weren't saying it wasn't homicide. They were saying they didn't have enough to call it one. And the obvious follow up is, well, who was supposed to give them enough? Because the medical examiner doesn't investigate. He reads the body, the rest, the scene, the witnesses, the vehicles. It's supposed to come from the agencies on the ground. And it appears in the absence of any other evidence, the default is just accident. Looking at the detail of Faith's autopsy, I noticed something interesting. On the COVID page, in the bottom right hand corner, there are two boxes side by side. One is the date the case was initiated. The second is the date the case was finalized. And there's a 10 month gap between the dates. 10 months on a case the OSBI was already calling a clear cut, hidden run. By early April, the autopsy was March 30. Microscopic exam, April 9. Toxicology came back in June. And then the file sat there for seven months before someone signed it. Somewhere in the middle of our call, I mentioned to Anna, almost as an aside, that OSBI never went to the property, the one she was sitting at the front of 30 minutes before her body was found.
- [21:20]
Amanda
They didn't go to the house?
- [21:22]
Anna
Yeah. At all. That's, that's almost unheard of. I mean, I can't, Yeah, I can't fathom that.
- [21:30]
Amanda
No, I, I, it's, it blows my mind every time I. Yeah, it just blows my mind. I don't know why, but they didn't,
- [21:36]
Troy Taylor
they not only did they not go
- [21:37]
Amanda
to the house that night, they never went to the house. They never looked at vehicles at the property. They just never went there.
- [21:45]
Anna
Yeah, well, I did some investigation into the systems in Oklahoma, and it seems as if their, I mean, their medical examiner system is not accredited by the national standards. And they also, back in 2014, were performing double the recommended number of autopsies per year that is recommended for a single doctor to perform. And in 2009, they lost their accreditation due to the, due to the poor conditions of the department's building and low staffing. And, you know, to this day, the state has not regained its accreditation. And it's an unfortunate fact that the quality of death investigations relies a lot on proper staffing, training and budgeting of its investigating agencies. But if that's the state of their medical examiner's office, that probably, you know, leads over into other state run agencies as well.
- [22:43]
Troy Taylor
Later in our conversation, we come back around to the toxicology report. The report shows that Faith had a combination of narcotics in her system when the toxicology Tests were performed. She had a blood alcohol level of 0.11, and she tested positive for both amphetamine and methamphetamine. Less than 0.25 micrograms per milliliter of amphetamine and around 1.2 micrograms per milliliter of methamphetamine. Faith's blood alcohol level was above legal driving limit, and her levels of methamphetamine were. Were without a doubt high in terms of amphetamine levels. The levels are relatively consistent with someone who might take Ritalin or Adderall to treat adhd, which Faith was diagnosed with. Anna and I look at it in the context of Faith's death and whether it could have potentially played a part.
- [23:29]
Anna
This is where the toxicology might play a factor, because when someone is under the influence of alcohol, they are more likely to bleed internally. And so essentially she died from that blood loss of that blood that was recovered out of her chest cavity. So she bled out internally. And so the toxicology findings probably would accelerate that process on some level. And also the methamphetamine in her system, that's going to put a much greater stress on her heart. And so that also could be a contributing factor to sort of that injury. If her heart is, you know, already under the stress of combating, you know, the intoxicants that she is under, plus it's causing her to bleed more, you know, readily. That combined with the injuries, it was probably all of those things combined which ultimately caused her death.
- [24:26]
Troy Taylor
I tell Anna there's something else in relation to the toxicology tests in the ME Report that struck me as odd. In cases like this, toxicology samples are typically held for 30 to 90 days, then disposed of. In Faith's case, it turns out someone put in a request for them to be held for five years.
- [24:44]
Anna
That leads me to believe that they think this might come open again, that there could be more to the story. If they thought the case was shut and closed, they would probably dispose of those samples. So the only time that we would put a hold on specimens in these type of cases would be because it could be investigated as a homicide in the future, especially of five years. That's a significant time to hold a sample.
- [25:16]
Troy Taylor
I asked the ME who put the hold on and why. And while they can tell me it was the pathologist's office who requested it, they can't tell me exactly why. But something pops in the back of my mind as Anna and I are talking. I remember back to the list of law enforcement agencies who were on the scene that night, the Seminole County Sheriff's Office, Oklahoma Highway Patrol, Uwoka Police Department, the Seminole Lighthorse Police Department, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, and the District Attorney's Drug task force. It never made sense to me why they would have been there that night. And I can't help but wonder, could the hold on Faith toxicology results have something to do with. With whatever reason they were there that night? Anna tells me Faith samples were logged on March 31, 2021, five years from that date. March 31, 2026 was about two months from now. Whatever the reason for those samples to be held for five years, whatever was being preserved for a day, someone might want to take another look. That window is closing. There's a clock on this. And it seems like nobody hit the start on it but us. It's a few days after my call with Anna, and I find myself driving down a rural highway thinking about Faith. I'm thinking about the 30 minutes between when faith was last seen alive at 8:02pm walking south, then Highway 56 and when the first 911 call came in at 8:29pm Ann has told me what her interpretation of the autopsy says happened in that window. She's told me what she believes couldn't have happened. But there's one version that we haven't put to her yet, and it's the version that in five years has shaped the entire investigation. Ryan's. I give Anna an abbreviated rundown of Ryan's version of events. In short, he sits with Faith on the truck's tailgate after the altercation, goes inside to check on his mother, comes back out and sees Faith walking down the highway. Ten minutes later, a truck passes with a light trailer. Then he hears a sound like a trailer going over a speed bump. And that's what makes him grab the flashlight and go looking. I ask Anna for her thoughts.
- [27:26]
Anna
A couple of things stand out to me, the timing of that. I mean, I'm hearing a. It doesn't make sense that he would have heard a sound of a truck passing over a speed bump because she wasn't run over. So that's. That is a strange thing to report. Um, it's also strange to me that they're sitting in the back of the truck and he's sort of making that association with the truck and it, you know, I'm just purely speculating on a non scientific thought process. If he saw her walking down the road, it would make sense to me, you know, that he would, he would follow her, you know, that he would get in the truck that they were just sitting in and maybe, you know, drive down the road and try and, you know, pick her up. I feel like that. Yeah. Is plausible. I feel like that's possible. And that would. That would also, you know, fall in line with the much lower speed than the 65 mile an hour speed limit. So, you know, she wasn't hit at 65 miles an hour. So if. If he saw a truck going with a trailer going down the road at the speed, why would they have been traveling at, you know, below 25 miles an hour? They wouldn't have.
- [28:35]
Troy Taylor
So the version Ryan told law enforcement, the mystery vehicle, the trailer passing at speed, isn't one that Anna will put on the table. The vehicle that hit Faith, if there was a vehicle wasn't passing through, it was already creeping under the shoulder in the dark, going under 25 miles per hour. And my question is, if that truck was going 40 miles under the speed limit when Ryan saw it go by, wouldn't he have mentioned that to the investigators? You can easily tell the difference between a truck going 65 miles per hour and one going 25 miles per hour. Wouldn't that have been worth noting? Because if Faith was hit by a car, that's potentially the difference between an accident and flat out homicide. I call Amanda to talk through it all. But before we get too far down the line, another call comes in on her end, and she patches it through.
- [29:23]
Amanda
Hang on.
- [29:24]
My aunt Sue's calling. I'm going to merge her with you so you can talk to her.
- [29:28]
Troy Taylor
Hello?
- [29:29]
Sue
Hey. Hey.
- [29:31]
Amanda
I have Troy on the phone with me, and I can hear you. He's from the blood force trauma, the investigator I was telling you about. He's on the phone with us right now.
- [29:41]
Sue
Okay.
- [29:42]
Amanda
I was talking to Troy and letting him know some of the information that you had already given us. And I was also telling him about that. That threatening phone call you told me about.
- [29:53]
Sue
Yeah.
- [29:54]
Amanda
And I think it would probably. I. I think he would like to. For you to tell him about it, and it coming straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
- [30:03]
Sue
Oh, I understand that. Yeah. I'll tell him what happened. It's been back. Oh, gosh. That was back in January, end of January. I had spoken to my nephew, who is my husband's nephew, Ashley. He is. Was a Seminole county police officer in Woka, and he no longer works for them. He works for the corrections. Anyway, I had spoken to him, and he kind of was telling me a little bit about what he knew about the case. You know, and he didn't really know anything. And because he wasn't on duty that night, Faith was found. But he told me, he said, just be careful what you're asking questions about and whatever I wanted to know to, you know, to ask him. And, man, he don't nothing. He's like, not, don't have anybody ask me questions. I'll answer you, but I won't answer, won't answer anybody else. Anyway, it wasn't, oh, maybe a week after I had spoken with him, my phone rang one night and I'm like, I answered, it's an unknown number, you know, and I, I wish I'd get the number. I did not. There was this man on phone and he asked me if I was sick and I said yes. And he goes, I want to inform you that you need to keep your mouth shut, quit asking questions and back off now or you're not going to like the consequences.
- [31:36]
Rosemary
Sam.
- [32:05]
Troy Taylor
Faith's case is still open and her killer or killers have not yet been brought to justice. If you know anything about Faith, her death, or those who may be responsible, we'd like to hear from you. Please visit EchoSpace Media Tips and either leave a voicemail or send us a message. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram at Bluntforce Trauma Podcast. If you're enjoying this podcast, please consider our subscriber option on Apple Podcasts or patreon@patreon.com Echospacepodcasts where you get access to early episode drops, ad free episodes, and bonus content across all of the Echo Space shows. If you'd like to keep up to date with progress on Faith's case, please visit and follow the justice for Faith Ely Facebook page. You'll find a link to it in the episode notes. Blunt Force Trauma is a production of Echo Space, written and hosted by Trust Troy Taylor. Executive producers are Troy Taylor, Mark Tarulli and Fred Schurzer. Our main theme song is Lose My Mind by Maya Davidoff, and the show also contains audio content from Moby Gratis.