David Rutherford Show: Jo Scott Morgan - Epstein’s Ranch, Crime Scene Truth, and the Meaning of Death

Summary

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Podcast Summary: David Rutherford Show — Joseph Scott Morgan on Epstein’s Ranch, Crime Scene Truth, and the Meaning of Death

Podcast: The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show (iHeartPodcasts)
Guest: Joseph Scott Morgan, Forensics Scholar, Host of Body Bags Podcast
Host: David Rutherford
Date: March 23, 2026

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Main Theme & Purpose

This episode features an in-depth conversation with renowned forensic death investigator Joseph Scott Morgan. The discussion centers on the renewed investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, insights into forensic procedures for potential mass burial sites, the psychological impact of working with death, and society's complex relationship with mortality and true crime. The dialogue weaves together technical expertise, personal experience, and philosophical reflections on the meaning of death for both individuals and cultures.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Joseph Scott Morgan’s Background

• Morgan is head of forensics at Jacksonville State University, board-certified in medicolegal death investigation, and hosts the Body Bags podcast ([03:27]).
• He has extensive experience in New Orleans, Atlanta, and with death scene and autopsy investigations.

2. Epstein’s Zorro Ranch: Forensic Possibilities and Challenges

• Isolation as a Factor:
  • Morgan highlights that the ranch’s purpose may be "isolation," possibly for illicit activity ([08:00]).
  • “Your boy ain't no rancher, that’s for sure…why would you need this? Well, purpose is isolation if you want to get rid of somebody.” (Joseph Scott Morgan, 08:20)
• Forensic Search Strategies:
  • Detailed discussion of utilizing satellite imagery, geospatial analysis, soil and hydrology studies, and advanced tools like drones and lidar to locate clandestine graves ([10:00–12:00]).
  • Assembling multi-disciplinary teams led by forensic anthropologists and geologists, supported by crime scene investigators: “You want those people to be the tip of the spear.” (JSM, 12:47)
• Media Pressure:
  • Discusses how media and political timelines endanger thorough investigations ([13:12]).
  • “The media are the clock watchers…if you’re not inside the investigative bubble, you don’t need that data.” (JSM, 13:13)
• Potential Evidence & Recovery:
  • Describes types of evidence dependent on how bodies are “memorialized,” e.g., concrete encasement or tarps, and forensic implications ([14:00–15:00]).
  • Details regarding asphyxial deaths and the way patterns emerge in cases of serial exploitation ([15:47–18:18]).

3. Human Dehumanization and Modality of Homicide

• Considers the psychology of acts at Epstein-linked sites: “It goes to psychopathy at that point in time. Because if there’s two, guess what? I think there’s more.” (JSM, 16:41)
• Explains how close-contact killings (e.g., suffocation) reflect a certain pleasure and control for perpetrators ([20:36–21:44]).
• Describes the necessity of treating high-profile and high-responsibility cases with meticulous scientific rigor, not just prosecutorial urgency.

4. Investigative Leadership Under Pressure

• Shares a story of effective crisis leadership during a mass shooting investigation—how strong management shields forensic teams from external pressures ([35:45–37:13]).
• “He would come to the door of the building and ask us what do we need. He handled all the questions. Everything. We never dealt with the press.” (JSM, 37:13)

5. The Human Toll of Death Investigation

• The psychological burden of daily proximity to death, including cumulative PTSD ([64:45+]).
• Describes the isolating aspect: “You think you’ve developed a callus…you’re still impacted, even at a microscopic level.” (JSM, 41:54)
• Discusses the crossover with military/special operations perspectives on death and the “culture of death” ([46:18]).
• The unique intimacy and rituals among investigators, including shared behaviors to check for “decomp” odors before returning home ([75:00]).

6. True Crime Obsession: Society’s Fascination and Fallout

• Society uses true crime as a form of “modern ghost stories” and puzzle-solving entertainment ([82:52–85:15]).
• The true crime wave offers both positive (crowdsourced problem-solving, attention for cold cases) and negative (voyeurism, unrealistic shortcuts) impacts.
• “You’re the only marker in time for that person.” (JSM, 59:39)—on the responsibility of reporting on the dead.

7. On Grief, Loss, and the Myth of Closure

• Morgan criticizes “closure” as a dismissive societal myth ([94:57]):
  • “Closure…is the biggest bunch of crap that has been sold to us as a society. With death there is no closure. Death is something that we all experience. People need to warm up to the fact that death is going to be part of their experience in life.” (JSM, 94:57)
• Advocates for embracing mortality and cherishing the present: “Life will be so much sweeter…It’s about living this life.” (JSM, 97:09)
• Importance of faith and finding peace, both personally and professionally: “My will has shifted…It’s not about me, it’s about my relationship with God.” (JSM, 97:12)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the Ranch’s Purpose ([08:20], JSM):

  “What the hell do you need with this?…purpose is isolation if you want to get rid of somebody.”

• On the Investigative Mindset ([16:54], JSM):

  “If you’re saying two, I’m going to think four or six or whatever…it goes to psychopathy at that point.”

• On the True Nature of Crime Investigation ([59:39], JSM):

  “As an MDI, you’re the person that’s bearing witness to the fact that this person ever even existed.”

• On the Myth of Closure ([94:57], JSM):

  “I’m going to tell you a word that people need to completely and totally rid themselves of…closure.”

• On the Impact of Death Investigation Work ([68:36], JSM):

  “It was a very long road for me…I was a babbling idiot…She [the psychiatrist] said, ‘You’re the worst case of PTSD I’ve seen since Vietnam.’”

• On Memory and Notifying Families ([55:07], JSM):

  “The first one I did, I still remember…the last one I did. None of them get any better. You’re a marker in time for these people.”

• On Finding Purpose ([98:37], JSM):

  “Enjoy every single moment that I have…I didn’t think that I would get to this point.”

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Joseph Scott Morgan Introduction/Bio – [03:27–04:56]
• Epstein’s Ranch: Forensic Speculation – [05:47–14:00]
• Forensic Methodology & Technology – [09:29–12:52]
• Media Pressure & Investigative Timelines – [13:12–13:37]
• Handling Potential Evidence – [14:00–15:23]
• Anonymous Tips & Patterns of Crime – [15:23–16:54]
• Psychology of Serial Offenders – [18:18–21:44]
• Leadership in Crisis/Case Management – [35:45–37:13]
• Impact of the Job & Notifying Families – [41:54, 55:07]
• The Myth of Closure & Embracing Mortality – [94:57–99:51]
• Personal Recovery, Faith & Purpose – [97:09–98:37]
• True Crime’s Societal Role – [82:52–87:56]
• Conclusion, Resources, and Final Reflection – [101:01–104:45]

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Final Thoughts

This conversation offers an unflinching look at forensic death investigation, both technically and emotionally. Joseph Scott Morgan delivers profound insights not just into the mechanics of crime and recovery of the dead, but also into the soul-wrenching cost and rare grace of bearing witness in death’s world. Calling out society’s myths (“closure”) and obsessions with crime, he urges a deeper engagement with mortality and grief.

Where to Find Joseph Scott Morgan:

• Podcast: Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan (iHeart, Apple, Spotify, YouTube)
• Institutional Home: Jacksonville State University Forensics Program

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“You’re the only marker in time for that person… Did you honor that person with the words that you wrote and the things that you said relative to their death?” – Joseph Scott Morgan ([61:34])

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Transcript

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[David Rutherford]

Today on the David Rutherford Show, I welcome Joseph Scott Morgan, head of forensics at Jackson State University as well as a normal appearance on Nancy Grace and also has his own podcast, the Body Bags Podcast. Don't miss this one. We talk Zorro Ranch, a missing UFO general and what it means to brush up and deal with death on a daily basis today on the David Rutherford Show. Joseph, welcome to the show. Again. Let me just, I just really want to emphasize your your background. You're an mf, MFS FAB mdi and you're a distinguished scholar of Applied Forensics at Jackson State University and you hold a faculty rank of Associate professor of Applied Forensics. You also hold a Master's of Forensic Sciences degree from National University and you're a board certified fellow of the American Board of Medicolegal Death Investigators. And from what we chatted before, you've also had extensive experience in New Orleans and in the coroner's office as well as in Georgia and greater greater Atlanta area too.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yep.

[David Rutherford]

So I guess I think the biggest thing that, you know, we'll get into eventually is just what it's like to how this job restructures your perceptions of death and as you watch how other human beings have to deal with it as it goes. But before we jump into that, I you recently did a fantastic show on the Zorro Ranch with Epstein and I would just love to get your, you know, your ideas behind this and why it could be kind of the next big break in the case. I guess it Seems like, you know, it's difficult to say. There aren't many active cases going on right now. So I'd love to hear your impression of what this might mean for the greater context of the Epstein files.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah. Well, first off, Ro, thank you for having me. It's. It's an honor and a privilege. Thank you so much. Yeah. As far as Epstein, I've kind of got a history going back. You know, I started literally just kind of back up a little bit. The. I think it was the morning after he was found dead. I'd heard, you know, heard about him, you know, forever and ever, you know, in the news and whatnot, in the news cycle. But when. When he died, of course, I was on the air almost immediately. I had people calling me from all over. And from just from that beginning, that's when my. My appetite from a forensic standpoint kind of got kind of wetted my appetite, if you will. And so I began to follow it very closely and follow that thread because there's all. As, you know, it's. There's so many roads you can go down with it. So I really try to stay. I hate to use the term to stay. Well, I'll stay within my guardrails instead of saying within my lane, because I think that there's interconnectivity with a lot of stuff. And so been following for a while, and I'd had a lot of conversations with people, particularly in forensics, about findings, you know, from jail and what there was and what there wasn't. And then, I guess it was probably three years ago, I was chatting with a buddy of mine, and he's. He's an old homicide detective, and we were. We were talking about if you. If you. If you had access to. To say, young. Young women, and they're, say, Eastern or even Western European, can't speak the language. And you come dragging them to the US they're essentially disposable. And. And so that was our supposition. And the idea was, what would you do with them? Well, some people had said on Little St. James, you know, surrounded by sharks, you know, you take them out there. Yeah, yeah. Alpha, alpha, predator. But then I got to thinking about the ranch, and I. And I'm thinking, you know, first off, what the hell do you need with this? Because your boy ain't no rancher, that's for sure. You know, and so I'm thinking, why would you need this? Well, purpose is isolation if you want to get rid of somebody. And I know that you probably spent time out There and in the deserts and it goes on forever and ever, you know, and it, it's like a sea, a sea of sand and caliche as far as you can see, you know, what you do. And then this, the story popped and we had had this discussion, I would say probably about three or four years ago. And then you know, this leaked email and again, I don't know how much veracity to assign any of this stuff, you know, because I can't necessarily validate it. And even though it's in a dump, you just never know because there's any number of people that are involved with it. But if I take that bit of knowledge and I begin to think about it, that's one of the reasons that I wanted to cover it on my, my podcast, Body Bags, you know, because what, what would you do? How could you facilitate it? Well, the fact that it's a so called ranch which you know, equates to for many people what they refer to as agricultural welfare. You know, a rich guy will buy a ranch or a farm just to write this thing off. Well, they have to maintain it. And it's my understanding they even have a fire department on this thing. And you know, he's got equipment out there because you can't go into that soil out there like that caliche that I imagine two old good boy, two good old boys with a couple of shovels and dig a hole.

[David Rutherford]

Pickaxe. Yeah, it does it.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah, yeah, it just. That don't rock and so anyway, I knew that if you're going to do this, you're going to have to show up with some kind of heavy equipment. The problem with this is that you're talking about, this is what I do. If somebody tells me there's a body located somewhere, I will try to expand that area in my mind because generally memories are very poor. I'm going to at least double that area and you're going to need to kind of target that area and begin to look at it. They've got all the time in the world. It's not like they're going anywhere. The place is locked down, it's secured, so you need to go back as far as you can. And I was had a discussion with my son, you know, because he's a GIS guy, he does the geospatial stuff. And yeah, it's like, son, how would you, you know, if you were trying to target an area, you know, what would you do, you know, as far as looking for changes? Because you know those people that do all this Their brain works in a different way than mine.

[David Rutherford]

Those are my, those are my favorite people at the agency I worked with. I mean, just operating on a different level.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

They are, they can see things abstractly.

[David Rutherford]

That's right.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

He said, well, dad, the first thing you need to do is go back and you know, they need to pull all the old satellite imagery and they'll just walk their way through this thing. And then he, he goes into the kind of more complex, complex issues like geo changes, hydrology and all these sorts of things. And what's going to impact that area the most. Looking at the rise and the fall, the contour of land, you know, how much rainfall do you get in a particular area over a particular time? And then you kind of tighten it down. They said from that you can build out and you can begin to use things like lidar, beneath, beneath drones and even, you know, certain aerial platforms other than drones where they can kind of sweep the air and go back and forth. You look for those, those little changes. You might be using infrared or, you know, you never know what kind of spectral analysis they're going to do and you're just looking for changes in the soil and there's, it's a two edged sword because out there things do change. They don't change a lot though. Not like down here in the south, no. You know, because it's baked in out there. So if you see any kind of abnormality, you kind of hone in on that. My, my biggest fear, I think moving forward with this is that the state's handling it and I don't know what kind of resources they have, but if it was me putting teams together, I'm not, I'm not going to go out and grab a bunch of, and I'm not disparaging them, but I'm just saying I'm not going to be looking for a group of crime scene investigators to go work a particular area. I'm going to break this thing down into teams and the team lead will always be a forensic anthropologist and I'll probably have a geologist at my disposal as well. And you populate each one of those teams with crime scene investigators, photographers and those sorts of things that will do the bidding of the forensic anthropologists because they can read the soil. You know, people hear about places like the body Farm at ut, the Maple center down in Florida, University of Florida, which is a fantastic place, and they've got human desiccation labs in a lot of different places where we study burials and all that. So you want those people to Be, you know, to use military term, the tip of the spear.

[David Rutherford]

Right.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

So they're not, they're, they're looking at this from a scientific perspective. They're not looking at this necessarily from a prose prosecutorial perspective. They're looking what does the science reveal to us? And they need to take their time. The only problem is, is that we see this with the Guthrie case right now is that the media are the clock watchers.

[David Rutherford]

That's right.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

And they, they control the pace. And there's always stuff going on in the background that public doesn't need to know, you know. No, no. If you're not inside the investigative bubble, you don't need that data. You just don't, you know, and so there's always something that's working. It all depends on, you know, it's generally not the technology is operator error, you know, anything that you do.

[David Rutherford]

Always. I love that you just said that. Always.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah. You know, and I'm chief among sinners. I failed multiple times throughout my career in Atlanta and New Orleans. You know, in screwed up cases, we all do. No one's perfect at all. And so you, you have to take your time and work these cases. I think the biggest question people will ask, well, Morgan, if we, if they do discover something, will there be anything left? Well, that all depends on. It all depends on, and I call it memorialization of the dead. It all depends on how the bodies were memorialized and what I mean by that. That's kind of a broad statement. Did they cocoon the bodies in anything? And what were they cocooned in? If they used a tarp or did they just throw remains into. Into bare earth? Were the bodies clothed in any way? Did they strip them of any clothing? Did they entomb them? Because just, you know, you got heavy, heavy equipment. If you've got somebody that goes and digs a hole and they, they pour concrete on top, well, that works to our benefit. I got all. I got all the time in the world. Go out there and bust up concrete. I'll take my sweet time. I'll sit there, son, have, have a cold drink while I'm doing it and go back to work. I'm not in any rush. I'm not running from anybody. So what's inside of this area is going to be dependent upon how the bodies were treated during that period of time, you know, because what you're looking for are going to be any kind of traumatic artifacts that are left behind. I think in, in the messaging here, we had heard that at least this was an Asphyxial kind of death. So if, if you're, you know, if

[David Rutherford]

you're talking, can you go over that real quick in terms of that messaging? And I think there, you know, because one of the things I learned on your, your show, it was this, this anonymous tip that had come into a local news reporter. It was, I think it was 17, right? Yeah, yeah. And can you just talk about that?

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

17 or 19. It was in that time period. Yeah, it's like a 24 month period.

[David Rutherford]

Yep.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

And this person had formerly worked there, apparently had dropped the dime on this and said that and called into a radio show. And I can't remember if it was, if it was a local show in like Albuquerque or Santa Fe or one of these places. Guy was a conservative radio talk host, host of one of these shows and said, yeah, you got, there's two girls that were, that were strangled or asphyxiated during rough sex or rough sex play. And you know, the first thing I thought about is that, okay, if it happens once and it's rough sex, it's not excusable. But you kind of, you kind of think, okay, it got out of hand. And how many times have I heard that over my career it got out

[David Rutherford]

of hand, I can't even imagine.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

But now we're, we're talking about.

[David Rutherford]

That's right.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

You're starting to develop a pattern here and that goes to psychopathy at that point in time. Because if there's two, if you've got somebody saying there's two, guess what? I think, I think there's more. Yeah, there's more than two.

[David Rutherford]

Right.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

This way. My mind works as an investigator, you know, as a forensic scientist, I, I'm not going to buy the first thing down the pike. If you're saying two, I'm going to think four or six or whatever it is, whatever multiple of two you want to work out.

[David Rutherford]

Right, Right. So you can also, even if now like, just as, as to extrapolate on what you're talking about, the psychopathy of it.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Right.

[David Rutherford]

We, even if you just look at the, a bunch of the emails and just the connotation of that type of, of what integrated play to them. Because that's what it seemed like. It's playful, this is playful language of how they're talking about, you know, oh, I hope, I hope she's all right or you know, you know, and it's just like it's almost this afterthought of, you know, there's no, there's no humanization of, of these girls. That they're with in any concept. Right. It's just about their own, whatever type of pleasure they're into. And it, and apparently it has this, this undertone of, of, of rough sex or in, in many cases, if you look, go back to the 2008 or the 2005, six stuff out of Palm Beach. There's some physicality in all of this as well, too.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah, there is. And, and you know, being a medical, legal, death investigator and two, arguably New Orleans used to be one of the biggest cities in south prior Katrina, but into the largest metropolitan areas in the South. I've worked several series of serial homicides over the course of my career. And you know, with, with that said, there was always an element of dehumanization, you know, and you hear that's kind of rote, you know, you hear it in movies and whatnot and all that sort of stuff. But there's a grain of truth in that where people, individuals are used as playthings essentially to satisfy whatever kind of primal lust or set, you know, they're trying to satisfy need, whatever it is. And they, they get off on the horror and the terror of it. And, and you can only imagine you've got this young, young lady that can't speak, can't speak English, she has no family around, she's been taken away out in the middle of the desert somewhere, and all hope is lost at that point in time. And you can imagine what kind of pleasure some psychopath would derive from that because they truly, they become God out there. You know, in the midst of that, they, they have this individual's life in their hands that goes to, you know, you know, you begin to think about the. Pardon me. You go, you go to think about, you know, we think about killing, right, and homicides and whatnot. And there's very kind of, there's kind of a. This mild change that takes place when you think about modalities of homicide. You know, you've got somebody that, you know, shows up and they're going to shoot somebody. All right, Right. Well, as you well know, you can do that from a great distance. You can do a close up. But when you start to get into things like bludgeoning, where you're beating somebody to death or you're utilizing sharp force weapon to stab them, which has a sexual connotation all in of itself, because the thrusting of the knife. We saw that. I think I saw that in Idaho. I think that was completely sexually motivated.

[David Rutherford]

100%.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

100% with a K bar and probably at the Top of the list is going to be suffocation, because you can. When. When you're applying force to somebody's neck, you can. You can sense their breath on your skin. You can feel. Feel the texture of their skin perspiration. You can feel the rise and fall of their chest. You can feel fear to a certain degree. You can feel the rapid nature of their pulse. And then when they get into that perimortem state where pulse begins to wane and goes away. So you tie that back to whatever this bug is that they have in their brain, that's. That needs to be fed. And it gets really, really dark in a hurry. And I've been, you know, in my career, I've. I've been in dark spots where I've had to witness the aftermath of a lot of these things. And for me, you know, they. Epstein, I think, has been elevated up to. On this perch that he somehow, this super criminal, he's as much of a scumbag as anybody else.

[David Rutherford]

Right? Right.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

I've worked cases that individuals died. Died at their hand. If in fact he did do this, he's no different. He's no different than any other kind of serialized perpetrator that's out there. It's just that, you know, Ted Bundy, he wasn't connected. And I didn't work in Ted Bundy case. I'm just using as an example Ted Bundy, you know, didn't have political influencers all around him and people.

[David Rutherford]

Billion dollars. Right. Access to anything you wanted, anything you

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

want at any point in time, which makes you uber dangerous. You know, I don't know. I mean, he's. He's right up there with Caligula. You know, when you begin, you begin to think brilliant.

[David Rutherford]

That's a brilliant correlation. That's a brilliant. Where there's no boundaries.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

None.

[David Rutherford]

Right. The power that you.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

You.

[David Rutherford]

It's almost. And it. And I think it correlates to the transhumanism emails going back and forth with different people, Peter Thiel and some of these other people, and talking about research conducting at the ranch as well, too. So you, I mean, I would imagine as an investigator, you. You certainly are looking for those correlations in conjunction with, you know, an area that would suffice for this type of activity. So if, let's say you were all of a sudden called by New Mexico and whoever's doing the investigations, how would you approach it?

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Very methodically. I would. I would put together a plan before. Before I ever set foot on that ridgeline. And some people refer to it as a ridgeline. I've heard other people say that's a cattle grazing area and they might very well be adjacent. I can tell you this, we're talking about, just to put this into focus for folks, we're talking about an area that is, I think that is in excess of 8,000 acres. In addition to that, it is buffered by state land, which, you know, like, if you've got like blm, I'm referring to Bureau of Land Management, where you've got this kind of. So you're, you're truly isolated. I mean, you're out in the wilderness. You know, I would, before we ever, we would look at aerial surveillance, I mean, be very, very careful about this whole thing. We're going to have a plan when we go in. We're going to have points of, of, of ingress, you know, and thinking about keeping it as secure as possible and having accountability. Because I don't want anybody looking over my shoulder while I'm working. I don't work for free. This isn't, you know, this isn't a sideshow. I want to go out there. There's only specific people that will be allowed access out there because this is going to be painstaking work. You cannot go in half cocked on any level. You have to go in and really understand what your objective is here. And it's, at this point in time, you're not going there to seek justice or to arrest people and all that embroidery stuff that you hear about, you're going out there to see if you can discover human remains. And what's the most effective way to do that. And look, for all I know, you might get out there and you might find human remains and they might not be connected to anything. And that has happened. I've worked cases like that, you know, where we knew that there was a dumping ground for somebody. We went out there and we found another human remain that was not related to the case that we had initially showed up or we have found the initial case that we showed up. And oh, by the way, there was another body out there. So that does happen, but that's in a more dense populated area. So if I go out there and we find any kind of human remains there, I'm going to begin to think, okay, well, is this tied back to him? And then, then you have to begin to think about, well, does the physical findings that I'm looking at from an anthropological standpoint, do they marry up with the timeline which he had possession of this property? You know, because we, I think that he probably gained possession of it like in 93. It was disposed of, I think in 23 by the estate. You know, I'm sure that Mark Epstein, his brother, was involved in, in that to some degree or somebody associated with that group. You know, however that was handled, that's not my, that's down the hall and to the left. That's not my department. So, you know, but you think about that 20 year period and when did he last visit that, that location? And how does that marry up with the story that this source is giving them? Which, by the way, that individual's name was redacted, of course. The doc. Exactly. And I'm hoping that the feds. I'm hoping that the feds are pressing, that they found that individual and they're pressing them right now for more detail because more detail you have. I'd want to be armed with that before I would go out there. I would also hope that the feds would have the foresight to say, look, we'll, we'll offer resources. And I'm not just talking about like the ERT from FBI. Yeah, right.

[David Rutherford]

Wearing their FBI jackets, doing a FOD walk down at the grounds.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Right. Well, I, I want to say. Can you, can you let me, can, can you please ask folks at the Smithsonian if they'll come out? Because Smithsonian has some of the best forensic anthropologists in the world.

[David Rutherford]

I didn't know and.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Oh yeah, yeah. And so that's why that little clip in Silence of Lambs when Thomas, what's his name, I can't remember the guy that wrote the book. But when they show up, she shows up at the, and you know, they've got the entomologist that's there and they pull the. Well, you have anthropologists that are there too. Some of the best in the world. I'd want to have the best on my team out there. And not just, you know, I'm not disparaging, but I just, I don't want merely the ERT. I want, I want PhD level anthropologists that are out there that can kind of read the ground. This is a lot riding on this because if you, if you're talking about, if you're talking about human trafficking, which everybody always goes around beating the drum about. Let's see, let's see. If you want to put your money where your mouth is and invest the time, the resources to pull these people out, send them out there and get these teams together. And I'm talking about full bore, you know, I, again, I'm, I wasn't I'm not making a joke when I say I want a geologist out there. I want them to. And I want, I don't want a geologist that's up in the ivory tower at some other location. I want somebody that understands the geology of this specific location. Period. End of paragraph.

[David Rutherford]

Yeah.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

So all the stuff has to be be organized and facilitated. That's going to be the most important thing.

[David Rutherford]

All right, before we get into the next aspect, I just really want to talk about how blessed we are to be sponsored by Black Rifle Coffee. I've been a Black Rifle fan and supporter since the beginning, since Evan came up with the idea years and years and years ago. We drink it at home today. I just want to tell you about their new cold brew Just Black that came out. This is really an amazing. It's, it's, it's for those who really love a bold flavor without compromise. Right. And it's made from premium coffee beans and steeped cold for a smoother, naturally rich taste. This is ready to drink can that delivers a crisp, refreshing finish with every single sip. Now you can find Black Rifle all over the place. From Bass Pro Shops to pop up stores that, that sell Black Rifle tactical stores. You can get it at Walmart or just go online which I recommend the most. Just go toBlack Rifle Coffee dot com. Either sign up for your subscription or order that single case and get your cold brew soon. You know, if you like cold brew in a can, man on the go. This is the cold brew for you again. That's Black Rifles cold brew Just black@black riflecoffee.com Hoo ya. Love you guys.

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[David Rutherford]

I, you know, I just, it's. I, I think I love the comment about the, the press, you know, and what that does to, you know, your chief of police, your local mayor, your, your congressman, whoever it is up the food chain that, that starts thinking about polling numbers as opposed to running a sophisticated operation. Right. And I think you're seeing that again. You mentioned the Guthrie case. There's this other case that's fascinating me right now. It's about this, and it's in the same area, this general who was part of the UFO program and at the Air Force, and He's been missing 14 days now. And, and it's, it's really starting to pick up steam in, in, in the news cycle as well, too. What's that like for those people who are running the investigations, who are getting pressure from the press, from the families, from the, you know, the political people that need a win? Right. How, how. What kind of role does that play on a lead investigator and then everybody beneath them in terms of, you know, because it is, I mean, it's science. I mean, you guys are in, in the midst and it's, it's, you know, and a lot of the stuff that you're collecting is microscopic even. And that's, I mean, that's a whole nother level that when you allow your mind to, to go to a microscopic level, it's. What is it? It amplifies the space of the relevant space of analysis, you know, times X times whatever it is. So how does, how does that pressure work in the, in the food chain of, or in the hierarchy of jobs? And then how do you guys push back on it in a way that kind of comports with, you know, giving you the space and time you need to do it? Right.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

I'm going to tell you a real quick story that kind of sums us up.

[David Rutherford]

Awesome. That's all I was asking. I just want, I Just want.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

No, no, no, no, no. It's completely salient. We had a. A mass shooting that happened many, many years ago in one of the jurisdictions I worked in. And we had in excess of 13 people that were dead. All right? And there were other people that were dead in other locations that were not in our jurisdiction, but yet that were still part of the case. The same perpetrator killed them as well. And the individual that had done the killing had gone into an office park and just smoked everybody that was in this location. I'm talking about people just sitting at their computer terminals, you know, and I probably in that moment, Tom saw one of the best examples of leadership I've ever seen in my life and from. In my little world. All right. As a medical, legal, death investigator. Our boss at the time that was the chief, chief investigator. Did you know he never walked onto the scene with us? He stayed right at the tape and he would come to the door of the building and ask us what do we need? He handled all the questions.

[David Rutherford]

Wow.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Everything. We never dealt with the press. And the thing about when you have a multiple event like this, you know, I talked about teams just a second ago. Relative to thing in New Mexico, we had to break up into teams because you don't just. You don't have one guy that's going to go through and work all the bodies. So you break up into teams and you process one body individual or two bodies individually. And it's very labor intensive work. You talked about, you know, you're working on a micro level because, you know, the old. I use the old adage with my students at Jacksonville State where I say, you know, if you. Once you walk across a threshold for the first time, you can never walk across it for the first time again. It's. It's there. You know, lawyers like to say, you can't unring the bell. That sound goes forward. And so if I can have somebody that is managing the outside and they should be trained to do this, they're keeping a monkey off our backs while we're doing the detail, heavy lifting stuff that's there now, they're doing their own heavy lifting. All right. I'm not diminishing what they're doing. Keep them off of our back and let us weave together this tapestry of evidence that we have. Because. And that was years and years ago. Can you imagine nowadays, the environment that we walk into now? I equate it to see, like walking into a surgical suite, you have to be prepped when you walk in. You have to know what you're going to be doing, and that's going to change just like surgery changes. But you walk into this environment, you have to be in your total gear when you walk in, you have to be geared up in your brain and you have to act like. Anything I tell my kids that I teach now, I give them two examples. Either pretend that there are buried landmines everywhere in that space that you're going to be stepping, or cold rattlesnakes that anything that you can, that you do, you're going to impact the outcome of this case because of your stupidity or your lack of, or your, your use of wisdom. You can, you can change the flow anyway. And you know, if you really want to lay it on thick, you tell them, well, look, you know, if you don't do your job, there might be somebody walking the streets that, that could kill somebody else or do whatever horrible thing they might be about. So you have to break this thing down. And talking about the general that's missing that individual, those individuals that are currently working that case, my hope is, is that they've got people keeping money monkeys off of their back and they're able to focus like a laser on every little breadcrumb. And I'm talking about things like digital breadcrumbs because that's a world that we exist in today. Because these damn things, we carry a crime scene in our pocket everywhere we go now. That's right, that's right, we do. I mean, that's, that's the reality of it. I tell my kids all the time that I teach. It's like you're going to behold things and see things in your career that I, I could not have even fathom.

[David Rutherford]

Yeah, that's.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Couldn't plumb the depths of. And, and that's just in the digital world, you get more into my world and now you're seeing the utility of DNA and that goes to being again in this world. That's almost like a surgical suite, because if you walk into an environment, there's an old adage in forensics, it's rather. The statement I'm going to make is more lengthy than this, but just suffice. It's called the card's exchange principle, or Lacquart's principle of exchange. And over 100 years ago, well in excess of 100 years ago, a guy named Edmond Locard, who founded the world's first crime lab actually in Lyon, France, he came up with a statement. It's brilliant mind. And it still applies today, even in digital, not just physical evidence. But in digital evidence, his comment was, every contact leaves a trace. And so that means that the environment you entered into, you're introducing yourself even as a processor of the scene. So anything you drag in from your unit, on your shoes, any dog hair you brought from home, and you're walking into this environment, and I think that a sneeze, right? Anything that.

[David Rutherford]

Yeah, anything. A snotball, a drip of sweat, right? Your perfume, you know, anything, it seems like, because that's.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

I mean, well, even. Even more profound than that, I think, is that. And lecard, I don't know if he went to this or not. If you've got personal shit going on at home, you're bringing that with you too.

[David Rutherford]

Dude, I love that you.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

And that that's going to impact the way you handle the case, how you view people you're interviewing. And that. That's the rub, isn't it? The. Our flesh, our humanity. Because you cannot check your humanity at the door. You want to think that you can and you build up a callus relative to, you know, the thou. Like me, the thousands and thousands of bodies that I worked over the course of my career over 20 years, you think you've developed a callus to it where you can flip it and you're. But you're still impacted, even. Even at a microscopic level, how you know what you're doing, what your attitude is when you show up, up the workload that you're dealing with, and everybody pisses and moans about workload. But if you're in my world, if you're. And in my. In my. In the MDI world, medical, legal, death investigation world, there's not as many of us as there are homicide detectives because we handle all deaths. You know, it's not just merely homicides. It's. There's five manners of death. You've got natural, undetermined, suicide, accidental, and homicide. So we're not merely just interested in homicide. So if you're an MDI and you go out and you work suicide, you might catch a motor vehicle accident. Oh, and then you've got an elderly person that's died at home. You're gonna roll on that. Oh, and by the way, we've got a double homicide you have to go on. And that's all in the course of one shift. So you're. You literally move from case to case. When I started out, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, when I was working in New Orleans and I was a young man, I was the youngest MDI in the country at that point in time. I was only how was a. I probably was in the morgue for the first time when I was 20 and I was working on bodies and working as an investigator at the same time. When I was 21 there were three investigators and we handled all the little jurisdictions in there. And then I was doing autopsies during the day. So your mind has to be right. You have to get into this point where you can walk in and observe, make the notes. Because unlike you see on television where you've got some hot looking forensic pathologist that Hollywood sets up and they send out to the scene, that doesn't happen. Forensic pathologists don't go to crime scenes, not at 2 o' clock in the morning. They don't crawl under houses with maggot infested bodies. That's the MDI that does that. We're their eyes and ears in the field. And so we're making notes and we're collecting data like that to bring that back into them so that they can do the autopsy. So you have to be on your game is what I'm saying, in that world, you know, trying to make your way through it. And so if you're not right in your mind, if you're not physically squared away, which many times I was not showing up, up, you know, just dog tired, just trying to be a human outside of work, you know, that's, that's a hard thing to do because you're not a robot. You know, you're, you're still going to go in and bear witness and nobody, nobody in your outside world like you go to party and you know, some guys like, I don't know, he manages a 711 or he owns a 711 or owns a couple of, of fast food places or a gym or he sells insurance. What kind of conversation am I going to have with that guy? You can't, you know, they're going to ask me to entertain them. Yeah. Hey, what's the worst thing you've ever seen, man? And then after you tell them that, they'll, they'll say, wow, that's really messed up. So are we going to get together for golf tomorrow?

[David Rutherford]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

You know, that's, that's kind of.

[David Rutherford]

Well, this goes back to what really, when we first chatted earlier in the week. You know, this was the thing that struck me, I mean, pretty quickly into our conversation. And you called that as in your. And it's the mindset, but the mindset of, of, of dealing with death or the culture of death. And, and I shared with you a Little bit about, you know, working with a therapist that had extensive, you know, background working with special operations guys. You know, we come from a culture of death as well too. Right. Everything we're doing is just essentially a component of killing bad guys.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Right.

[David Rutherford]

You know, and you're on the other side of that end, but in a much more comprehensive reality because you're dealing with all five of those, those deaths. So if you could. Because I think one of the things, and I was trying to figure out how to ask you this and the best way to launch into this, because it is. So there's a, a theological component, there's a, there's a metaphysical component to it, there's a philosophy, philosophical component to all these things. Right. Death is, is Right. There's two certainties in your life. You're going to be born and you're going to die.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yes.

[David Rutherford]

And, but yet it, I believe death is the most under assessed thing within whatever the regular aspect of, of civilian, modern civilian existences.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

You.

[David Rutherford]

And that's why I think we see this fascination. And you talked a little. Maybe you could tell the story you told me. We talked about how infatuated people have come with true crime series or true crime podcasts or whatever it is. And it is a booming, I mean just last night we watched my wife and I watched the documentary about Andrea Yates who murdered her five kids. But it was a result of the influence of that cult leader, you know, and just, and how that twisted her mind enough to go through with the most atrocious thing there is on the planet, which is the killing of children. But people like to touch it or taste it, but they really don't understand it, so.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

No, they don't.

[David Rutherford]

Let's, let's, let's start with maybe the process of what you went from that 20, 21 year old kid to who you are now, what you learned about the proximity to death. And then maybe once you've gone down that, those rabbit holes and anywhere you want to take it, maybe we, we, we kind of come back to a place of why do you think people are so infatuated with, with grazing up against it but are still petrified of the reality?

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

They're still petrified. They truly are. And that was huge questions. No, no, no, that's okay. I'll try to break it down. Yeah, So I was, I mean, because I believe, I truly believe in my heart of hearts. There's this primal being within us that has fear and indwelling fear of death. And look, you can church it up any way you want to. People say, I can do that. Okay, go ahead. And most people. Most people think they can do it. Maybe they can do it for a little while. Maybe they're smarter than I. Than I was, because I paid the price for it, because I stayed. I did it a lot longer than I should have. I was almost like an infant when, you know, my wife wound up having to take care of me.

[David Rutherford]

Oh, wow.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

And so. But going back in time for me, you know, kind of how I got into it, everybody. Everybody has a, you know, somebody done somebody wrong song. You know, everybody has that, and I do, too. And. But, you know, for me, came up pretty rough family background, and was always told I would never amount to anything, that I was going to be a failure. That. And I would turn out just like my father had. Okay. And my father was a Vietnam vet that tried to kill our family, you know, when I was very young man. And, you know, he disappeared out of our life. And he was always held up primarily by my stepfather, somebody that I'm going to wind up just like him. And for anybody that I didn't realize I was doing it, but for anybody that ever watched Seinfeld, I would. I would take George's attitude. And I didn't know I was doing. I was going to do the opposite of that. And you'll hear a lot of people that go through trauma in their life. I was not going to be like that. I was going to be a good family man, which I striven to be. It's gonna be a good friend. It's gonna be a good husband, and I was gonna be. I was going to excel at whatever I did. I was not gonna be sorry. I was not gonna be late for work. I was gonna maintain a job, and I was gonna do something that nobody else could do.

[David Rutherford]

Wow.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

And I wanted something that I could do, like that. I tried. I say tried the military. I was in the Guard, signed up in high school, went to. And I saw that as maybe a potential escape for me, but got into forensics, and forensics took. And. And it was something that. When. When I started working, I had no education. I. I came into this backwards. So I started literally working, pushing a mop in a morgue while I was going to college. And it just so happened that the morgue that I was. The hospital I was working at became the morgue for the parish. They don't have counties in Louisiana. Became the. The morgue for the parish because the. The morgue for the parish was so run down, it was actually sat on the side of the old gallows. Sold it was. And the morgue was actually contained inside of the parish prison. We had to walk into the prison every day to do autopsies. And we did a thousand per year in that little more work. And so it was being repaired. And so I became friends with the guy that was, essentially became my mentor. That was probably the finest forensic scientist I've ever known in my life. And I just started showing up at autopsies, not getting paid for it. I'd go to school full time, work at the hospital as an orderly, and then show up and go to autopsies. And I had a pathologist said, well, this guy's crazy enough to hang around here with flies lighting on him and I'll just make him my scribe. And he made me his scribe. I would sit there so that he didn't have to come out of his gloves, and I would just write. And finally one day he says, you want to close? And I was like, what do you mean? I've been closing, I've been mopping up. And he said, no, do you want to close? And he handed me the needle and he showed me how to sew a body up. Gosh. And then finally that, that evolved into, do you want to open? You know, and I'll, I'll never forget the first time how terrified I was because I didn't know how much pressure to apply. That's right. To do. Yeah, to do a standard Y incision. And I did and found out that, you know, retrospectively, the morgue is the best classroom I ever sat in. Still to this day, and I still, I tell my students at Jack State, you know, I'll say, you know, this is all fine and good. You hear some white haired old man, you know, pontificate every day to you, the best classroom you'll ever go to is, is the morgue if you want to become an effective death investigator. Because you learn more there, you learn more. You know, it's, it's, it's like what you do in the military. There's kind of a, there's kind of a recipe, you know, see one, do one, teach one. And medicine does that. Medicine is not a lot different than the military. You know, like procedurally, you, you have to go through these steps. It's the same thing in the morgue. You see this, for you, there's a way to work the problem. We're not sitting in a classroom, and by God, you better do it right. And so I began to kind of absorb. And so I Just go to. I'd go to autopsies all the time. Then I started going to scenes and I had two guys apply and quit within six months for an investigative position. I took the job and they finally gave me the job. This young kid who had no business doing it and stayed there for seven years.

[David Rutherford]

Wow.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah. And then.

[David Rutherford]

That's incredible. What was the visceral shift between the morgue and on scene? Because you can still feel the energy on, on scenes, right. That are relatively new. Right?

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Families.

[David Rutherford]

Different. Yeah, families.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

That's what I would imagine, families. Because, you know, there's nothing like, like when I came in, When I came in, they, they. It was at the height of crack hitting the street. So we had like, there were a lot of drive by shootings back then, more so than you hear about today. So it was nothing that I would go out and I would do an examination on body and I do it in front of an audience, about 200 people and they're all angry and, and the dynamic of dealing with families because the other part to the job of the MDI is also notifying the families. And I've done like 2,000 of those in person over the course of my career.

[David Rutherford]

I've done one and it was the worst experience I've ever had.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah, the. The first one I did, I still remember the last one I did. And none of them were. They. It's not, it's not like they get any better. There's no flashes of joy you don't bring, you know, and I've always said it's like pulling a pin on grenade, throwing a room, closing the door behind you. Just listen for the boom, the screams and, and that's you. It's like you walk into somebody's family and they're. There's everything that was before you and there's everything that's after you. And that sounds horribly egocentric to say that, but that's, that's. You're a marker in time for these people. They might not remember you, but that moment in time, and I would submit to anybody that's this listening to us right now, reflect just for a moment when you were a little kid and the first time someone that you loved or that you knew died. And I tell you this, most people, and I find this very interesting, goes to human psychology, I think a great degree who we are as people. I have people that can recall sounds, sights, they can remember the clothing they were wearing. They remember who told them, they remember what the response was. However, this is something interesting that I Found out. When you go to notify somebody and you know, you knock at the door, you badge them, they let you in. Of course the question is, what's wrong? Have a seat. You inform them that the loved one is dead. Did you know that after you have told them that, that most people, and this is kind of obvious, but there's been a couple of studies about it. Most people don't remember anything you say after the first 10 minutes. Yeah, and to a person, To a person, I would get a phone call the next day. That's why I always had to leave a phone number so that they could contact me because I could. They might ask questions about, you know, what happened. They always want to know where they are, where the body is and they want to know who did it. If it's a homicide, if it's a suicide. They always believe it's a homicide. And we wind up, you know, in our world we work, we work all of the homicides, but we work more suicides than we do homicides because police are not vested in, in homicides. And many times suicides are, they're more challenging to investigate than even homicides.

[David Rutherford]

Well, usually there's no note, there's no nothing, there's no reasoning, you know, and, and what most people don't understand with annual gun Deaths, it's like 60 or more of annual gun deaths are self inflicted gunshot wounds.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah, they are.

[David Rutherford]

It's, it's a massive amount of people.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah, yeah, it is. And, and you don't. Unless somebody's famous, you know, unless the media. Right, Unless the media deems that this person has value, you're never going to hear about it. That's why I always look, kind of give them the side eye. Anytime I see some media personality saying we must address the, we must address the tragedy of suicide in our world. You're an.

[David Rutherford]

Yeah, completely.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

You're an asshole. Because if, if you really wanted to address that, you would truly have a conversation about it and talk about the numbers that are out there and not just when Robin Williams hangs itself or Philip Seymour Hoffman dies, either of a drug OD or he took. I don't know. It's not going to change my life one way or another, but I know what does because I've stood over the bodies, I've cut people down, you know, that have suspended themselves and I've had to go out and tell families and you know, the media can bang that drum all they want to all day long, but it's a real, it's a. And I've you know, and. And people do it for all kinds of reasons. It's not just one thing, you know, and you. It's a. It's a real. It's a real sadness that you bear witness to, because as an investigator, you walk into an environment and many times you're the only person in the room with the deceased that has taken their own life. You know, people are all over homicides, you know, everybody wants to know. And yeah, it requires. Because things can go to court and all that sort of stuff, but you're really, as an mdi, you're the person that's bearing witness to the fact that this person ever even existed.

[David Rutherford]

Wow, that's heavy and really heavy.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah. That's why I tell my kids, first off, our working assumption is that all deaths are homicides until proven otherwise. And we've heard that for years and years. But I also tell them this. If you will step back and take yourself out of this idea that about forensic science and understand now, almost in going back to antiquity, you're a historian because you're making note of a life that has been lived that no one else will ever make note of, of. I've seen, over the course of my career, I've seen some of the most, you know, being on cold case squads and things like that over the years, I've seen some of the most disrespectful narratives that you can, where people just kind of passively wrote things down, they didn't pay attention to detail. And it's like, if I read this thing from 30 years ago, it's like, I don't know anything about this person. I'm not saying I need to know the granular detail of their comings and goings as a person, but just the fact that they occupied the space. What was their life like? What was the environment like? In that environment, I tell my kids that not only are you, your potential forensic scientists, you're going to be a historian. Because literally nowadays, the world that we exist in, with the digital world, you know, 500 years from now, somebody's actually going to be reading your report, whether they're doing genealogy or whether they're working on a case, you're the only marker in time for that.

[David Rutherford]

That, that I never thought about it like that. It's such a awesome way to think about it. A tragic situation is that you're the generator of the final history of that individual.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

And listen so many, so many times, man, I failed. It took me a long time to learn that. It really did. I failed Miserably, many times in documenting the life that had been lived. And, you know, I wrestle with that many times, you know, did I. Did I show the due care that I should have showed at that moment? Tom. Or was I worried about something else in my life that was very temporal at that moment? Tom. Because, you know, you're. You're on this. When you brush up against death and you inhabit this world, you're. You're literally doing God's work. I mean, you're. Yeah, you're there from the perspective of you're seeing things. And you, you're given the privilege of making note of a life that this person that may have taken their life, for instance, thought was no longer worth living. They didn't feel like they had any value. Maybe their family even had transmitted that information to them that they, that they didn't have any value. You know, but how much value can you show? That's, that's, that's what you're going to be judged on at some point in time. In my field, you know, if you. Did you honor that person with the words that you wrote and the things that, that you said relative to their death, did their, did their death mean enough to you that you would conduct. Conduct a thorough investigation?

[David Rutherford]

It seems so counterintuitive, though, too, because it's like there's an aspect of it that you want to keep it scientific, but what you're saying, what you're saying, after what, four decades of doing this, you're. You're looking at it as like there's this. There's this deeper responsibility.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

There is that.

[David Rutherford]

That. That is affiliated with this. This, this job. It's. It's more than a job, right? Any. Anything. I think that's relative to death.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Death.

[David Rutherford]

There's more than. It's more than a job, right? Because there's something. There's something sacred in it in and of itself. Like you're saying there's a. There's a connection to the individual in the days that they led, pre. Leading up to whatever the thing that. That brought them to their demise. And there's something. There's a spiritual aspect in that as well, too. So as you went through these transitions and you got to that place where you, you described that your wife had to almost take care of you in an adolescent capacity, how did you come back out of that and begin to restructure the way you engaged in this? This. What is it? There's a. There's a. There's a. There's got to be some ethereal term for what it is. Like you're, you're carrying the, you're. You're co. Mingling the, the tragic nature of. It's. Of the. The soul's ending, but you're also preserving it, like you said. And the document of. The historical record of. Of that person existed and they were relevant in, in some capacity.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

It was, it was a very long road for me. And still, you know, I'll have. I'll have those moments, you know, where the last time I left the Emmy's office. I've told the story many times, but the last time I left the Emmy's office was in an ambulance. And that was in Atlanta. I was talking to one of my childhood friends that was a homicide detective in Atlanta. We'd gone out to eat lunch together. And I'd had been having the same heart attack for about six months. And I'd go to the emergency room, they'd say, you're okay. And every single day I felt like the walls were closing on me. And it had been happening for a while. Had tremors. I couldn't focus at all. It had affected my speech to a certain degree. I found myself stumbling over my words, lightheadedness, dizziness. I'd go out and I'd run a jog. And still there was no, no alleviating it. And here's the thing. I should have known. Well, woulda, shoulda, coulda. But the days that when I would get off work for the week, you know, when I would be done, when I went to get in my car, the only thing I could think about was I got to be back here in 48 hours. And I would spend the entire time that I was off when I should have been thinking about my wife, my children. I've got to go back. I've got to go back. I could take a two week vacation and there would not be a single day that I would not sit there in utter dread of going back to work. And I was a senior investigator. I was a supervisor. I had the chief medical examiner who's dead and gone now, but he walked up to me and said, we understand you're having trouble, but you have to understand everybody here looks up to you. You got, you got to suck it up and deal with it, and so you feel hemmed in. And I'd done all this stuff, and this is my own vanity, I'd done all this stuff nationally, like, like I'd help. Help design the national standards for medical legal death investigators. I was on a federal task force called the Milwaukee Task force. And there was 12 of us from like LA, Seattle, New York, DC, Atlanta, New Orleans, Dallas. I could go through the whole. Chicago, I could go through the whole list. And we came together with the seminal document through NIJ that said this is what you need, need to have in order to be an effective medical, legal death investigator. Because nobody had ever codified it before. I was very proud of that, you know, and, and so I. People in that sense did look up to me. But you know, that stuff, when compared to the price that you pay physically and mentally and also spiritually and from a familial standpoint, ain't worth gunpowder to blow it. Hell, it's just, it's really not. And it's easy for an old man to sit back and say that to some young, hungry investigator wants to prove themselves and do all this stuff in the field and say that they're resolute and they, they, they don't mind being around the horror. They don't mind bearing witness to those things that other people would flee from. You can say that to your blue in the face, brother, it ain't gonna work. It's just not because I was that person. And so when my wife finally got that remnant of what was left of me, I was a babbling idiot. I really was. The psychiatrist that saw me, this would have been in 5, I think 4 or 5, 2004. 5. She had done her residency at the VA in Seattle with Vietnam vets. And she had told me at that point in time, this is before you heard a lot about ptsd, before it really hit, you know, know the big splash with it. And she said, you're the worst case of PTSD I've seen since Vietnam. And all I could form out of my mouth, and this is really pathetic was work, work, you know, I want to go back to work. That thing that had been burrowing under my skin for all this period of time. And she finally looked at me. Her name was Dr. Rao, I'll never forget her. Little Indian lady. And she said, Mr. Morgan, she said, if, if you attempt to go back to work, I will have you judicially committed. And it was at that moment in time that I had this, that, that, that identity that I had. And my identity was a death investigator. That was it. Isn't that pathetic? You know, that's pathetic. That was, that was my identity.

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[David Rutherford]

I, I've seen it. We, we experience the same thing in our world, right. Guys go and they get involved, they get hooked on that, whatever. You know, it's not adrenaline. It's deeper than that. It's, it's. You feel you're serving something that's at a higher order.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah.

[David Rutherford]

And, and regardless of, of how it's physic, physiologically destroying you as well as emotionally and spiritually, you, you can't pull out. You just keep going and going and going until you're like where you hit. You're non verbal in most cases and your emotional construct is, is relative to the job itself and only itself. And I, you know, the, the, the I, I think like the, the number one greatest challenge with all of that is, is it destroys that send the genuine sensation of what intimacy is. Right. Because there's a, there's an intimacy in death and that seems to override the, the, the natural intimacy that is the most fulfilling which is in your relationships. And so.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah, yeah. I gotta tell you. So just kind of a little slice of life from my world and people might be really. Have you ever seen, have you ever seen great apes that, you know, like they do the. Where they're in the jungle and they're, they're filming these apes, you know, and they're taking care of one another and, and they're sitting there and they're picking nits out of each other's. Yeah, we do that in medical, legal, death investigation only. I'll give you an example slightly like, because we're very small group of people. We're not like cops where our world is completely different. All right? Because we're around literally death. We're not Getting kitty cats out of trees. We're not finding lost children. We're not having.

[David Rutherford]

There's no wins, right?

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

There's no wins. Yeah. So we would. If we were gonna go somewhere, we would ask one of our colleagues, smell my hair. And because we had been out on a decomp, and we would. If we had to go with regular people.

[David Rutherford]

Yeah.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

We didn't want to be offensive in any way. And we would smell each other, and that's a real weird behavior. When I used to get home from work, God bless my wife. I love that woman, I swear.

[David Rutherford]

Yeah. God bless your wife for helping you.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

She would show up at the back door of our house, and she would hold me on stoop, and she'd say, did you have decomp today? And she's got kids in the house. My kids.

[David Rutherford]

Yeah.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

And I'd say, no. And she'd say, come here, let me smell you. Because it's not just the fact that you had gone. That you had not gone out of one. You're around the environment.

[David Rutherford]

That's right.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

And so she's the one that's, you know, and she'd say, take them all. And I'd have to take my clothes off the door. And. And most. You know, most other married couples don't. They don't have that experience stripping down.

[David Rutherford]

You're not. You're not. You know, you're not going through.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

You're not. This is not a good stripping down. No, no. You're.

[David Rutherford]

You're going through your decon process, and that's.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

That's something that regularly happened, you know.

[David Rutherford]

Wow.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

And. And it affects you in every. In everything. And a lot of this is the PTSD that comes through, too, because it's like when you. You like. If. If my wife and I were to. And I avoided Atlanta particularly, that was my last stop in my career. I never. Still, to this day, I don't like to go to Atlanta, because when I go to Atlanta, I don't. I don't see Atlanta from the perspective that everybody else does. Like, we'll be going down the road and, you know, and just spontaneously, it'll spark.

[David Rutherford]

I had that case here. I had that case there.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Exactly. Wow. Yeah. On this corner, I had a homeless guy. Over here, I had someone, you know, that motor vehicle accident or I had a suicide here, or. We didn't find this person for three months. They were in that house. I crawled under that house. Everywhere you go is populated by that.

[David Rutherford]

Wow.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

And people. You know, people will always ask me because I'm around the Dead. And this gets back into this kind of weird world that people have this perception of with dead. And it's like they. They always. One of the big questions, you know, that people that have never been around death, they always want to ask, you know, have you ever seen ghost? And it's like, no, no, I've never seen ghost. You know, I'm haunted by events. I'm haunted by the living. You know, I'm haunted by the daughter who I was talking to outside of her dad's house. The last time they talked was three months earlier, and they fought. She came over the house and his body looked like it was moving across the floor because he had maggots all over him. And she fell on the floor, hugged his body. And as I'm interviewing her, she's got maggots crawling in her hair and she's got decomp fluid on her face. That's. That's the kind of thing I'm haunted by, you know, and all of us, all of us, you know, we all have those little stories, you know, that are.

[Bethenny Frankel]

Are.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

That are part and parcel of, you know, kind of documenting this, this journey that we're on, this really. And I know that you guys in, in your community, you. You have the same, the same feeling with this, in a sense, that who, who else are you going to talk to about this that can identify with it? Because nobody can understand the depth and breadth of it. Most of the time you might catch a spark from a couple of people, but. And nobody wants to hear you whine about it either. And that's the other thing you have to fight about, particularly as a man. You know, you sit here and say, well, nobody wants to hear me bitch about this. They're sick of hearing about it. And how much of a man am I that I can't just deal with it and sally forth, you know, set my face like flint and going into the storm. Well, brother, I've been setting my face like flint my entire life. Yeah, you know, at some point in time, you got to back off on the throttle for sure. I went through three therapists before I came to one that happened to be an old Vietnam vet that had gotten a PhD in psychology. First two had no idea. I started telling the nightmares I was having. Recurrent nightmare being surrounded by decomposing bodies floating on a barge that had cut loose on the Mississippi River. And I was stuck to the barge and the bodies were all over me. And the therapist would sit there like this. And finally I wound up with a guy that. And what he taught me to do. And it's something I hated to do when I was in high school. I hated that teacher that would say, okay guys, we're going to journal.

[David Rutherford]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Well, I started writing and it turned into a memoir because I was going to burn it. I was going to burn it and I wrote that thing. I guess back in 12, I sat in a cabin up in the mountains and while I was working as a, as a teacher and as a college professor instructor, and I just, I bled on the keyboard and it was a big purgative kind of event for me. And, you know, it helped me, I think, to a great degree. There was still, you still don't. You know, I'd still, I still couldn't go to Walmart, you know, and be surrounded by people I don't know. I didn't want to go to restaurants because I'd be out of control. I'd feel like, you know, I was going to be murdered there. Anywhere I went, I had a, I like teaching because I could be up at the lectern and I had a view all over the classroom. I could leave and run back to my office and lock the door and sit there. I could live in that kind of isolated environment. But you know what's really weird is that some of the best therapy sessions I ever had was just talking to myself in front of my classes, I bet, you know, and just teaching them the basics of forensics. And I found that I was kind of purging myself along the way.

[David Rutherford]

That's. I feel the same way when I, when I got a client that I'm coaching for performance stuff. And it's, you know, there's, there's some type of emotional hang up or there's some trauma that they're trying to process or whatever. You know, it's, it's. I'm, I'm talking through, I, you know, the greatest references. Well, I had a really difficult time with this thing. This is what I kind of thought about. Are you thinking, you know, and you, can, you work through it as you're, you know, integrating the techniques that got you in the situation in the first place. Right. And, and it puts, it drops that layer of humanity on what otherwise seems to be this sterile kind of lifeless existence. Right.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah.

[David Rutherford]

And, and, and, and I just think that's, that's, it's such a, like you said, it's, it's so cathartic in so many ways. And, and that's what you're looking for. Let's just pivot Real quick. And I just really want to get your perspective on this. You know, phenomenal. You know, I don't know, maybe phenomenological obsession with crime stories, death shows, psych, you know, psychopathic killers and. And the consciousness of a society that now is somehow holding this form of entertainment as well as. Because I. As we started out with Epstein, there's almost like a voyeurism with the magnitude of destruction that he left in his wake. The humans are enticed by this. Why do you think that is the way it is within the human consciousness? And then what are the negative aspects that can really kind of. It'll be a residue that exists within your soul.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

First off, I've always. People have asked me about true crime, and you know what I feel like as a forensic scientist being involved in it? Part of me, the little boy in me, has always felt as though that the true crime genre that's out there right now, those are our modern ghost stories, you know, from when we were kids, and we'd sit around a campfire and we wouldn't wanted to be scared. There's always something within humans where we want to be. Be scared. And it's not just true crime. I. It's a story of heroes that are overcoming. You know, they're coming face to face with death.

[David Rutherford]

I was just thinking that for me, it was war stories. Right.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah, me too.

[David Rutherford]

Yeah.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

My. My family distantly is related to Audie Murphy, and so, like, wow, I don't know many. Yeah. I think my grandmother and his mother were both Killian. Okay. So that was her last name.

[David Rutherford]

And

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

I was always fascinated by Audie and any number of the other people, particularly in the military world, you know, because I got enough little boy in me. I'm still fascinated by him to this day. I love to hear the stories and overcoming those things. There's a part of us that I have found and that is quite, quite telling, I think, about unsolved things. We were. I was never good at jigsaw puzzles. I hated jigsaw puzzles. I didn't have the patient for them, patience for them. There are a lot of people that love them. The puzzles that I always put together were a real broad tapestry, and I think that some people see that. Is there something. Is there some thread that's been left unpulled out there that maybe they're going to be the person that's going to have the lottery ticket that's going to pull that thread and there will be a reveal to it. It. There's that element. But Then you've got the other. The other elements out there. I mentioned Ted Bundy a few moments ago. Well, how many more damn toms can we talk about Ted Bundy? I don't know. I don't know. I mean, each.

[David Rutherford]

Each generation. Each new generation.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Each new generation, you're right. And Ed Gein, you know, I mean, Ed Gein, the Butcher, Plainfield, they just had a big splash with a television show, you know, about him. That was back in the 50s, dude. You know, I mean, again, you know, you go, jack the Ripper. You know, I did an episode on Jack the Ripper because they found the shawl that allegedly had seminal deposition on it that was connected to this guy that had always been on the list that was Polish, Polish Jew, that was a barber or something in London.

[David Rutherford]

Right.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

People are always fascinated by that. That is an unknown. But it's, you know, it's very, very salacious. I don't know. But here's kind of the curious thing. I go to cromcon every year, and I. Which is the big, you know, people hear Comic Con, you know, that happens down in San Diego. That was like the first of these Con kind of shows. And I've spoken extensively with these things. I'm going back this year here. The thing that kind of separates cromcon apart from everything else that I've done. When I first started going. I didn't go the first year. The first year it was in Indianapolis, I think. Can't remember where the second year was. Anyway, we. Oh, Nashville. We were in Nashville. And I saw something, right, that I. I didn't expect to see. Nancy Grace had a table, you know, where she set up. If you've never been to one of these things, they set up, you know, the stars of the thing set up tables, booths, if you will. You can go by and get a picture made, get an autograph. And I agreed because I'd known Nancy for a long time. She's a prosecutor in Atlanta, and I was death investigator with the ME there. And I would appear on her show when she was still back on hln. And I was going to be on a couple of her panels. Well, we went to the first time that she was going to be at her table where she had fans showing up. And I saw something that broke my heart. And it's hard to break my heart. There were people there that wanted to meet her, but because of the celebrity part of it. But there were equal amounts of people that were there in this. This line went forever. There were people that had paid Thousands of dollars to travel to Nashville. One, one lady came with her daughters, drove all the way from Seattle to Nashville.

[David Rutherford]

Whoa.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

And what I was seeing were these people that had stacks of files that were this thick. And I had a lady, I was just kind of standing outside the line. They knew my voice because they would hear me on her show. You're Joe Scott? I was like, yes ma', am, I am. How are you today? You know, where are you from? My wife was working the line with me and she said in tears, can you please give this to Nancy? And I was like, what the hell? What is this? You know?

[David Rutherford]

Yeah.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

My sister was raped and murdered in 1974 in Dallas. And the cops had never helped us. Can you please help us? And the next thing I knew, I looked down the line. It was like a freaking scene out of a movie. It's like every third person had a stack of files in their hand. I was like, you gotta be kidding me. And there were these people that just wanted hope. And you're not going to get that where you're dressing up like, you know, Bugs Bunny and going to CR to ComicCon. You show up there and there are people that actually have their, they have no hope. No hope. So you've got the people that show up for, for the stories, but then you have the people that show up because the system has failed them and you're the last, last ditch effort. And now because of some of the stuff that's been done, there's been crime crowd solving efforts that have been put forth where you get a collection of brains together and you all look at these, these cases and I've seen it work. So that's, it's a two edged sword. It's also put more emphasis on holding people accountable that are doing thing, doing things in, in the view. Like when I, I started covering the Idaho cases, the massacre, what they refer to as the Idaho massacre, again, I was, it happened. Those bodies were discovered at about 1300 hours on Sunday afternoon. I had my first media call at 6 that evening. Wanted me to make comment. Didn't stop for two years. It's like every, every at least every other week I would give an interview about it. There's only so much I can say I wasn't inside the tape. But every single day that case was scrutinized about why are they handling it this way? What we've seen this done other ways. You know, we, we even. And people in the public, civilians would say even we know not to do this. And of course I'd have to back them off and say, you don't know what's going on on the inside. You cannot just make a simple judgment by virtue of what you're seeing coming in and out of the house. Then I started seeing. Seeing things. I'm thinking, well, it's kind of interesting. And then they got to the point where we're going to tear down the house. And thing hadn't even gone to trial yet. And so, you know, and I'm starting to think, well, maybe some people have. Have a point here, you know, and so now the spotlight has kind of shifted where, you know, those that work in public service and those that handle cases, they're held to a different standard. Wow. You know, because public's watching and It's. Brother, it's 24 7. Don't think. Don't think for two seconds that people aren't watching what's going on out there. They're making notes every day. You see it in Guthrie right now.

[David Rutherford]

Well, the most significant one in the last few years is Charlie Kirk's death. Right.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Charlie's. Charlie's death. I was actually on. I think I was on with Pierce Morgan, Rob o', Neal, and.

[David Rutherford]

Yeah, that's where I saw you first with.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah. And Mike. CIA Mike. I can't remember his name.

[David Rutherford]

He's on Rogue in a bunch.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, he was on there. And they were just trying to get my assessment of. Just from a forensic standpoint of what I thought, you know, at that moment time and, you know, just having that discussion. And so, you know, and that. That has evolved over time, and everybody has opinions about it. You know, everybody. Everybody's a ballistics expert, you know, and. And everybody's a medical legal expert and. And all these sorts of things. And you kind of have to. You take the good with the bad, and you understand procedurally how things are gone, how things are done. But then, you know, you start hearing, you know, there's all these conspiratorial pieces that come in. But, you know, there's always been conspiratorial pieces about everything. And so you. I try to look at it through an investigator's eyes and try to say, what do I know scientifically? What can I verify scientifically? And some stuff I just, I can't because I don't have the data in front of me.

[David Rutherford]

Right.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

I can kind of address how it should be handled. And hopefully, hopefully it meets the standard that we expect of. Of everybody as an investigator and how these things are handled and processed and, you know, move forward on because you, at the end of the day, you want, well, with Charlie's case, you know, you want somebody held accountable for that.

[David Rutherford]

That's right.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

You know, you want somebody's feet put to the fire and you want to understand what their point of origin is. You know, what, what's going on here? You know, what, Why'd this happen? How was, why was it allowed to happen? You know, and so, and I think

[David Rutherford]

that's, that's such an important thing to, to kind of maybe close on is the why. Right. And there's an aspect of death that, you know, obviously transcends the why. It's. Yeah. And so, you know, I would imagine as a person that spent so much time, you know, I mean, processing literally every conceivable construct of death, you know, I, I would even imagine extensively your own death, you know, your father's death, your degenerations of death, your siblings death or whoever around you's died. And you know, but, but you know, what is some of advice that you can give to people to help them better pro. And it's better. Such a horrible word to use. I'm trying to better prepare them. Yeah, to better prepare them, I think, for the inevitability of their own death or more importantly, the inevitability of them experiencing the death of someone they love or care about.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

I'm going to, I'm going to tell you a word that people need to completely and totally rid themselves of. And I'm begging you to do this. And that's the word closure. It's, it is the biggest bunch of crap that has been sold to us as a society. And let me tell you why. It's one of the most dismissive terms on the face of the planet. If some doe eyed fool looks at you and says, well, maybe someday they'll have closure. In other words, what you're saying is shut your mouth. I don't have any more time to listen to anything that you have to say. Let's move on to the next death. Because with death there is no closure. Death, Death is something that we all experience. People need to warm up to the fact that death is going to be part of their experience in life. From the moment we're born, we start dying, okay? And each one of us close our chapter. We die at certain intervals, at a certain interval. You're going to lose people along the way that you thought that would be with you forever and ever. Amen. You'll have people that, you know, you'll have the, the three pack a day grandpa that'll live until he's 99. And no one can explain it. All right? People need to embrace the fact that they're going to die. And in that. In that foundationally, life will be so much sweeter that it's. And it's not about escaping this life. It's about living this life because I've seen so many people out there that have chosen to escape it. And I'm not talking about somebody that has a press contact. Gunshot 1. I'm talking about people that just have given up. And it's almost a passive suicide. I've seen a lot of that. People don't think about that. There are people that will just allow themselves to develop what I call the dwindles, and they're circling the drain.

[David Rutherford]

I had a friend who just died of that last year.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Yeah, it's four years. Yeah, it's a tragedy. It really is. You have to find that will. Now for me, that will has. Has shifted from. It's not about me, it's about my relationship with God. And every time I go to mass now, at this point in my life, when I walk in and I understand that the God that I worship is greater than all of this. God created life and he created death. And it's going to happen. We are not meant to go on in this physical body to infinity. And we are all in either spiritual or. Or physical state of decay. That's. That's the reality of it. You know, if you just look at it from biological standpoint, you can try to stem it. You can try to, you know, knock it down, you know, and say, I'm. I'm gonna do this with myself. I'm. You know, but either way, it's. You're. You're loping toward the end at the entire time. You know, right now my wife has. As. As I'm speaking right now, she's in the van and she's gone to go pick up my grandbabies in another state and driving them back here. I'm going to absorb that this weekend.

[David Rutherford]

Yes.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

And enjoy every single moment that I have. Have with them. Because I didn't. Brother, I didn't think that I would. I would get to this point. I really, you know, I saw myself in that room or in those dreams surrounded by death with flies. Was lighting on me. And there were many nights, you know, that I would. I would stare at the cold blue skill and thinking, I can't. I can't do this anymore. I can't see this. But it's. It's all that I knew. It's all that I was. It was the essence of me. But I've realized that that's not me. That is not me. There's more to me than Joseph Scott Morgan, the death investigator and the college professor and the guy you see on tv. Well, I'll tell you what, sir. You just have to. You have to back off and, and, and just understand that it's on the way and it's. It's part of it. But, but don't, please. I'm begging, people, just. This idea of closure, you'll never have it. You need to celebrate the life and the time that you had with these people and the life and you have that you're afforded.

[David Rutherford]

Amen. I. I just. This has been one of the most impactful interviews I've ever done. I've never heard anybody be able to articulate what you just did is. Is in the way that you did it. I just. Man, I'm kind of at a loss for words, which Jordy will tell you is virtually impossible. So, again, sir, just thank you. Oh, thank you for bestowing the. The magnitude of that wisdom on me personally. It's just. I mean, you know, I've been in the culture of death my entire adult life and still get those 1130 texts at night, hey, my, you know, my. Another. Another friend's dead. And, and, and, you know, it's integrated into our familial situation pretty intensely as well, too. And, and so, but your words, they. They have a lot of weight, a lot of meaning, and I just. Man, I can't thank you enough for coming on.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

You're quite welcome. Thanks for having me. Thank you for everything that you do for the community. We appreciate you.

[David Rutherford]

Yeah, thank you very much. Last, before you go, I just. Where can people listen to your show? Because if, if, if this is even remotely what you do on a regular basis, man, I want to push my entire audience towards you because it's just powerful, powerful stuff.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Well, that's kind of you. First off, I. Big shout out to my university. It's Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama, not Florida. We're in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains at the very tail end of it. One of the most. A place that I found peace in my life. Life. And I would say that, you know, you now knowing a little bit something about me, I found a place of peace, and they exist for everybody out there. I can tell you that I've just found mine in this little old town here in Alabama. But you can check out our forensics program there and which is pretty amazing. It's one of the best in the Southeast. I'd say it is the best in southeastern United States as far as my appearances and whatnot. I'm new to YouTube, so I've been doing. I'm on my 500th episode of my podcast or we just. We passed it to on Monday actually.

[David Rutherford]

Congratulations.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

That's a. We drop. Well, thank you. We dropped three episodes per week. We're on iHeart and Apple and Pod and what is it? Spotify.

[David Rutherford]

Spotify.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

But I just have hopped on YouTube for the very first time and it's Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. It's at Joseph Scott Morgan on YouTube. So check us out. We've breached. We've been live on YouTube for I think three and a half, four weeks now, and we're closing in on 5,000 followers or subscribers.

[David Rutherford]

That's amazing. That's so awesome.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Well, we've been. Congratulations. Well, thank you. They backloaded all and right now we're about to go to video. Haven't done that. I don't have the bravery that you. You have. We're about to go to. We're about to go to video pretty soon. But all of the old. The cat. Our catalog. Yeah, I never thought I'd use that term about something I'm involved with. Our catalog is now on YouTube and, you know, we listen. The thing I do with body bags and the reason I call it body bags, it puts some people off is that. And give you a story about that real, real quick, is that every time I would look into our vehicles when I worked for the ME we would carry a stack of body bags with us. And there was a certain time when we would have to replenish and for every body bag that represents a person. And so my show is called Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. And so it's emblematic of the deaths that occur all around the country, some of the things. But I focus on forensic education and to take cases that are in the news. And I talk about it from a forensic perspective because a lot of people have not been blessed with the opportunities I've had of working in forensics and having a graduate degree in forensics and all that stuff. And so I like to talk to people that, you know, are interested in what I'm interested in and don't have same advantages that I've had. So that's why we do it and we thoroughly enjoy it. So three times a week we drop on Tuesday, Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays.

[David Rutherford]

Well, I'M a subscriber now, so I'm thinking forward to putting that in my repertoire as well too. You know, Joseph, you're a pretty phenomenal human being. Not just like your technical expertise, but the way you're able to, like I said, deliver the narrative of life and death is. It's really. I gotta say, it's pretty unmatched. Thank you, everybody.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

Thank you, brother.

[David Rutherford]

So thanks again for coming on.

[Joseph Scott Morgan]

You're quite welcome. Thank you. God bless you as well. Well,

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