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Criminally Obsessed
D4vd's Burn Cage & Body Bags - Death Investigator Reveals How Celeste Died
00:46:56
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everybody, I'm Ann Emerson and this is criminally obsessed. How did Celeste Rivas Hernandez wind up dead and dismembered in a rapper's Tesla? She was 14 years old, barely a teenager and someone's child.
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B
The substantial amount of time that passed between her death and the discovery meant that crucial evidence had degraded or disappeared.
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A
There are videos of Celeste and the rapper David, and he recorded a song called Romantic Homicide. Here he is singing it on an episode of Verify.
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C
In the back of my mind I killed you and I didn't even regret it.
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A
In the same episode, which was posted by the way, back in 2022, three years before Celeste's body was discovered, he explains the meaning behind it.
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C
It's not like the thought of her is gone by itself. Was something that she did. It was something that I decided to do and I killed her in the back of my mind. It was really more of a figurative I killed you.
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A
There's even a video of him bloodied, putting a body into a car. You've got to wonder, is life imitating art?
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B
As the evidence will show in court, the financial gain was for Mr. Burke to maintain his very lucrative musical career that Celeste was threatening on that particular night.
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A
Celeste was last seen alive on April 23, 2025, going into David's Hollywood Hills home. Her body was found decomposing in the trunk of his Tesla last September.
- [01:39]
B
Today I am announcing the charges against David Anthony Burke, the musician known as David, spelled D4V. D, in connection with the brutal and horrific murder of. Of Celeste, a 14 year old at that time. These charges include the most serious charges that a DA's office can bring. That is first degree murder with special circumstances.
- [02:07]
D
And what does lying in wait mean? You know, was, was this individual lying in wait at that residence? Were they behind a door? Were they in the garage? Were they in the car? I have no idea. But the police apparently do. And that's the key here. They've begun to put all of this together.
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A
That's Joseph Scott Morgan, a well respected forensic investigator who has spent decades working in the coroner's office to uncover how people died.
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D
One thing that people never get used to, and I know this is very ghastly, is the smell of decomposing flesh.
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A
We just found out some new information about Celeste's murder and we talked to Joseph Scott Morgan about it. So let's get into it. Just based on this information that, that you're sharing with me right now. You. What is that? What is the headline that you're seeing out of this this document, in this
- [03:05]
D
charging document that they have, you know, they go into very, very specific detail. And this goes back to the charges we think about the brutality of her killing. Because now the LA District Attorney is actually saying that there is a sharp weapon that has been used and that that can mean many things. Okay. Most, most of the time you're thinking knife and the knife. Just so folks understand, they're not talking about a knife relative to the dismemberment, which is a separate part to this.
- [03:39]
A
Right.
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D
They're talking about a sharp instrument was used expressly for the purpose of taking this child's life.
- [03:47]
A
Okay.
- [03:47]
D
Now how many injuries there are, the nature of those injuries, we don't really know at this time. But this is more data than we've had previously.
- [03:55]
A
You will be able or one would be able to tell the difference between the dismemberment and the sharp force injuries that were, that they found on her body. There's a distinct, There's a difference.
- [04:10]
D
Yeah. Okay, so let's look at it this way. If you think about a stab one, okay. Stab wound has. With a single edged weapon, we're not talking about a dagger. All right. And the assumption is it would be because you, you don't come around, you don't come across in forensics, you don't come across many double edged weapons. They're generally single edged weapons. And so they have a very specific pattern. When you look at a stabbing event, I actually refer to it as the winking eye. So if you think about an eye and how our eyes are shaped closer to the nose is kind of blunted and then it comes out to a point. Okay. On that hour, on the periphery. So when you insert the knife, you see this pattern. It's very distinctive, even in a decomposing body. The other thing here is that you're going to have to try to understand the difference between antemortem injuries, stab wounds or slices, cuts, and postmortem injuries which would go to dismemberment.
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A
So anti mortem is while they're still that that's when. That's before they die, they die or
- [05:11]
D
in the midst, in the midst of dying perimortem. And then you have the dismemberment issues which are going to look nothing like at all because there's not going to be any indwelling hemorrhage. And I know people are thinking, well she's decomposed. We take, that's one of the reasons we do autopsies. We take tissue samples. And even with decomposing tissue. We can go into certain areas and we can actually appreciate if there's indwelling hemorrhage and like the margins of a stab wound. And that can still be appreciated to a certain degree. All right, now it's going to be tough and all of this is tough because of decomposition. And I think personally that this is one of the reasons, One of, one of many probably, but one of the reasons it's taken quite some time for a lot of this data to come out.
- [05:55]
A
Okay, and you're also hearing more about the, the, the gruesome nature of, of the, the maggots, the, the bugs that were on or, or near that. What does that tell you?
- [06:15]
D
Okay, so that, that data actually came out in a leak and that was, you know, some weeks back. However, this is why this is important I think, because I first off, the place where she is found, which is inside of this vehicle, is not where the dismemberment took place. All right. I would be very surprised. All right. And we don't know how she, her remains migrated into the so called front of the Tesla. My suspicion is, is that she was somewhere else on that property when she was killed and then dismembered. Now, if she was not placed into the Tesla as a storage location immediately, that means that her body lay there until they could determine they, the assailant or assailants determined what they could do. All right, or what are you going to do? Because now you're faced with human remains, how do you get rid of them? We know from this document that had been released earlier that there was insect activity. So going back, I'm wondering if there's not insect evidence of insect activity around the house. And this is something that a, you know, civilian that's not involved in forensics is not going to be aware of. Be aware of. So when flies lay eggs, those eggs mature, right? They turn into maggots. Well, when maggots begin to go through their cycle, which is generally about 16 to 32 days, they shed their husk and they just look kind of translucent little husk on the ground. They're crunchy, they're tiny. You might not think anything of it. For us, that's valuable information because you, it's generational and these generations keep, you know, going on and on and on. And you can actually track that. You can track it through development. You know, how long was a human remain there? And it's in a state of decomposition. How many cycles of flaws have you gone through? So you know how I talked about that. That static time back on the 23rd. Well, the Maggots themselves, the insects themselves can actually act as markers as well. And, you know, how many cycles were in or in the trunk because they noted the insect activity inside. I keep saying trunk, but franc is the, you know, parlance that they're using. How many cycles were in the frunk and how many were outside? Okay. Was there any evidence? And even if you leave blood behind, that also attracts insects. So it. The devil is truly in the details, you know, in this case. And how thoroughly did they get there and examine that location in the wake of the discovery of the body, had he had sufficient amount of time to clean up? And that's going to be very, very important in this case. Some of the stuff has been speculative, but now we've kind of got concrete markers, don't we? We think about. We've got, you know, date. And now the authorities are using terms like line and weight. That means that they have specific information, and it obviously didn't come from Burke. All right, so that data is coming from somewhere else, I would think. Either that or, you know, either like another witness, person that witnessed, or they have specific timestamps relative to text messages, you know, because I would imagine there are, you know, tons of text messages. Messages probably flying between these two, more than likely. But at any rate, he lured her to the home. That's when we know that she. She vanishes. We. We don't see her after that date. And, you know, she doesn't pop up again on the radar again until, you know, she's found in that parking lot, you know, months, months and months later. But it's important for us forensically because now we have markers in time that we can kind of assess this and get an idea as to which way this is going.
- [10:26]
A
Well, thank you very much. Those were very important points. But, dang, it took a long time to get here, didn't it?
- [10:32]
D
Hey, listen, if you really want a measure of time, and I'm talking about from a scientific standpoint, okay, think about when the last time it was that Celeste was actually seen alive. Okay? And there's been a lot of questions about this, correct? I mean, that's. That's been the conundrum, if you will, from a scientific standpoint.
- [10:53]
A
And why is that important as far as, like, when she was last seen?
- [10:56]
D
I mean, it's very important in the sense that if. If her body is not in the condition that it's in when it's found, then we have to back up and reassess the timeline. Timeline goes to narrative, right? You know, and also what the public, and more importantly, what the investigators are seeing, does it. Does it match up? And from my side of the house, from the forensic side of the house, we take the evidence that we have, which are this precious child's child may emphasize here, remains found in the front of this Tesla vehicle in an impound yard. What was their status? You know, and we began to look at things like decompositional rates, we began to look at things like injuries, how degraded they might be. Is it still appreciable based upon the length of time? And I got to tell you, now we kind of have benchmarks, right? Because what they are saying at this point in time, the last time she is known to be alive is when she walks into that. Into that residence on April 20, 2025. So that's kind of a static marker in time. You know, in science, we like to have the static markers because it's. It's from within that construct. We've been. Can begin to do specific measurements. And then. And then she's not found. She's not found until well into September. If we are to believe what investigators, the police are stating right now, then she has essentially been decaying inside of this vehicle or maybe somewhere else. And she was placed in the vehicle after she could not. After they could not handle her being in another location, say, for instance, in the house, if that's where this dismemberment event took up, took place. And then they put her in the. In the car and then moved her out to the road. I've been kind of going through my mind of all of these various scenarios, because, listen, I can tell you this. Working in New Orleans and Atlanta with the coroner and the medical examiner, respectively, one thing that people never get used to, and I know this is very ghastly, is the smell of decomposing flesh. And so you take someone that's certainly not used to being around that and faced with the possibility that he allegedly did this, and it's a constant reminder, isn't it? And so you could see how she could be taken from one spot and then placed in another, and then the car moved out of the garage and put onto the road and it's being moved about and that sort of thing. And now, you know, it's. There's more clarity here.
- [13:18]
A
I think we have, you know, from these press conference that we've just heard from the, from the district attorney's office, from. From Hockman that she was last seen alive on April 23, 2025, when she arrived as you sat at David's home. And then you had this enormous amount of time where she may or may not have been in a picture or. But then you leapfrog all the way to September 8th, which also just makes me absolutely heartsick is because that was literally, I think, the day after her. It would have been. She was discovered the day after her birthday would have been 15, 15 years old. Can you talk to me about what they found in the frunk, which is like the front trunk of the Tesla that had been, as you said, sort of moved around to these different places in, in la, in the Hollywood Hills area.
- [14:13]
D
Y' all be glad to.
- [14:14]
A
It gets impounded, right? After a couple of days, they. They just throw it into the impound lot, they discover her body and. And what. What's going on with this body? How did, how do they find her body?
- [14:27]
D
Well, most of the time with decomposing bodies, the. The first idea that you have something that is decomposing, whatever it is, any kind of organic substance is going to be smell, it will be giving off an odor. And in this particular case, that's what happened. One of the workers there, somebody went by that impounded Tesla and they took note of it. And it was at that point in time that they summoned people there. They were able to open up the front, as I'd never heard that term before until. Until, you know, months ago when I first started covering the frunk. They, you know, they make this ghastly discovery. So it's not just her body in the frunk, it's her body in multiple components. And one of the major components, and this is something, I think, that was leaked out as a result of some of the grand jury data that had come out, you know, a few months ago. And we were shocked to hear this. The police actually used the term body bag or something similar to that, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, cadaver bag, specifically. And that's. That's a term that is we don't use in the industry. We don't say cadaver bag for the most part. We use the term body bag. Years ago, they used to be called disaster pouches. You hear body bag most of the time. But this is a cadaver bag, which, by the way, can be purchased. You know, you can go on Amazon and find these things and you can buy them. And you can buy them for. For any, any number of reasons. You know, Halloween display. You can buy them actually for pets, and you can buy them for human size as well. And they do come in various sizes. And I just want people to understand that. And so it would have been, it would have been easy for him to have acquired one of these, allegedly, if he is in fact responsible for this. But, you know, there were other items that were also found, you know, at that dwelling, by the way. 20k per month in rent, right?
- [16:28]
A
His, his mansion.
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D
Yeah, yeah. And we had a burn cage that was found there that had not been used. And that, that was kind of suspicious. There was an unused chainsaw.
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A
I wanted to see what a burn cage looked like. So of course, I googled it right away. And they appear to be ventilated steel boxes, some with lids, some without. And they can cost anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to over a thousand. A typical burn cage is about 35 inches or a little under 3ft tall and 20 inches wide. But bigger versions can get up to almost 4ft tall and 2ft wide.
- [17:04]
D
I had an opportunity to talk with the private investigator that was working on behalf of, of the, the land owner. I said, let me ask you something. At this dwelling, if you're, if you're a customer, if you're a renter, are you expected to do your, your own maintenance around the house? Your own, you know, is he going to go out and start, you know, whittling on trees and limbs? And he laughed. You know, because, you know, and I know what the Hollywood Hills are, right. I mean, this is not the place where the people that are living in home. I guess I could. But if you're renting, you're not going to go out and do your own lawn work.
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A
No. And those burn cages are not, those are not a, they're not even legal, are they in Los Angeles?
- [17:49]
D
Yeah, they might, they might not put you in jail for many things. In Los Angeles nowadays, you start burning stuff, you know, all you gotta do is look at Malibu and the Palisades fire. You start burning stuff out there, you're gonna get somebody's attention. And burn cages in and of themselves are used many times on rural properties. And you can burn stuff, it kind of self ventilates, it maintains, you know, cause fire has a requirement of having an uninhibited flow of oxygen, right? And so it's got openings on it and this sort of thing. So to breathe and you can render down, that's what it comes down to, rendering. And that's very important. And there are people that use these things on properties. It could be debris, the remains of vermin that they recovered, that sort of thing. And so it would be nothing to take, say, human remains. And if you can place them into smaller manageable pieces, for instance, you could render those down. These things burn really hot. I mean, I think I checked and they will burn as hot as a crematory. So the temps really get. Get in. They're built, they're built to do this. Okay. So they can get up over a thousand degrees in heat, but you're going to draw attention to yourself with that, particularly in la.
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A
Well, and so they, but they hadn't been used from what this PI told you.
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D
Yeah.
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A
And I think I know you're talking about Stephen Fisher. Is that who it was?
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D
Yeah, Stephen, yeah. Yep.
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A
So he, he was the PI for the owner of the property that David was renting during this whole time period that we're talking about last sort of spring to summer time frame is from what I understand. So it wasn't used, though? The chainsaw and the, and the burn cage were not used?
- [19:35]
D
They were not used, no.
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A
So we wouldn't see any, any potential DNA on that. But. So no, it creates this whole scenario. Right? Like, what is going on? And then you find this body.
- [19:48]
D
It's like you and I could go out and we can, we can buy pretty much anything we want to. You know, this legal. It's legal to purchase. All right. But it certainly, when you're working at this from an investigation, investigative narrative. Right, right. You're trying to put all of these pieces together to try to understand. And we're not even talking about court yet. All right. We're just talking about why in the world would somebody possess this that has no need of it. If you're looking to get rid of debris on the property, that's not your job. That' down the hall and to the left. Right. That's somebody else that's going to be hired by the. By the owner to do that. So it would make an investigator. Pause. Right. Well, why would you need this? Are you about to get into gardening? Are you trying to dispose of something that you don't want anybody else to see? You know, those questions are going to pop up and they should, they should in any legitimate investigator's mind. And so that's very important. Can I go back to something, though, relative to the dates? And I think that it's essential. One of the things that came out in the press conference, and you need to check this wording very careful, you know, we, we talk about those dates. You know, if it was the 23rd of April, one of the things that, that was stated in the press conference was that he, being David, all right, was laying in wait now, right? That has a certain implication to it. You know, like he had foreknowledge. He had an understanding. When she comes back, you know, at that date, on that date in April, he's laying in wait for her. That goes to planning, right. That goes to an awareness that. That she could run contrary to any kind of plans he has for the future. And he has to have a way in order to not just end her life, but also get rid of her, because this is no easy undertaking for anybody. I cover a lot of cases on my podcast and on other platforms relative that involve dismemberments. If I could just tell you, you know, a couple of things that I see consistently that. That happen along this way is that most people that decide to do a dismemberment do not have the proper tools at hand. You know, there are a lot of people that do it, think they want to do it, and then they're going to grab whatever they have in the house in order to render down the body. And most of the things are not sufficient to the task. It's not like they work in a medical legal environment where it's a morgue and we have scalpels and knives and saws and all those sorts of things that we use when we're doing dissections. Okay. And suddenly you're left with these very rudimentary tools. Also. What do you do with these elements once you're in the midst of this? And most people get very, very frustrated? You have to have power. You have to have water most of the time, and you have to have. More importantly, you have to have privacy in order to do this. You're not going to go in the backyard, you're not going to go in the front yard. You're not even going to go to the alleyways to do this. You have to have seclusion in order to facilitate this. So did this take place at that address in the Hollywood Hills, or did it take place somewhere else? Was her body transported somewhere else? Where her remains were, were essentially dismembered at another location and she was brought back here. I think that there's a lot more to learn here. But I got to tell you, the focus is kind of tightening at this point in time.
- [23:13]
A
And so that you believe, like these special circumstances that you're talking about, that they are leveling at David right now on. On top of the murder in the first degree, it's lying in wait, committing crime for financial gain and murdering the Witness in an investigation. Yes, those. And that witness being Celeste Rivas Hernandez herself as a young girl, as a. As a minor that was in the middle of this. So lying in wait really does show that premeditation, but it doesn't tell us yet where the crime scene necessarily is. And we know where her body was found, but not necessarily where she died.
- [23:55]
D
Yeah. And what does line and wait mean? Was this individual lying in wait at that residence? Were they behind the door? Were they in the garage? Were they in the car? I have no idea. But the police apparently do. And that's the key here. They've begun to put all of this together and suddenly those things that were, you know, kind of foggy, you know, from our perspective as the public, we've got a little bit more clarity now moving forward. We know that they've been working behind the scenes and they've put together something because they would not use terms like that like line and wait. And also what the motivation could potentially be, and that's long term, you know, financial gain. Is she. Is she going to go into this environment and bespoil that opportunity for the accused? And apparently they've drawn that conclusion at this point.
- [24:44]
A
Well, that she would have possibly. You know, what the prosecutors were talking about was that this was somehow going to stymie his career. Also during the press conference that we heard, and this is, I think, going to be incredibly important is the recovered digital and forensic evidence, which. Which could be. And they talked about how the smoking gun is really the totality of the evidence that they've discovered in this case.
- [25:09]
D
Yeah. You know, one of the fascinating electronic evidence elements to this is going to be that car.
- [25:16]
A
Yes.
- [25:16]
D
And I don't know if. I don't. I'm sure that there have been. Okay. However, in a case this high profile, you. We actually have a Tesla that's involved in this. And these things track you right. Everywhere you go. There's cameras on this thing. We don't know what they have. Okay. As far as comings and goings go. All right. And that's going to be an interesting piece. And also if that car was used, you know, we've heard about this late night trip that took place at some point in time to Santa Barbara County, I think, and then coming back. Well, if you marry the data from the Tesla with his phone or Celeste phone, and they're traveling in tandem, you know, moving back and forth and that sort of thing, that kind of digs the hole deeper and deeper, at least from a digital forensic standpoint, you Couple that obviously when she was last seen, was her phone functioning after that point in time? Did they do geofencing around that area? If her phone ceased to operate after that last day when she was known alive, that's going to be very, very important here. And then also there are activities online. You know, there's certain, you know, we've got this, the streaming element. You know, I think Twitch has mentioned a couple other things. And there's those, you know, you can see there's. There are those images that I've seen, you know, where she's, you know, attempting to hide her face. What was the reasoning behind that? How long has she actually occupied that space? Because, yeah, we do have a ghastly homicide here, but we've also got a girl, a young girl that is involved with someone that's much, much older and he's potentially involved in an inappropriate relationship. That, that's kind of the seed, you know, that, that this thing springs from, I think. And that's another, you know, very, very disturbing element to this case.
- [27:13]
A
It is. I mean, the ages that we're dealing with here are, are. It is. It's every. I've said it before in other cases, but this one couldn't, it couldn't be more true that it's just literally every parent's wor. Your daughter walks out of the house one night. Your, Your, Your seventh grader walks out of the house and never comes back. And now we're, you know, because of your experience and seeing these bodies, there's, there's questions I have right now. There's, you know, about how they're, how they were able to recover her body out of that trunk with the head and torso in one. If you could just help our viewers understand, you know, how decomposed these body parts really were. Like, what we really think we were dealing with when they pulled these body parts out.
- [28:04]
D
I'll put it to you this way. There would have been some skeletonization, some at least going on at this point, because soft tissue would have begun to have rendered down. You will have this in the bottom of the container. For instance, we used the term cadaver bag earlier. You would have liquefied remnant that were down there. And I know that's horribly ghastly, all right. But that's the reality of the world, you know, that people like myself work in. Okay. One of the things that is going to be encouraging, I think, as far as physical evidence goes, is that since there is a dismemberment, if they can find a tool that is Similar or that matches the tool marks on, on these areas where her body was dismembered, those points of dissection or pro section, you can marry up that specific instrument with those, with those markings that are on the bone. Now the trouble is, are they going to be able to put that instrument into the hand of, of an accused person or potential perpetrator? That, that's where good old fashioned police shoe leather comes in. We can give you this data from a scientific standpoint, but what are the police going to do with it? And at this point it sou. They've been working the case well and
- [29:25]
A
you know, as far as finding evidence on like you've got now two bags, two cadaver bags that were in that, that trunk. One had the head and torso, the other had the arms and legs. They were able to actually identify Celeste Wright with this little tattoo that was on her finger that said sh. And you know, we've heard a lot like in the Gilgo beach serial killer case where tattoos removed, you know, for different purposes, you know, to try and so that you don't know who, you don't know who the victim was based on tattoos and that sort of thing. But this was a case where we knew it was Celeste pretty soon afterwards.
- [30:05]
D
Yeah, yeah. And the tattoo will be significant merely for the purpose of identification. Of course. There would still be enough viable, viable, useful cellular data to do a DNA match here. It's not going to be degraded, I don't think, to the point where you couldn't run a DNA profile, come up with a DNA profile on the remains and then do a comparative analysis with her biological parents. That's kind of easy to do nowadays, I think it's horrible, but yet it's still easy to do. So, you know, we'll. All of that coupled with what they have remaining of her remains is creating a very, very grim picture. And to what links did he go, you know, to try, you know, because we're talking about, if I'm not mistaken, I think there's a charge in there about abuse of human corpse as well.
- [30:58]
A
Right? A mutilation of body. Yep.
- [31:01]
D
Yeah. And that, you know, that charge varies from state to state. You know, it's just called something else in a variety of different states. Many times it's just a misdemeanor charge, but it's, it, it's demonstrative of what a particular assailant, what links that particular salient would go to. And it goes to kind of a hardness of heart, doesn't it? You know, and it's not just the mere fact that she's young. It's not just the mere fact that she's been murdered. It's also, oh, well, look what was done with her remains afterwards. And you talk about it, it gets dark really, really quick when you look
- [31:33]
A
at like the, the tattoo on her finger. I guess the question was like, if her body's decomposing, you're in this sort of record setting heat in August that this body has potentially been there. Would there be what you talk about with this skin slippage with that, can you look at how long the body has been decomposing based on the fact of being able to identify that tattoo, even
- [32:02]
D
not necessarily what happens with. And just so folks understand when, when decomposition happens, we have a stage that bodies go through. It's called desiccation. And desiccation just simply means drying out or, you know, it's dehydrating of tissues. All right? So this desiccation begins on the periphery. So if you think about the toes, the top of the head and also the fingers, these areas are absent hydration for a period of time. And those areas mummify very, very quickly. Okay. And so you'll have this drying that takes place and it's, it is not very difficult for us in the, in the morgue. One of the things that we do is a rehydration of skin through injections. And you can actually, you can't bring it to absolute life, but you can say, kind of expand the area through rehydration and you can begin to pick up on certain details. And we will in fact dissect that area out and have it. Okay. And treat it special and take photographs of it and we can come back with details. I've worked on cases where we've had tattoos on decomposing remains and we have compared said tattoo that we have to antimortem, which are pre death photos of the individual in life. And you can compare the two things and it'll put you in the ballpark relative to a positive id.
- [33:27]
A
Well, and also with, as far as the decomposition of the body, is there anything from that physical side that they really need to be be looking at? As far as Celeste's body?
- [33:40]
D
Yeah, there's a couple of elements here. First off, was she protected the entire time? That is if her body was, and I call it cocooning, if her body was cocooned and then placed in a protected environment where you do not have, say, scavengers that are going to come along and that's not going to influence the status of the body. If. And also you're going to look at the rise and fall of temps now and what you'd mentioned was that, was that we had record setting heat or they did in LA back in August, remember. And so, I mean it was scorching. I had friends that were out there, you know, they talked about how insufferably hot it was even by LA standards in the summertime and you have that peak that goes up. So what we know about, about decomposition is this heat always speeds things up. All right. So the higher the level of heat, all right, the quicker remains will begin to break down. So if you've got kind of a cooler period leading up to this, leading up to this peak, you can actually have an accelerated decomposition at this point. The one saving grace that they don't have and that they're absent in the environment in LA, say, as opposed to where I live in the Deep south, they don't have a lot of humidity and humidity is also a contributing factor too. So you might have remains that are a bit more preserved out there in that environment, environment even though they're subjected to high heat. There's lower humidity in the South. You have high humidity, high heat and you will really, really have a breakdown in tissue. So that might be the one saving grace. However, back to your question. Is it possible to kind of plot this out?
- [35:21]
A
Sure.
- [35:22]
D
Once you start to get out beyond about that, about that eight week window, it's very, very difficult to kind of narrow your timeline. It's almost like starting like a beam of light starts in 1.1 central location, but as it goes downrange, it spreads out further and further. It's harder to kind of narrow that beam down. Right. And so the further out in time, the more difficult it is to tie it back to a specific point in time.
- [35:51]
A
So it's going to be tough.
- [35:52]
D
It will be tough, yes.
- [35:54]
A
Well, and I think that, you know, if I put on my defense attorney's hat because of course David's defense attorney saying we're going to prove that, you know, that none of this evidence is going to point to David like this. He, he, he is not guilty. You know, that's what we've heard so far. We don't know if anything else is happening behind the scenes right now.
- [36:13]
D
Right.
- [36:14]
A
But we, that's what we're hearing right now. And you know, one thing that I keep on thinking about is is there some way for the defense attorney to turn this as this wasn't an accident. She took, took too many drugs, something Happened, she overdosed, she fell downstairs, she. Something else happened. And then David didn't know what to do and he panicked because, you know, I feel like I'm reliving like the Brian Walsh trial out of Massachusetts with his wife, you know, and then I didn't know what to do, so I just, just cut her up, you know, that kind of thing. It was unbelievable way of handling it. Right. Do you think toxicology reports, anything could be to, to rule those kind of scenarios out? Is that one of the things they've been looking at?
- [36:59]
D
Yeah, I'm sure it has been. And could they get talks, you know, from her torso? Again, very graphic here, but we probably would not be able to get. Or they would probably not be able to get useful blood. You're going to have to use things like solid organs, brain, liver. And we spin those down and liquefy them. Now you can. When we draw that up and we run tox on there, you can get qualitative results, which means, yeah, this type of drug was in system, whether it's coke or meth or whatever the drug of choice is, all right, but you're not going to be able to get quantitative amounts, which gives us a level of lethality. Say if you have X amount of cocaine on board or X amount of meth on board that's incompatible with life, you will in fact die. All right? So that's not going to be a possibility. If there is, if there are maggots present, we actually use those many times, we will spin those down. If, of course, she would have gone through several generations of, of flies probably at this point in time. It's one of the things we look for with maggot. You can take those, spin those down. We can get a, a qualitative amount. Sometimes that'll be contained within the remains of the maggots themselves. Can't get a quantitative amount. So if they're going to go down that road, I'm just thinking about what the defense would do here. They can say they can use that scenario and that's actually been put forward, you know, I think several months back that maybe she OD'd. All right, maybe she OD and he panicked. There was also somebody else that said, hey, maybe, maybe she was pregnant. And there was panic that sat in and that. That was stated as well. So you're going to have forensic pathologists and you're going to have forensic toxicologists come in and talk about this and toxically say, well, why would the toxicologist talk about it if there's Nothing there. They're going to talk about an absence of it. Okay. So the, the county toxicologist or state toxicologist will come in and take the stand and they'll actually talk about the testing that they went through, how there was an absence of viable sample, and they'll talk about what they could do with it. All right, so. And it's, it's easy for these waters to get muddied very, very quickly. I think he's probably got a sharp team and they're gonna, they're gonna pull out all stops on this.
- [39:17]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he's got a, he's got a father who's a lawyer.
- [39:21]
D
Yeah, yeah, he does. I think a defense lawyer by trade. I might be mistaken. I might be mistaken, but a lawyer, certainly, definitely attorney. We know that, that this individual had people that were in his inner circle. Right. The defense. There's a high probability the defense is going to do some finger pointing as well. All right, so, you know, just that somebody else may have facilitated this. I think that's certainly something else to consider. Anybody that would have had intimate knowledge of this individual's comings and goings and what they had been about, what they had heard, what they had witnessed, all those sorts of things will come into play as well.
- [40:01]
A
Yeah. And you're dealing with a music star, so you're dealing with an entourage. You're talking about teams of people that are constantly orbiting, you know, this person. Can you tell how long a body has been. Has been. How long a person has been deceased by the smell of a body? Because we hear so much about this bowel odor. Is there anything about the smell that can tell you how long this has been going on?
- [40:27]
D
Not within normal human ranges. Like if we're, if you're asking an individual, we'll grade the smell based upon what you smell. And can you tie a specific point in time to that level? Smell? No. Now, early on, you know, and when I say early on, there are some bodies, you know, two to three, maybe even four days down range, you're not going to smell anything unless you're right on top of the body. But after a certain period of time, the body will advance to that point in time where the smell will begin to emanate. I'm thinking also the fact that when that car was towed into that lot, the remains, which they didn't know were in there got jostled. They got jostled. And if this frunk, as they call it, feels so weird saying that word doesn't it got jostled. And if you've ever gone, driven down the streets in la, there's a lot of jostling, Right. Potholes.
- [41:26]
A
Like, you're going, like.
- [41:27]
B
Yeah.
- [41:27]
D
And you're. You're swimming back and forth.
- [41:29]
A
Yeah.
- [41:29]
D
And then this vehicle comes to rest right there. Well, the smell will begin to emanate simply because you've gone over very dynamic surfaces along the way. And maybe things leached out. They've leached out into the greater area. They're no longer contained. I'm thinking about fluids and those sorts of things, so. But no, there's. There's really. There's no scientific way within our range of smell as human beings to detect that there are certain people. You go back to the Casey Anthony case, famously, where there's an individual that claims they can do an air sample in the air and, you know, detect whether or not there are human remains there or were there and that sort of thing. But as far as, like, giving a specific timeline as to how long someone has been deceased based upon smell, no, it's not scientifically provable.
- [42:17]
A
Do you, with all the work that you've done on this case, have you come up with a timeline of when you think she died?
- [42:24]
D
Well, not having seen the remains and just simply based upon what I have heard, I would. I would imagine it would be within reason that she could have, in fact, been dead since April, ever since the
- [42:36]
A
last time she was seen.
- [42:37]
D
Yes, ma'. Am.
- [42:38]
A
That's unbelievable.
- [42:39]
D
This might be one of the more complex cases that we covered in some time.
- [42:42]
A
Absolutely. And I think that what. What really. What really speaks to, like, the fact that the police department, the homicide teams, the investigators, the prosecutors have held and held and held on this, you know, on these charges being filed, is because they really are throwing the book at David in this case. We are seeing everything. I feel like I'm seeing a timeline based on what they just. What they just charged him with, almost.
- [43:14]
D
No, I agree. And here's the thing, and it really speaks. You said this earlier, and though there is a moratorium right now, death penalty is still in the case. Still on the case.
- [43:25]
A
Yeah, that's a really good point. It won't be next year, possibly.
- [43:29]
D
Right. But this is capital homicide and in the worst way. Right. And so, yeah, that goes to the level of egregiousness here. I've thought that, you know, because, you know, many times we will see these things, you know, every common day, people, you know, you see these things and say, well, there's rules for us and there's rules for Them. Right. And many of us, and I've heard, I've been in conversations, if this was anybody else, right, other than this person that has some level of celebrity, they would charge them. You know, we would have heard something to this point. But conversely, I think that they're just trying to be really, really careful. You know, this guy's now got a team of at least three defense attorneys, probably going to have access to a team of experts, forensic pathologists, electronic forensic people. You'll have a whole litany of these people that are going to be on his team. So this is not something that, that the prosecutors is going to take lightly because they're going to have to. It's going to be their best against their best at this point in time. So whenever this thing does make it to trial, it'll be, It'll be worth the watch. I can hear, I can tell you that.
- [44:37]
A
That's really good. Thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate you breaking this down. I, I've. It's. It is a lot. I mean, when we're talking about a young girl and what has happened to her, and I know it is probably put the investigators through the ringer to, to actually from the moment they, they had to find this little girl, I know that it's been heartbreaking for her, for her entire family and for everyone who's worked on this case. And there's gonna be a lot more that we have to hear that's going to be heartbreaking. Thank you very much. Now, David is innocent until proven guilty, but he's facing some very serious charges, and the circumstantial evidence is not in his favor. What do you think happened to Celeste? I want to know what you think about this case. Please be sure to like and subscribe and turn on your notifications so you don't miss any of the updates on this case. Thanks for watching and I'll be sure to reply to some of the comments, comments that you leave me.