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- [00:00]
Brett
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Alice
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Brett
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Alice
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Brett
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Alice
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Brett
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Alice
From the waters of Lake Erie.
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Brett
It was raising flags, he said. There's no way that that fish should weigh 7.9 pounds.
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Alice
It's just not big enough. To a nondescript office building in Richmond, Virginia, home to a $700 million fund for children with special needs.
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Brett
If there was a cliche list of how to blow money that you just stole very quickly, this guy did all of them.
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Alice
To the ski slopes of Salt Lake.
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Joseph Scott Morgan
City, where a former Olympic snowboarder landed on the FBI's most wanted list.
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Brett
Ryan James Wedding is one of those interesting Norcos who have had two very successful careers, one legal and one illegal.
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Joseph Scott Morgan
We're pulling back the curtain on a.
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Alice
Fresh lineup of opportunists who stopped at nothing to get ahead.
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Joseph Scott Morgan
These are the stories of people who.
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Alice
Saw a loophole, a moment of weakness, a chance to get ahead, and took it. I'm Host Sarah James McLaughlin.
- [01:40]
Joseph Scott Morgan
Join me for a new season of.
- [01:42]
Alice
The opportunist on May 19th. Follow now wherever you get your podcasts.
- [02:05]
Brett
I'm Brett.
- [02:06]
Joseph Scott Morgan
And I'm Alice.
- [02:08]
Brett
And we are the prosecut today on the Prosecutors. Joseph Scott Morgan of Body Bags joins us to explain the autopsies. Hello everybody, and welcome to this episode of the Prosecutors. I'm Brett and I'm joined as always by my pathological co host, Alice.
- [03:09]
Joseph Scott Morgan
Oh, Brett, it's good to be back. It's good to be back, actually, with, thank goodness, not just the two of us trying to pronounce all of these forensic pathology words. We have a real expert with us, Joseph Scott Morgan. My goodness. We've spent the last two episodes going through autopsy reports and I know we can't shed any more light on it because this is not what we do day in and day out. Joseph, thank you for being Here. Thank you so much for being here.
- [03:34]
Alice
My pleasure.
- [03:34]
Brett
So excited to have you. Joseph Scott Morgan, the host of body bags, who AL.com called the best podcast out of Alabama.
- [03:44]
Joseph Scott Morgan
It only hurt a little bit.
- [03:45]
Brett
I'm just going to let that hang there for a second, but okay. It's okay. It's fine. Anyway, so we're glad to have you here. As Alice said, in all seriousness, we have all these questions and people have tons of questions about this case. I know we want to dive right in. But before we do that, I would like for those of you out there who have not listened to Body Bags and I don't know what you're doing. Please, sir, introduce yourself to the audience.
- [04:10]
Alice
Yeah, sure. Yeah. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and I'm professor of forensics at Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama. Now, let me just say this. I think I'm. I might be the best podcast in north Alabama, and you guys are the best podcast in middle and southern Alabama, we'll call it.
- [04:29]
Brett
So kind of you to say. Well, we'll take it.
- [04:32]
Alice
Hey, you guys are. You guys are Clue Award winners. So there you go. That says a lot. So. And that's how we met. We met at cromcon, but yeah, I've been at JSU for. I'm in my 11th year now. Prior to that, I was at the University of North Georgia, which if anybody's watched a Christmas Hallmark movie and they've seen Dahlonega, Georgia, that's where a lot of them are filmed. The beautiful square in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I taught there, started the forensics program there many years ago. But prior to all of that, I did have a real job. At one point in time, I was not a college professor. I was a senior investigator with a medical examiner in Atlanta. But my career started with the Jefferson Parish Coroner's Office in New Orleans, Louisiana, which I regard as my hometown and where much of my family still resides. So been doing this body bags thing now. I think we're in our third year. I think we're right at about, I don't know, probably. I think we're closing on like 375 episodes, putting out about. We're doing three per week and Tuesday they deliver on Tuesday, Wednesdays and Thursdays they roughly run about 40 minutes. Myself and my co host Dave Mack, and we're primarily platformed on Iheart, but, you know, like everybody says, it can be found. Apple and Spotify. I've got a lot of fans over in Great Britain getting ready to go over there in three weeks. To UK Crimecon and gonna be joining my buddy Gavin Fish on stage to talk about Ellen Greenberg in Great Britain. And so that's going to be a lot of fun. And going to be doing a live taping over there about what to expect in the upcoming Idaho case from a forensic standpoint. So we'll be doing a live taping their body bags as well. So a lot of things happening. So I just try to keep it between the ditches at all time. Try to get sleep whenever I can. And loving life, man. Loving life.
- [06:24]
Brett
Well, I appreciate even more you taking the time to join us. I didn't realize you were that busy. I knew you were, but.
- [06:28]
Alice
Well, idle hands are, in fact, the devil's workshop. So I say busy.
- [06:32]
Brett
Well, well, look, we talked a little bit before we started recording, but I'll just ask you for the, for the group before we reached out to you and sent you information and you started looking at this, how familiar were you with the West Memphis Three case?
- [06:47]
Alice
I think I may have seen it, seen something about it on 60 Minutes many years ago. It's something that's always resonated in my brain. I was born in the Mississippi Delta, and that's, that's where a lot of my family originates from northwestern Mississippi and northern Louisiana. I've got a lot of folks down in south Louisiana. And so I kept, you know, I would just peripherally hear about it. And then when the release happened, the exoneration, I think it was at that moment in time, I was so busy doing other stuff on television and whatnot, I never really took the time to dig in. Not necessarily surprised that it did happen. And I don't mean the homicides. I mean that these guys were released and, you know, after. And I've really not dug into it, but after kind of reviewing a lot of the data that you've sent my way, and knowing some of the peripheral characters in this, either professionally or personally, my appetite was whetted. We'll say that at this point in time.
- [07:46]
Brett
Well, let me ask you this. When you, when you review this kind of data and you're looking back at a, at an autopsy, autopsies, they were performed now, 32 years ago. How do you, how do you start with that? I mean, obviously, there's a huge advantage for the person who's there. They have the bodies, they can see the bodies, everything else. How do you, how do you try and recreate that so that you can, you can reach some sort of conclusion?
- [08:09]
Alice
Well, first off, I go and try to vet the person that did the autopsy and try to determine if they're board certified forensic pathologist. Because there's, there are a lot of people out there that claim that they're a forensic pathologist and they're not. They haven't done a fellowship, they haven't sat for boards, that sort of thing. Now they're good pathologists and maybe they're good forensic pathologists, but they're not bona fide and certified. They're. So you have to be very careful. You don't know what kind of training program they come through and all of that. And you know, we've had cases over the years that have involved faulty data that was generated at autopsy. And it's, it's almost the autopsy room itself. Particularly when you think about these three young boys, it's a, if I can wax spiritual for a second, it's almost sacrosanct because you get one shot at it, just like you do at the scene. You get one shot in that autopsy room. And then once that's done, then you'll have Michael Baden or Rip Werner Schmitz come in and they're gonna be reviewing everything and Katie, bar the door if you haven't done your job. Because can you imagine having a job where 30 years later people are picking over your handiwork? And I know that, you know, you guys being in law, you understand that, you know, because things that you write down, they're there forever and ever. But scientifically, if you don't glean that data at that moment time and have it interpreted in a timely fashion, then you're going to run into problems. And this thing, at least to me, starting with the scene, it's kind of a train wreck to begin with, just with scene security and people bopping around the scene. And what would be from an impression, evidence standpoint, evidence rich environment, you know that one of the things that I read was the bank, the bank of this mud hole, ditch. It looked like trampoline had gone like her cattle had, that's my words, had gone through the area. And the soil is damp in those areas and it holds water in those kinds of areas. So it's very pliable. You know, when you step down on that area, it will hold that shoe impression. Now I saw one image of shoe impression, you know, that was kind of contained in all of this data. And, and one of the things that happens, and I found this happens particularly with kids and, and death scene investigations, is that many times the responders to the scene, and this extends out to first responders anytime There's a kid involved, people lose their minds. They don't. They throw logic out the window. I've actually had, I remember one case that I had down in New Orleans where I had an 8 year old girl that was stomped to death by a sexual predator that had kidnapped her out of her mom's apartment, came in through an open window and pulled her out and mom was falling clothes in the back room and stomped her to death. And we had EMTs and firefighters that showed up because everybody had been looking for. And so you get so jacked up in that mindset, you can't change gears. Many times you want to do whatever you can, you know, to help. And sometimes that frenzy is portrayed before you. And in that particular case, we actually had EMTs that were trying to get this girl intubated and her head, it had full thickness now about like this because he completely crushed her skull. But yet their mind, and I'm not dogging them okay, in any way, I'm just saying their mind is, this is a child, we've got to help the child. And people just lose their minds many times. And that brief second can change the course of everything. And that's before the cops ever secure it and do anything else like wait a protracted period of time before you ever call the electric coroner out to the scene.
- [11:53]
Joseph Scott Morgan
Thank you for humanizing it. What horrendous situations you've had to preside over. But I think you're exactly right. We see this in this case. You know, all they can think of is pull the boys from the water. It's clear they're gone, but yet they're lovingly, you know, handling them because they're little boys and they put them in this environment. But my next question you were just getting to. They don't get the corner out there in time. But when you are there after the fact, they've already pulled, you know, disrupted, essentially the system. They're left out on the bank in a hot day for a while. And then you come into the actual autopsy room knowing that a lot of evidence has probably been altered or, or, you know, destroyed. At this point, do you go about the autopsy in a different way or what? What sort of steps do you take to try to get the best autopsy you can despite knowing that there have already been missteps along the way?
- [12:44]
Alice
Well, let's back up just for a second. Let me in this. These particular. I've been having to watch myself on body bags because we've been covering a lot of multiple homicides lately. And I'll make the mistake of saying case and it's disrespectful as far as I'm concerned, to the dead. I don't care about the people involved. I try to advocate for the dead most of the time. And, you know, you're kind of the lone voice in my world. I'm a medical legal death investigator by trade, so I always think about the dead. And so in these cases, each and every one of them, when you look at the autopsy report, the bodies are brought in and it's normal for a forensic pathologist to give the descriptor about level of rigidity, which talks about rigor mortis, post mortal avidity settling of blood, Is it posterior, anterior, is it still blanchable? And then body temperature. The problem with that is that that data that is gleaned by the forensic pathologist at the morgue, it's not worth the gunpowder to blow it to hell. All of that stuff has to be, has to be collected on site because you're contextualizing the environmental factors that are impacting that body. And this is doubly important in this case because you've got these precious little kids that are in an aquatic environment. I bet you dollars to donuts no one at the scene took a water temperature probably. And when you're trying to marry up post mortem interval pmi, which is one of the things we do, less going to impact post mortem changes. So once you get the bodies up on the bank and as, as you stated, Alice, the bodies were subjected to heat. We know what Memphis is like. High humidity, hot, and leaves are all greened out. You can look at the scene images and you begin to sweat when you see it. You know, it's kind of one of southern things. You know, you get beads of sweat just looking at the images and that's going to impact the body because they're no longer in the aquatic environment. They're just laying there. Well, the coroner wasn't called for two or three hours. Well, the cops don't do postmortem assessment. I've trained coroners in Arkansas. I've actually taught them. I've had them in my classes. And they do the best with what they have. As we all know, Arkansas is a very poor state. But they try really hard to do what they can do each and every corner in that county in those counties. And sometimes you'll have, you'll have police in particular areas. They'll say, let's wait until we're done with everything and then we'll Call the coroner. What many people don't realize is if there is a body at the scene in many states, and I can tell you in Louisiana and Georgia is this way and Alabama where I teach now, the coroner is actually in charge of the scene if there's a body there. And many times you've got this relationship between cops and coroners and they'll wait till the last minute. They treat the corner like they're a livery service. Come on, pick up the body, we're done. You can take the body wherever it is you take it to. And that's a real problem. It's a real problem because that assessment should have been done there. Environmental measurements, both environmental, ambient temperature, water temperature and then body temperature and then rigidity assessment there. Because once you put the bodies into the back of the hearse, now you're going to, I mean, I don't know about you guys, I don't ride around in Alabama with the air off in summertime. I got my air on in my car. Well, you're taking a body now that's been sweltering in the heat and now you're placing it into an air conditioned vehicle. Then you're going to drive down the road and you think about, well, how well was the body secured, was placed in a body bag, wrapped in a clean white sheet. All the things that we look for, how were they positioned? These kids were found with, you know, they're hogtied. And immediately when I see hogtied individuals that are nude, my default position is always sexual assault. Always. So when we transport bodies, there's even a way that we, we transport bodies. Say if we have a rape victim. A lot of people don't know this and I'm talking about like a female rape victim. It applies to males too, but female rape victim. We will transport them with their feet elevated above the level of their head and that's so that we don't lose seminal fluid. Well, did that happen in this case? So now you're bouncing down the road. Have you secured everything on the body? And then so we're going to go out of the van, back into the heat, we're going to go into the mortuary. Oh, and yeah, the mortuary is really cold. So now the data, by the time they would get to these bodies, that data is so skewed. And I know it sounds maybe like I'm rambling, I don't know. But with this case, time is a huge element in this thing. Trying to assess the last known location of these children who may have heard or seen them last point. And also, you know, you got search teams wandering around at night. What did they see and what did they hear? And then the boys were not found until like 1:45, I think is when they saw this shoe floating in the water. That's a long time. I mean, all kinds of things can occur with, you know, with, with, with bodies during that period of time that are going to skew your data. So that's just very superficial here, guys. I'm sorry, I didn't, you know, it's just I, when I see this, when I see this kind of thing happen, it's striking. And read to your comment earlier, when you're looking at something in, looking back in the past, looking in the rearview mirror, there's no excuse. Thirty years ago, you should know what you're doing. Back then, I was training coroners 30 years ago. We're post O.J. we know. We've come so far in my field relative to how we handle scenes. I help create the national standards for medical legal death investigators. And that's been in place since 96 ABMDI, the American board of Medical Legal Death Investigators has been in place since 1999. And most coroners around the country are trained up to that standard now. But maybe the cops haven't heard about it yet, I don't know. So it's, it's problematic. It truly is. And I've always been of the opinion that most cases are either going to be solved or not going to be solved in the first five minutes from a forensic standpoint. And the way you handle the body.
- [18:58]
Brett
Well, if it was an evidence rich environment, they recovered almost no evidence. There is basically no forensic evidence in this case. Yeah, they got a shoe impression, but it wasn't, they weren't able to get a good enough one to actually compare it to anything. And then, and then otherwise, just not a lot of forensic data. You said one of the things you do is you look into the person who performed the autopsy. Do you have an opinion on. Before we get into the autopsies themselves, Dr. Peretti?
- [19:23]
Alice
Not particularly. I mean, not one way or another. He's, I think that he's, he's not board certified. For what. Yeah. And again, that's, you can get, you guys are attorneys. You know what happens if you get on the stand and you can be good as gold if you haven't done.
- [19:39]
Joseph Scott Morgan
You say for maybe people who don't know, you know, what is the board certification process? Additional education.
- [19:45]
Alice
Yeah, let me run that by you because a lot of people don't know, know this. We're kind of an odd group in my field. So the way it happens is this. If you want to be a forensic pathologist, first off, you got to be a doctor first. And I don't mean psychologist, I mean you have to be an md. So after you go through your undergraduate and go to medical school, which is four years, then at the end of that period of time, as a lot of people know, you get to choose a residency or you put in for a residency and hopefully you'll be chosen. Most young doctors will have a selection of what track they want to go down. They've established that by the end of their senior year. Many have, some don't, but many have. If you want to do pathology, it used to be a four year fellowship, now it's a five year fellowship. So that means that you're going to be an indentured servant for five years, working in a teaching hospital somewhere, sitting at the feet of a board certified hospital pathologist and the hospital pathologist, what they do, and just so we know, pathologists study disease. That's what they do. All right? That's what they do. We should be very grateful for pathologists because they truly make the diagnosis. You go in surgery, you got a mass, they take it out, they're going to look at it, put it on scope and give you what they think is going on. So at the end of five years, you have a decision to make. You can specialize in pathology and do things like blood banking, you can do laboratory management. There's a myriad of things that individuals that have a pathology background can do. Or they just take that five years and go sit behind a microscope and take frozen sections and surgery and make diagnosis and then make a very good living at it. The one thing you can do is you can also apply for a one year fellowship. Now I was with Fulton county in Atlanta. We were affiliated with Emory. So if you guys are attorneys, you know Emory Law School, so they've got a great medical school. Our pathologists were all on faculty at Emory Medical. And so we would select two people, one international and one from the US and it's highly competitive. You come in, you do a year's fellowship and you go out to scenes, you do autopsies, you learn from experienced pathologists and then you go sit for your boards. But in addition to that, you have to sit for your anatomical and your clinical boards as well as it's a very involved process. And look, there's a lot of. And I'm Sure, a lot of people know that there are a lot of really good test takers out there. But just because you're a good test taker doesn't mean you're worth a damn. Right? You just take tests really good. And that applies at all levels. And just because this fellow was not necessarily board certified, it doesn't make him a bad pathologist. It just again, he's not bonafide like I said earlier, and that's a problem. Forensic pathology is one of the few fields in medicine where the more education you get, the less you get paid because you're going to wind up being a government employee for the rest of your life and you're going to be around decomposing bodies, you're going to be doing autopsies and you're going to trial and you're going to be finishing reports and giving depositions. So it's amazing to me that and there's still, I think roughly, I think there's like maybe 500 to 600 board certified forensic pathologists in our country. And there's fewer forensic pathologists out there than there are brain surgeons. And you're talking about places like in LA and Chicago and New York that they have to have a large staff. So when you get out into a more rural area, if you're thinking about Arkansas and God loved people in Arkansas, it's a beautiful place. But if you're gone through all this training, you're going to go to Arkansas and get a job. I don't know, maybe you will, maybe you love Arkansas. Got friends from Arkansas. I've even got family live there or lived there. But you never know what you're going to get. And most people that hire forensic pathologists, they're not physicians that hire them. Okay. So they don't know what they're getting many times. If you ever want to watch a fantastic, I have my students watch this every semester that I teach medical, legal death investigation. It's a frontline thing that came out, I think back in 2011 and it's called death investigation in America. If you get a chance to watch that at any point in time, it'll blow your hair back. It'll terrify you when you watch it. And it follows several forensic pathologists through the process and what it's like to work at an ME or coroner's office and people will be shocked. We spend more time doing after school programs and building playgrounds than we do spend money on taking care of our dead. Our dead are probably by far the most neglected segment within our population, county by county. It's like, okay, well, you're the corner, you'll take care of it. And again, I'm an advocate for the dead. So I'm a bit prejudiced in that area that, you know, you need to dump all of your resources that you can toward this because it's somebody's mom or dad or somebody held them as a baby at one point in time, but kind of forget about it at some point in time. So sorry, guys. Running on.
- [24:57]
Brett
You were. You were allowed to do that. Okay, so moving to the autopsies themselves, my untrained eye, having read a bunch of autopsies, but having precisely zero training in anything that involves medicine. The only science class I took in college was intro to biology for non majors, so that should.
- [25:15]
Alice
Oh, cool.
- [25:16]
Brett
They seem to me, upon reading them, to be shorter and less detailed than I would expect for three murders where there are so many injuries. These boys, they have a lot of injuries. Whether they occurred during the murder, after the murder, or animal predation, there are a ton of them. But the autopsies themselves seem fairly short and cursory in my view. Am I completely wrong about that?
- [25:48]
Joseph Scott Morgan
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- [28:01]
Brett
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- [28:30]
Joseph Scott Morgan
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Brett
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- [30:32]
Alice
It's going to vary from practitioner to practitioner. I've read autopsy reports over the years that have ranged up to 40 pages, and a lot of those dealt with multiple gunshot wounds, where you're having to track them through decomposed bodies and really complex natural disease things. When you're talking about three little boys that are homicide victims, the most glaring thing to me with the reports, one of the things that's missing is, and maybe it exists out there somewhere. I have no idea. There's no coroner report. Coroner report and the medical examiner report are two separate things. The reason the coroner report is so important is that coroner writes a separate report about what they saw at the scene and it's a separate set of eyes from the cops. It's an independent investigation. Coroners don't work for the cops. Coroners work for the coroner. You know, and they are a duly elected official that is as old as the office of Sheriff itself. It goes back to the Magna Carta. It's one of the few words sheriff, bailiff and coroner are three of the words that you can actually go and read right now in the Magna Carta and see what they are. That's how old the office is. I think that's 1276, 1274, I can't recall. They're a separate standalone entity and they have specific authority. I want to know what the coroner had to say at the scene. I'm not to begin with the forensic pathologist is not painting a picture for me here. This individual is not at the scene, to the best of my knowledge, but yet they're going back and kind of assessing what they have been told, trying to breathe life into their autopsy report with limited or no information from the scene. And I don't know who was at the autopsy Most of the time, what happens is you have a lead detective. The lead detective will either attend themselves or they will send a detective that is specifically assigned to the autopsies. You'll have the morgue tech there, the forensic technician from the ME or the coroner's office. And you might have a police photographer that's going to take separate photographs in addition to that. Is that his report?
- [32:37]
Brett
That's the coroner's report.
- [32:38]
Joseph Scott Morgan
It's almost like bullet points.
- [32:39]
Alice
Yeah. Yeah. It's not very robust. Okay. If that is the total. If that's it, there's more of it.
- [32:48]
Brett
But that's the sort of description.
- [32:51]
Joseph Scott Morgan
So this is really helpful. I didn't realize that because I know that the coroner is elected, and so this makes sense where they're seeing from a different perspective than the medical examiner or the police as well. When. Sorry, you. You keep reading. I'm just kind of.
- [33:04]
Alice
No, no, no.
- [33:04]
Joseph Scott Morgan
I can get this.
- [33:05]
Alice
Yeah, I can. I can multitask. Go ahead.
- [33:08]
Joseph Scott Morgan
And I can see that this almost looks like a form that you check through. Is that what a coroner's report typically looks like? It's a pre filled form that you can.
- [33:15]
Alice
Yeah. Nowadays everything is fed into a program in the computer and there's a lot of box checking. But the thing about it is, is that when you go through the coroner's report itself, it'll be page upon page many times. If anybody wants to see a really excellent example of what a investigator slash coroner report looks like from a scene, do yourself a favor and look up Robin Williams autopsy report and coroner report. I think it's from. I think it was Modesto. And that is the gold standard for how a report should be written. Again, that's something that I use in class all of the time. Well, this is. I got to tell you, this is kind of thorough. And because he's even making reference to larval development, I can see that he's talked about post mortem changes in here, and I don't remember ever seeing this.
- [34:08]
Brett
This is not something that really gets talked about very much. Like, I didn't even realize the coroner's report was that important. I thought it was really medical examiner's report that you were looking at.
- [34:19]
Alice
So we're learning the coroner's report. Again, they are independent from the police and they should never be influenced by the police at the scene.
- [34:31]
Joseph Scott Morgan
Can I ask this? Does the coroner prep the ME before the autopsy is done with this background information? So there's like a briefing before.
- [34:39]
Alice
Yeah, there's a phone call. In this case, the coroner would have been well served to have attended the autopsy, but it's saying that the body was sent to the M.E. in Little Rock. So I don't know if this guy even attended, if he. You know, I would urge my people. One of the things you have to understand, again, this goes back to forensic pathologists. You're not going to have a forensic pathologist. Probably in West Memphis, Arkansas, they starve to death. You can't pay them enough. Generally, the me the forensic pathologist is one of the highest paid people in a county. If you have a county medical examiner, because they're physicians. So they're going to be pulling down probably at least a quarter mil per year. And most places can't afford that. So bodies are sent. In this case, this body's going from West Memphis to Little Rock. If you don't know about the geography in Arkansas, it's kind of a poke. And so they would have to have the bodies transported there. Now, whether or not the coroner would be in attendance, it would be preferable to have them there because there's like a course of people that talk to the forensic pathologist. The leading voice in the course when it comes to the dead body should not be the cops. It should always be the coroner telling them specifically. Now, probably what happened. And again, I'm only speculating here, is that the coroner would have gotten onto the phone with Peretti and would have had a discussion with them. And they also send in, many times they'll send in an info sheet that's generally about a paragraph narrative. It's not going to be this. This is something that would have taken a couple of hours to write for each one of these little guys. And this would be generated later. Now, he may. I don't know what they could have done back during this time period if they could have transmitted this to somebody or, you know, something like that, electronically. I don't. Or maybe facts that I have no idea. But at any rate, most of the time, the body is going to arrive with an info sheet, and each info sheet would accompany each body, and the body would be in a body bag. Hopefully, they locked the body bags en route, which means that no one else, because, you know, the more Salacious a case is, the more interest there is. You'd be surprised at how many people want to open a bag and look at a dead body. It's something you have to be really aware of. In our world, everybody wants to peak, and I'm talking about cops, EMTs, everybody. And there's no reason anybody should ever open a bag. That's why in the mid-90s, it became almost a necessity to lock body bags. And you have. If you think about locks on the back of transfer trucks where they're clamped down like that, and if they're broken, you can't reseal them. They have little wax locks inside of them, and they have a serial number on it so that when that thing is cracked open, you know that, and no one else will have the lock. So the coroner, the medical examiner will generally make note of that at the autopsy. I received this bag. It was sealed with number 222-4365. And they'll talk about whether the lock was intact or not. So you have to guarantee security. And if you're driving this distance from West Memphis to Little Rock, that's something that, again, you got to trust people that are transporting the bodies for you.
- [37:46]
Brett
So in the report, Peretti lists the cause of death for two of the boys, for Michael Moore and Stevie Branch, as multiple injuries and drowning. And then for Christopher Byers, he only lists multiple injuries. What were your take on that? I know Dr. Spitz, for instance, said that all three boys had drowned.
- [38:06]
Alice
Yeah. Whether or not those kids could have been viable. And they make a lot of reference, kind of passing references, in that collection, Brett, that you sent me of the questioning of these various individuals that took a look. There's a twilight period. People here are talking about antemortem and postmortem, but there is a period called perimortem. P E R I mortem. And that's kind of. You're in the throes of death, and he never uses the term perimortem. I think it's. I think it's Spitz or it wasn't. I think Baden is one of the people on there, but I think it was Spitz that actually never specifically alluded to it. My thought is, if you cannot come up with a specific cause of death, and these are fresh dead kids, you have to assume that drowning, it's going to be almost. It's almost a process of. First off, homicidal drownings are rare. They just don't happen. Unless you're Andrea Yates. Okay. Or that horrible monster in South Carolina that let her kids roll, roll, you know, down the ramp and drown those babies in the back of that car. It just. It doesn't happen a lot. That's why you hear about it in the news when it does happen, where you use drowning as a modality to commit a homicide. So you have to be very specific. My thought is that with the drowning, drowning is part and parcel of the total picture of their deaths. It's the assault relative to being harmed. You know, you've got one kid that's got a very severe skull fracture, and again, that's. And I can't remember, forgive me, I can't remember specifically which child it was, but he doesn't go into great detail to my liking, at least relative to the trauma that that was inflicted upon the brain as a result of skull fractures and underlying hemorrhage. Brain is congested, you expect that. But you can have congestion with brains and drowning as well. So there needs to be a very definitive line here.
- [40:07]
Joseph Scott Morgan
So along the lines, I hadn't thought about, you know, homicidal drowning not being common. And that makes complete sense. But I think for purposes of this autopsy, what I was interested with respect to fluid in the lungs is, is less so because I think based on how horrendous their beatings were on their skulls, they probably were not very conscious, if conscious at all, when they were put in the water is to understand at what point in this attack they were put in the water. Is there enough detail to see that within this, even if.
- [40:34]
Alice
Yeah, there is, because there's uptake, there's actual. There's actually they're drawing in water. And not only do they have water in their lungs, they've also got water in the inner ear, which is also indicative of drowning that we see many times. And as a matter of fact, you actually, and forgive me, I don't mean to be disgusting or anything, but this is the world that kind of dance in. One of the things that we'll do after we take the brain out, we go in into the cranial cavity and you can access the auditory canal. And so you will go into the inner ear through the top of the skull at the skull top skull's been removed. Brains out, you'll go into the inner ear. And one thing that you're going to be checking for to see if there's water in the inner ear. And it's part of the physiology of drowning also, they're talking about this frothy exudate when they're depressing on the lungs, you See that like when you. Many times when you pull a body out of water, and this is one of the creepier things that you see as a death investigator, it creeped out about much. But when you take a body, someone that has drowned out of water, and you place them on their back, you'll see it almost looks like the head of a beer. It begins to present out of their nose and their mouth, and it's. We call it. We refer to it as a frothy, edematous cone. You also see it with heroin ODs. The body's in congestive failure. The. The lungs are. Have shut down. They get real heavy, congested. And that's one of the things that, like in the autopsy that you want to look for is our lung weights. Well, these kids were eight, right? They were eight. So there is a specific bracket. There's a specific bracket as to how much their lungs would weigh in life. At the age and weight that they are, it's almost. It's. It's the same thing. It's like for those of us that parents, you know, you have a growth chart for children where you don't ever talk about, with the living children, you never talk about what their organ weights are, because there's no way to really assess that. But at autopsy, we do. We have standard weights for lungs. If they get congested and heavy, we have to look to see metabolically what's going on with a child or do they have some kind of underlying condition? You rule that out? Well, they're found with debris up their nose and in their mouth. And you've got this nasty mud water that's also. That's in their airway and also down into their lungs. Well, that's a sign that they had to uptake this at some point in time.
- [43:06]
Brett
So Christopher Byers, he's the one with the part of his skull punched into his brain. He's also the one who has this, the emasculation. And he's the one that Peretti does not list the cause of death as drowning. Interestingly, just looking at what you were just talking about, Christopher Byers lungs weigh more significantly more than either Stevie Branch or Michael Moore. So I don't know what to make of that.
- [43:32]
Alice
I don't. I don't know either. To tell the truth. We. We know that his little lungs would not have weighed that much had he not up. Uptaken water, had water uptake. And we know that the dead cannot take on water. Okay. They're not respiring at that point in Time. So something's missing. Why would he go to the trouble of not including that as one of the contributing factors or making it dual, listing it as a combination of head trauma and homicidal violence and drowning.
- [44:04]
Brett
Something you said earlier, the drowning, murder by drowning is rare. So in this case, are you saying that you think these boys were murdered by drowning or is it as Alice said, they were beaten so severely they're unconscious, they get tied up, they're put in the water and then they drown is sort of almost the part of the COVID up as opposed to part of the murder.
- [44:26]
Alice
Excellent question, and let's break that down. So you've got, I think probably three possibilities here. You've got someone that's a sexual sadist and they use shoestrings to tie these precious little boys up after they've done what they're doing with them. They've got them nude, they're living out some kind of sick fantasy and now they have to get rid of them. Well, they fight, they scratch, they do everything. The boys are incapacitated to the point maybe they've been beaten down and sadist goes and holds them underwater. Now that's kind of a proactive thing that they're doing. I'm talking about the perpetrator. You can have them beaten so severely and they might have. Number two, you have them beaten so severely that they might still have what are referred to as agonal respirations, where if you had a stethoscope and you were there with them, you could pick up a faint heartbeat and they're still uptaking oxygen even though that's been compromised to a great degree. And then as an afterthought, you just toss them into the hole and you let them drown. But I guess the big question is, what was the purpose of going down to that location? Because one of the things that has come up relative to this case were they assaulted in another location and brought to this location and dumped. Well, maybe they were assaulted in another location, but unless that other location had muddy ditch water, how do you explain that? So I think the assault probably took place there. And as an afterthought. Yeah, they can't move. We're in two to two and a half feet of water. We're going to toss them into the water here and that will assure that they, that they're finished and no one's going to find them. And then for a third consideration, as far as homicide is concerned, I can't really think of anything that would trump those other two possibilities. They didn't accidentally wind up in the water. They're bound. They had to have been placed there by someone. I think that that's understood.
- [46:28]
Brett
And they're, like, pressed down into the mud as well.
- [46:31]
Alice
Yeah. And so you can see that. You can see a lot of that in their. Some of these presentations on the face. I think one child in particular. And that's why I go back to the utility of drowning as a means to commit a murder. Like, you're holding them on their restraints, they can't fight back. So that kind of sadistic bent that goes in. I'm no profiler, trust me, I don't want to be a profiler. But do enough. These things where you begin to kind of look for patterns and things. If you have somebody and you grab them by the back of the head, by their hair, and just kind of grind their face into it like this. The really unsettling thing about this is, were all three of these boys incapacitated at the same time and at the same level? Or were the. Were the other two aware? And they were laying there and they're watching the perpetrator, the sadist, do this in front of them? And again, I think, in my opinion, for whatever that's worth, cup of coffee at Waffle House for two bucks, maybe. I'm thinking that. That. That would be the most horrific thing for me, you know, that he. He used this as a means to inflict emotional terror, because it is terrorizing that he's doing before the eyes of the other boys. And who knows? Because the progression of everything. That's why I go back to what I initially said. There's a lot of activity going around in this area, which requires individuals to walk around and stomp in the mud or the soft earth. And lots of times we can get an idea about activity at a scene based upon footprints and movement of the perpetrator and also movement of the victims. Because there's a couple of injuries that I've seen in some of these images that look like. They almost look like linear drag marks, like somebody is dragging, dragging one of these kids. I think one child has got these kind of bilinear markings going up the face. Some people have interpreted that animal activity. Some people have said knife, those sorts of things, but. And where they drug over some kind of surface. But we'll never know that because that area wasn't locked down. See it all play. Everything plays into everything else here. Because this is highly interpretive, because this is so complex. And every time you add a body to something like this, it just becomes exponentially more complex. That's why it's important to secure everything, because you can't gauge what the movement around this mud hole is because it's so disruptive.
- [49:07]
Joseph Scott Morgan
We could easily have you on for many hours. But since you brought up animal predation, that's obviously been an alternate theory. Interestingly, this theory did not come up when Peretti testified at the trials in 1994. It was not mentioned in the autopsy reports. It wasn't mentioned at trial. It was something that came four years later in post conviction hearings. And it came with defense. I think the defense experts brought it for the first time. So first of all, can you be certified, I guess, in animal predation, what piece does that play typically in, like your autopsies, if any? And if this wasn't even brought up in the original autopsy, original trial testimony, how can you glean that theory four years later from. From the autopsies that you also took a look at? I know I threw a lot at you. No, no, no. And I thought everything. Everything for you.
- [49:54]
Alice
No, no, I understand. Okay, so first off, let's get this out of the way. Bite marks in general now are not a thing. It's. And we'll just start with human bite marks to begin with. I think it was Obama did the Best Practices in Forensic Science study that came out in 2012. And bite marks was one of the things that was like, you can't quantify it. You kind of qualify it. See what I'm saying? You kind of qualify it and say, yeah, in my opinion, this is consistent with the behavior or a bite that may have been generated by a human. So are you telling me that you can't say whether or not. No, I can't. It looks like a bite mark, but there's a lot of things that might look like bite marks. Same thing extends to animal predation. There are just so everybody knows there are forensic veterinarians out there, but most forensic veterinarians deal in things like, you know, we got the Kentucky Derby coming up tomorrow. So they do things like doping and doping of animals, and they look for people that have been, you know, hunting animals illegally, you know, and we've seen this played out. I don't, I'm not going to mention her name, but her initials are Karen Reed. We've seen that come up. I'm so.
- [51:09]
Joseph Scott Morgan
That was a laugh I needed right now.
- [51:12]
Alice
I'm so over it.
- [51:13]
Brett
Don't mention it.
- [51:14]
Alice
That's what, that's one of the things that came up. And in, in that case, with their expert, there's, there's nobody out there that is really a, a true animal bite mark person, because there's no bite mark people out there anymore that, like, I'm not going to say you'd be laughed out of court, but they're going to take, the attorneys are going to take you to task if you're saying that you're a bite mark expert. Forensic Odin just have a great. They occupy a great position in the pantheon of forensic science. Okay. For my money, aside from DNA, there's nobody better at identifying bodies based upon, based upon dental work. And all those things that we do when we have, like I've gone out to work, plane crashes, for instance, where I've got bodies, 20 bodies, they're all burned. All right, you can't eyeball that body. But I can bring a forensic dentist out there and they can, you know, we can remove the jaws, we examine the teeth and, and do that. But as far as, you know, trying to say that a bite was generated by a person or an animal, it's very difficult. You can look at it and say, well, yeah, that kind of looks like a human. All you got to do. I urge anybody that's hearing my voice right now to look into a case out of Mississippi involving a forensic dentist who I had worked with in the past when I was in New Orleans named Michael west, and based upon his bite mark testimony, had one guy that was in parchment on death row in Mississippi and had another guy that was serving life. Two little girls got raped and dumped into a creek in Mississippi and they had bite marks all over them, according to him. And he said that this guy did this and this guy did that, and it turned out not to be either one of them. It was total hogwash. And it was one person that actually did it and that guy was still walking the streets. So it's really hard. It's something hard to quantify you can qualify now as far as I can look at something. And one of the first things I thought about when I saw some of these, and they are postmortem, these kind of punctate injuries that you're seeing on the face. First thing I thought of being a Louisiana kid, this is crawfish, because I pull bodies out of canals that are covered in crawfish. I don't know. And this kind of environment that they were in is a perfect location to have while growing crawfish in that area.
- [53:41]
Brett
And they press down in the mud too.
- [53:44]
Alice
Yeah, yeah. And press down the mud. And you don't Know if somebody's putting pressure on them. And yeah, there could. You could have a turtle in there. But with most turtles, snapping turtles in particular, when they bite and keep. Folks, I'm not trying to be insult. Most people don't know anything about the anatomy of a turtle, but they don't have teeth. They have a beak, and so it's firm. So when they bite, they'll bite down and then they rip. Okay? They'll tear and you'll get big chunks of tissue kind of taken out. Dogs actually work kind of similar to that as well. They'll put their paws. Bite, tear. That's why we have canine teeth. Canine teeth are tearing teeth. So they bite and rip and swallow meat. Okay. Turtles will act similar to that I've had in Louisiana. I've seen. I've found blue crabs on bodies, which you wouldn't have in Memphis. Turtles, but a lot of crawfish. And in a mud hole like this, you would expect to see that. I heard them referencing things like minnows. I think it was Baden maybe had mentioned in his. In that kind of auxiliary deposition that he was given the report. You know, he mentioned like minnows. You know, this is not minnows that are doing this. And some of the mark. Some of the injuries that they had, you know, he mentioned like minnows. You know, this is not minnows that are doing this. And some of the mark. Some of the injuries that they had bore close resemblance to me relative to ants. But you generally are not going to have ants in an aquatic environment, because ants work this way where they'll. They'll tear off that top, the epidermis, and even go down to the dermis. And a matter of fact, when you. When you see a body that has been subjected to ant bites many times, you think they. It's a thermal injury because they'll rip the skin down. If you've ever seen anybody that's been burned and their epidermis is missing, it's got that red kind of moist appearance to it. You'll see that with ants many times. But I got to thinking about this because I was reading the report and I'm thinking they're saying insects. I'm thinking, well, what kind of insects are you talking about? That brings me to one other topic. You know how you guys were saying that the bodies were left laying on the bank. Well, depending upon the position of the bodies when first observed, whether they were face up or face down. Sounds like they're face down. Well, we've got larval Development in the eye. Well, flies don't go underwater and lay eggs. And again, if you're, if you're dragging bodies out of this aquatic environment and you're tossing them up on the bank, I don't mean that literally, but you know what I'm saying, You just kind of put them to the side there. You have so not guarded the body to the point where you've got blowflies that are now zeroing in on the eyes, which is very consistent what they do. They go to the eyes, they go to the nose. If the mouth is open, they go to the mouth and also the anus. And with women, they'll go to the vaginal area and they will lay eggs. They want warm moist areas and they're, they're talking about they've got larval development in these babies eyes.
- [56:48]
Joseph Scott Morgan
When you said they like warm moist areas, do they exclusively lay eggs? I guess you have to be. If you're dead and there's like no respiration, does that happen as well? So were these postmortem laying of the eggs that the larvae developed?
- [57:04]
Alice
To a certain extent. I've had cases. Again, I'm going far afield here, but because somebody will always come back and say, well, what about this? Okay, I'll give you the what about this? You can get larval development in living people, people with untreated cancers. I had a lady that died of erosive breast cancer that was being held hostage in the basement by her daughter. She had bilateral erosive breast cancer where you could look through her. I've talked about this before on other shows, but through her, through her ribs where the muscle had been completely degraded. You could look through and actually see her lungs. And the daughter had abused her mother that bad. And she had indwelling maggots that were living. I had another lady that had the same thing. Opened up her chest and fly opened up her, her blouse, flies flew out. She was fresh dead. She had been living with breast cancer untreated. So yeah, it does happen in the living. It's rare, but they start their cycle. So you will have. Most of the time you're going to have a blowfly that will show up moist, hot, humid. They love this environment. They thrive in this environment. And they have the ability to sense decay on a level that we can't. Like we might be around a freshly dead person and it's not going to give us a hint. I've had cases where I've had. You couldn't see the eyes within five hours of death because There were so many fly eggs in the eyes. I've had that happen. And that was primarily in south Louisiana. It's a very hostile environment environmentally. It's so humid, moist all the time. Bodies go a lot quicker down there. And if you're in the Mississippi Delta, which, you know, we're talking about the Memphis area, like that kind of the same.
- [58:45]
Brett
So Stevie Branch is the boy who has the sort of horrific wounds on the left side of his face that Peretti describes as punctures going all the way into the oral cavity. Sounds like you're confident those are post mortem. Maybe crawfish, but not. No one stabbed him in the side of the face.
- [59:03]
Alice
Yeah, it would be an odd instrument. You know, I don't know what the utility would be for that. What kind of. Because those punctate areas, I don't know what they would marry up with as far as an instrument goes. And there's a. Brett. There's kind of a lack of. Anytime you see animals eating a body, there's a lack of uniformity with the insults to the body. Whereas if you have stabbings, for instance, I mean, true stabbings, where you've got somebody driving a blade into somebody's body, single edge blade, I call it the winking eye. If you look at the pattern that is generated by a knife going into a body, you'll see one kind of blunted edge on the. The injury itself and then a sharp edge. And that's how we delineate between single edge versus double edge. You could use an ice pick maybe or something else that has a hole punch or something like that. And I'm talking about an old type of hole punch. I'm not talking about hole punch that you use in school. Holes and papers. I've had homeless people in Atlanta that used to use. They would break off pieces of rebar and then wrap duct tape around one end and file the end. And so they would use that to like a shiv. And it would look like it approximates a 9 millimeter bullet hole. You look at it and you think, this guy's been shot. And no, the instrumentality was a piece of sharpened rebar. So you get. You get all of these things. It's really hard, you know, to kind of make that. And you begin to think about it.
- [60:32]
Brett
With probably not a Rambo style knife like they.
- [60:36]
Alice
No.
- [60:37]
Joseph Scott Morgan
Can I add another thing for you to. In addition to Stevie? Branches, face. So obviously we knew that Christopher Byers had the genital mutilation, but the way it's been described Is that the penis was like de. Gloved?
- [60:49]
Alice
Yeah.
- [60:50]
Joseph Scott Morgan
Like the skin was essentially skinned and then the scrotal sac was.
- [60:54]
Alice
Was mated. Yeah, I saw the image of it. Yeah.
- [60:57]
Joseph Scott Morgan
I mean, so. So we've been talking about the face and potential animal predation. Can you shed some light on that? It sounds horrific. And if someone did that to him with a blade, it's incredibly horrific. And can that be animal predation? Do you have any sense? Have you seen anything like that? And any sort of light you can shed on that would just, you know.
- [61:17]
Alice
Brett, is this the same. This is the same young fellow that they thought that they saw? The discoloration that somebody had, almost a different one.
- [61:24]
Joseph Scott Morgan
This is the punched out skull.
- [61:26]
Brett
So the one you were just talking about who had his face with the knife marks stabbed into his face, he is the one who has the injury to his penis. That is to me at least, very unusual. Yeah, I mean, I can read to you. I can read to you what it says in the autopsy, if that would be helpful. The mid shaft of the penis, to include the glands, was diffusely red purple with overlying very fine superficial scratches. There was a clear band of demarcation at the mid shaft which showed that the proximal portion was uninvolved. There were no injuries noted to the testes or internal aspect of the scrotal sacrifice. And that's the one that in testimony, Peretti described is like a hickey. Then you have Christopher Byers and he's the one with the. The gruesome castration. And then Peretti believed that someone had taken a knife and carved the skin off of the penis. The defense position was some sort of animal turtle, I guess, like you were saying, sort of bites the scrotum and rips and when it does that, it degloves the penis. That was sort of their position. And that's been a real point of contention throughout.
- [62:37]
Alice
Okay, so let's go with that. That case first. It almost looks like sexual mutilation when you see it. Again, there's a lack of uniformity to it. You would expect, like if you're using an edge weapon, you're talking about something that is milled. A weapon that is created in a factory. Okay. That has a milled edge on it. So anytime you drag that across the surface, you're going to have, first off, the margins are going to be uniformed. There's not going to be any ecchymosis, which means fancy term for bruising. You're just going to have kind of a laid open area. I Don't see. And just looking. Just looking at the scrotum. Okay. With this little boy, it's so kind of macerated. It doesn't look like someone went in with an edged weapon and did that to me, just based upon. And these images are not like. They're not like HD images. So I'm looking at these things from my perspective and just kind of trying to assess it. I've had people that have had their testicles cut off before. We had a drug war that's going on and had a guy that was castrated as a means to homicide. And even in that case, when you looked at the margin of what was left, you know, they talked about the proximal. You mentioned the proximal portion of the penis. In the other case, proximal means closer to the body, distal is further away, so you're up toward the glands. If it's distal, proximal, close to the body. Even in that case that I was referring to where you had this castration that had taken place, it was almost ringed around the base, the proximal portion of the scrotum and the edges were very well defined. It had very well defined margins. That's why if this child is. Is kind of in the water like this and floating, he's nude, not to be disrespectful, but the genitalia is kind of hanging in the water like this. And it would not be out of the realm of possibility for an animal, an opportunistic animal that's in that area, whether it be a turtle or crawfish or whatever that would come up and begin to feast in that area. You also see that with bodies that are doing, you know, what people classically call the dead man's float with their fingers hanging down if they're in an aquatic environment like that. I've seen the ends of fingers eaten off or down to the bone. Toes as well. The nose is another, because it's a prominent feature that they can go right to. They're seeking protein. That's what they do. And so they see nutrients in that, and so it's to their advantage to do it. The other question I would have, why him and not the others? If you're dealing with somebody that. And this is for somebody in a different department than mine. But if you're thinking about profiling somebody, why him and not the others? You know, where you've got edge, weapon, torture that's going on. I'm not saying there's not a level of torture here. I just. I Don't see a lot of definitive stuff here relative to like slashing and stabbing, which is one of the things that they've talked about. I've also heard about the serrated edge. Well, when you say serrated edge, you mentioned Rambo. Well, they're not really talking about a serrated edge in the sense of like a steak knife. Okay. That's serrated. And with serrated injuries, one of the things that you'll see is there's a, they call it scalloping. It's like a scalloping pattern that goes along with that edge. It's not like a smooth, smooth edge that you have on like a combat knife with the leading edge. If they're saying Rambo knife, then you're talking about. It's not just a serrated edge, it's a saw edge. Because that's the utility of that. You can flip it over. Everybody's seen these along the thickening backside where you can saw branches with. I don't know, I don't, I don't necessarily see that here.
- [66:27]
Brett
Let me ask you this. You mentioned, you mentioned the, the dead man float. What, what do you make of the fact that once again, like that makes tons of sense to me, but the boys weren't really floating, they were pressed down in the mud. The crawfish make a lot of sense for Stevie Branch sort of punching through his face. What do you think about that when you think about the injury to Christopher Byers?
- [66:54]
Alice
Well, I don't know. I can't give you a definitive answer on it. I really can't. There's such a multiplicity of things that are going on here with the central pivot point, with this whole thing. The central, the axis to all of this is going to be the utility of. Is this the lake knife that they're.
- [67:11]
Brett
This is the lake knife.
- [67:12]
Alice
The lake knife, yeah. The utility of drowning as a means to committing homicide. It's not, it was. Not necessarily. Why would you use multiple utilities to commit a homicide? You know, like multiple means to do that? That's my one fallback position relative to cause of death.
- [67:32]
Brett
And I think some people would say because there are multiple perpetrators. Do you have a position on whether or not these murders look like something that was done by multiple people or a single perpetrator?
- [67:46]
Alice
For me, I think that is markedly difficult to wrangle Three little boys. Now, you can do it with fear. We've had cases and it's easy to intimidate an eight year old little boy. And particularly if that individual is wielding a weapon. But how do you get them all to submit like this to the point where they can be tied up with their shoelaces? That's kind of chilling when you think about that. So part of me, the investigator, part of me wants to think that there may be more than one person involved in this because it's so. There's a bit of orchestration to all of this. How are you hitting all of these notes, continuing on with the music analogy? How are you continuing on with all of these notes like this? And you're a single person doing this? It's not like they'd been drugged. One of the kids had therapeutic levels of Ritalin in his system, sub therapeutic, which means he hadn't had it in a while, it had already metabolized through his system. Weren't drugged, they didn't have alcohol on board. So you're not getting them to submit because you've got some kind of chemical thing going on with them. I don't know, were they snatched and taken somewhere else at some point in time, tortured and then brought to this location to be dumped? But that doesn't make sense because they've all got evidence of uptake of water, the same type of water, by the way.
- [69:02]
Joseph Scott Morgan
And kind of along these lines, I know when you're looking to see if there's one or multiple perpetrators, you look for common types of injuries. And I know with respect to these boys, you've already said it many times. It's. It's even hard to know if it's animal predation, just degradation, or, you know, the actual original inflicted wound. Do you have a position on whether an instrument that was used, if it was a knife, if it was, you know, a blunt object, if so, what type of object do you see in terms of the injuries you're seeing across all three?
- [69:32]
Alice
Well, this depressed skull fracture that you're talking about, that's some kind of instrumentality. That's it ain't a knife. And you've got something that was utilized to create a depressed skull fracture. And it's a very impressive fracture, by the way, when you see those images of the reflected scalp. Scalp has been opened and you can see, I think it's in like the left parietal area. I can't recall if it's left or right. But anyway, there's like a depressed skull fracture there. That's not something somebody does with their hands. There's also another interesting kind of presentation as well, and that's these kind of 90 degree angle marks that are on the body. They Almost look like they're connected. You know, when I first saw that, when I first saw that, I can't remember what series of images it is. Let me see if I can find it real quick. Bear with me if I have it right here.
- [70:18]
Joseph Scott Morgan
And when you're seeing these blunt objects, based on the amount of force that would have been used and how hard they are, I mean, are we talking a small, like a handle of something, like a flashlight or a butt of a knife, or are we talking about like a larger branch or a baseball bat or something even larger?
- [70:35]
Alice
Well, the one that's at the 90 degree. Do you know which one I'm talking about, Bret? The. The image of. It's like at a 90 degree hard angle like this. It almost looked like the leading edge of a piece of angle iron that had been like driven down like that and impressed into the skin. So I don't know that I could formulate an opinion beyond that.
- [70:53]
Brett
So the image. I have at least five more questions for you. So I'm sorry, you just have to stay. So the image on the screen you talked about bite marks. So this middle image, this whatever injury right above the eyebrow here is one of the injuries that people have sometimes said they thought was a bite mark. Peretti thought this was a belt buckle. There have been some people who speculated that it's actually the butt of the lake knife, which is what you're looking at. There's this. Basically they're showing how the measurements line up and then you have this X in the middle, which is the thing that made me always think it was mechanical, not some sort of bite mark, not some sort of animal predation.
- [71:36]
Alice
Yeah.
- [71:37]
Brett
Do you have any thoughts?
- [71:39]
Alice
Yeah. It doesn't look like any bite mark I've ever seen the elliptoid shape of at the 5. 5 o' clock position. And I'm talking about the middle image that we're looking at the 5 o' clock position and the 7 o' clock position there, I guess you'd call it. That doesn't look like a standard incisor. They would have to be really odd teeth to create that. And then you've got this. It almost looks like an N, like the letter N, a capital N. When you're looking at it. That's an impressed object that has some kind of pattern on it. Does the hilt of that, the handle of that knife, have that on the inside?
- [72:17]
Brett
Speculation. Is that screw. Well, there was a compass in the. In the butt, which would have had a pin in the middle to hold the spinny spinny arms. It's not there anymore, but it was there during the assault. Take the butt, smash in the face. And that the pin of it leaves that mark. That's the theory, whether it bears any.
- [72:39]
Alice
You know, what's. What's really odd about this is that this may be more than one strike that you're looking at here. And it's almost like a readjustment of the object that's being driven down on here because you've got these two elliptical shapes down here at the bottom, which, again, I don't. In my opinion, I don't see that as a bite mark. You've got a really misshapen mouth, too. If the top we're talking about from the 10, 10 o' clock position all the way to about the 230 position right there, that arcing thing, and then there's a dip in it that this mouth would have to be so misshapen in order to generate a bite mark that would look like that and almost looks like the thing has been readjusted, but there's no underlying contusion. Looking at this thing, like with a strike in life, while somebody like. If you look below, if you look to the right, bottom, right superior to the. That's a contusion right there. It's got kind of a bloody area right there. That is a contusion. That's something that occurred at least, if not in the ante mortem states, certainly in the perimortive state, at minimum, that means that blood is leached out into that area. It's kind of pumped out into the interstitial tissue. Yeah, that's not. I can tell you definitively from my perspective, I've seen bite marks. And again, you can't quantify them. You can qualify them. And I look like any bite mark I've ever seen.
- [74:02]
Brett
So we talked about it, but then we kind of moved on from it. So I want to go back to it. This wound on Stevie Branch, the band on the penis, what do you make of that? If you have any thoughts on it?
- [74:14]
Alice
I can't recall, but I really wonder. And this is going to set. Really. This will set people's teeth on edge. I really wonder if he did a dissection on the penis. I'm referring to Peretti, because if you see something like that, and it is a contusion, you have to. And this is something we do in the. More commonly, you would have to slice down through the penis and to see to what depth the hemorrhage, if it is associated Hemorrhage is discoloration. Just looking at it. If it is an antemortem insult, that could be generated by kick, maybe even a punch, but there's no other associated hemorrhage from what I'm remembering of that image. When you get more proximal. And so it would have to be very, very specific. Maybe a blunted weapon, not an edged weapon. That would create.
- [75:04]
Brett
What if you grabbed and squeezed with that?
- [75:07]
Alice
Yes, it can. It certainly can. And again, if you're talking about a sexual status that be in their cookbook, my thought at least.
- [75:15]
Brett
So, and I hate to keep returning to this because it is gruesome, but the degloving injury, I assume Pareti said that it would have taken him a scalpel and being in his lab to do that. And then it would be very difficult to do, to do it intentionally. So presumably someone's not doing it with a Rambo knife on a ditch bank. So the degloving, what kind of force would it take to do that? To me, the two options are, and I feel like you've gone a long way to debunking the second one are snapping turtle absoln to the scrotum and pulls and in doing so, de gloves a penis. The other would be an incomplete. I called it incomplete castration. Someone grabs and pulls and throws away.
- [76:02]
Alice
You guys call it in law an inchoate offense.
- [76:04]
Brett
There you go. Exactly. I mean, basically. But they, they didn't, they didn't cut all the way through. Right. They went part way and then they ripped off. What kind of force does it take to do that? Could a person do it? Could a turtle do it? What is, what is most likely to have happened here?
- [76:19]
Alice
Yeah, I suppose that a, an animal could do it, but they would have to lay into it and to be. And here's the thing about it, is that with the degloving, it doesn't sound it, but it is very superficial compared to other injuries. Okay. If you're peeling the skin off of somebody, when you think about that, the people have had their skin peeled off, which used to be a method of torture. You're talking about deep. If you're doing that, this is not deep. You're talking about taking maybe down to the upper layer of the dermis. Okay, so epidermis, dermis and your kind of peeling around. If it's incomplete all the way around and it's not what they refer to as circumferential, it could be an incomplete attempt at that by somebody. But I don't know what kind of instrument you would have to use in order to facilitate that. One of the things that I thought about, and there's no indication of that here because you get an associated contusion with a pair of pliers as well if you're trying to torture somebody, like needle nose pliers and kind of rolling the skin back. But this involves a significant portion of the circumference of the shaft of the penis. So my thought would be probably, I've had to list toward the turtle activity being in that area. I don't know if they were. The turtle itself was interrupted or got distracted, maybe decide to move to the testicles or whatever the case might be, because testicles are horribly macerated. In this kid's case, not so much the shaft of the penis. Okay, wait, hang on. Asia tastic, ask a question. That's a great question. Were the bodies in the water long enough to cause skin slippage? Right on the cusp, but I would say probably not. Skin slippage, the skin will come off, it'll peel off, and you generally have to be a bit further along with decomposition for that to happen. Sorry, I didn't mean to step on you and.
- [78:11]
Joseph Scott Morgan
No, that was a good question.
- [78:12]
Brett
Last question on this injury. Is that injury, in your opinion, post mortem, however it happened, was it a postmortem injury?
- [78:22]
Alice
Yeah, there's not a, like a lot of associated hemorrhage which you would see. And again, if you're hedging your bets and you're saying that this is a sadist that's doing this, some sadists are necrophiles as well, so we cannot completely exclude them from tampering with the body in a postmortem state. I think that there's probably a mix of this here. You're incapacitating these children. They're almost dead, like anyway. They're paralyzed with fear. I can go on and on with this. So you can't, you can't dismiss that someone could have had activity with a body after they were dead, Perhaps pulled them out of the water, put them back. I have no idea. But just looking at it, I think that, I don't think this is necessarily something that would have occurred in the ante mortem state before death, because with as macerated as his scrotum was, and if this was done, if this was done in throes of some kind of torture event, you would still have associated massive hemorrhage around this area. And here's something else I'd be very curious to know. When they did the blood draw on these bodies, which you do in every one of these cases, did they have trouble getting blood out of this particular child? What I mean by that is, was there some kind of associated antimortem blood loss eventually with the child? You know, people go on and on about this may have happened in some other location and it didn't happen there. So, you know, I, I just, I'd like to ask and have the question answered. I'm not directing y' all being very broad.
- [79:51]
Brett
Christopher Byers, according to Peretti, died of blood loss. That was one of his statements, was in addition to all the injuries, it was the injuries and it was blood loss. No drowning, but blood loss. So he definitely came to a conclusion that blood was missing in some way. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. You chose to hit play on this podcast today. Smart Choice Progressive loves to help people make smart choices. That's why they offer a tool called Auto Quote Explorer that allows you to compare your Progressive car insurance quote with rates from other companies so you save time on the research and can enjoy savings when you choose the best rate for you.
- [80:36]
Joseph Scott Morgan
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- [81:53]
Brett
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- [82:43]
Joseph Scott Morgan
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Brett
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- [85:12]
Alice
Well, yeah. And so if it's missing, you can have blood that is missing. It's missing from the vascular system. But is it still contained in the chest? Is it contained in the abdomen? Or has there been a bloodletting where, you know, you think about trussing up a hog and when they butcher a hog, they cut the throat, it bleeds out, you remove the carcass and you butcher the hog. At that point in time, blood is left in one location. Is that what they're saying here? Do they think that there is a mass amount of blood somewhere in somebody's vehicle? Is that what they're opining here? That would be a question I would want to ask and have answered specifically, you know, what happened to the blood? And that'd be a big question. So he's saying that contributing factor is. It's a fancy term that doctors use. It's called a sanguination, which means it is massive blood loss, that it impedes the ability to get oxygenated blood to the brain. And so you die as a result of that. It's kind of self explanatory, but that's just some of the verbiage that they use.
- [86:12]
Brett
I was trying to find if I could get his actual testimony on this. This is the whole satanic panic case. So one theory was that the blood was collected for later satanic rituals. So I don't know if you have an opinion on that or not. That was not Peretti. In Freddy's defense, he did not say that.
- [86:31]
Alice
Oh, my God. Okay, y' all are young. When I started work back in the 80s, every freaking case that we worked back then, somebody said it had a ritualistic aspect to it. Hell, we even had Geraldo Rivera come down to our part of the country because there were some deaths that happened and they were trying to say that they were being sacrificed to the dark lord. You had the Scott Waterhouse case up In Maine, where these two kids chose this one kid sacrifice to Satan, I've never put a lot of stock in it. The closest I ever got, I had a former Baptist deacon that created a pentagram in a room, burned black candles and blew his brains out in the middle of the pentagram. I think it was more of an anger thing directed at his ex wife. I don't necessarily buy it that there's Satanists that are running around. Maybe. I guess it's within the realm of possibility that there could be predators that are out there looking to do this. But you have to have. If this is the track that you're going to go down relative to the occult and Satanism and all this stuff, give me all of the proof that you have of this. I want to see it in a linear format. I want to see it laid out spot by spot. Tell me, describe it to me. Tell me specifically and tell me what the requirements were. Are you making up? Is this person making up requirements as they go along? Which you find a lot of people that are unbalanced that say they're worshiping Satan, they make up the ritual as they go along. All right. It varies from person to person. So unless you have something that has substance to it, where you're committing a ritual sacrifice, which I don't know, I've heard that involves the drinking of blood and the removal of organs, you're going to cut their heart out. Well, where did you drain the blood from? You know, where did it come from and how do you know that they drank it? I don't know. It just doesn't make sense. I'm kind of a sciencey guy. I don't lean much into. I'm a good Catholic. I believe in God and God's brought me a lot of peace in my life. And I know that there's evil out there, but I just. In West Memphis, Arkansas, you got. You got a Satanist that's going after three little boys. I don't know. Maybe it happened, you know, I have no idea.
- [88:40]
Joseph Scott Morgan
I'm just curious. You said you know, that was our assessment of the time period as well. You were called into a lot of investigations that involved at least mention of Satanism. Were any of your investigations ultimately ritualistic killings?
- [88:52]
Alice
No, I never had one. I had people that.
- [88:55]
Joseph Scott Morgan
And how many have you done? I know, several hundred. Right.
- [88:57]
Alice
What's that?
- [88:58]
Joseph Scott Morgan
Investigations.
- [88:59]
Alice
Oh, I thought you meant how many homicides had I committed personally.
- [89:02]
Joseph Scott Morgan
Yeah, well, that too, but you don't have to say it now. We'll do it after we are.
- [89:05]
Alice
No, this is just broad spectrum because I cover all manners of death because I work for the M.E. and the coroner. So we cover all the deaths. So thousands. Thousands.
- [89:17]
Brett
None of them were ever sacrifices. I'm very disappointed.
- [89:20]
Alice
No.
- [89:21]
Joseph Scott Morgan
Yeah.
- [89:24]
Alice
I started out in New Orleans, the home of voodoo and Santeria, and there were people that actively practiced voodoo. People think it's a joke, but they take it. Doesn't matter if you take it seriously, they take it seriously. So I gave them a lot of latitude if I was ever in a social situation where I would be around people that were involved in it. All due respect, man, I don't want to get the grigri put on me, but I never saw somebody practicing voodoo or santeria that was involved in this sort of thing. No, I've never encountered that.
- [89:57]
Brett
Okay, well, I think we've kept you long enough. I'm going to give the people in the chat one last opportunity. If you have any last question while Alice is. Is asking her.
- [90:03]
Joseph Scott Morgan
While they're asking. I'm gonna ask this last one and we have to ask it. Of course.
- [90:07]
Alice
Yeah.
- [90:08]
Joseph Scott Morgan
You've looked at pictures, you've looked at the autopsy reports. You've looked at a lot more firsthand information than most people who are making documentaries and commenting on this and making 60 Minutes episodes or whatnot. Not holding you to it because there are legions of people coming up with their own theories. But having looked at this information, do you have a theory as to what happened to these boys?
- [90:33]
Alice
Well, yeah, I think that first off, there is a tremendous amount of anger and hatred that was directed at least one of these children and other kids. I don't know if they were. I hate to say they just happened to be in the wrong place, the wrong time. I don't want to devalue them in any way, but you've got somebody that is really sick and twisted because this takes so much effort to do this. If you're talking about this case being a case involving drowning as a modality of death, this takes this to a completely different level. Okay. Now, again, it's combined with blunt force trauma and blood loss and all these sorts of things as well. But specifically, if you're incapacitating a child to the point where you're binding them and you're putting them in the water where you know that they're not going to survive, that's a sadist. Not a Satanist, but a sadist that would do this. Somebody that would have to have a tremendous amount of anger. I think it was somebody that derived Pleasure from it too, because it was so provocative, the positions these boys were in. And we can't forget. They found. They found the clothing. There's two pair of underpants missing, I think, if that's correct.
- [91:43]
Brett
Yes. Two under five socks.
- [91:46]
Alice
Yeah. Underwear in specific. Has meaning to it, I think out of everything. Unless it's just tossed away and no one happened to find it. I don't know. They didn't secure the scene. So how. How do I know? I don't know. But who knows what happened to that. But I'm hopeful. I'm hopeful that whatever they collected at the scene. We're in a brave new world, Othram. We're in a brave new world now relative to genetics. And I'm truly hoping that. That they're going to be able to glean some information all these years later because there have been other cases that have been solved with DNA evidence. And again, I don't know everything that they have and I also don't know out of the stuff that they have, how well has it been taken care of? Because you guys have practiced law for a long time. I don't know if you guys have had an opportunity to go to evidence rooms at any point in time, but when you go to evidence rooms, there do you have. They run the gamut. You'll have places that are Spartan. It looks like the Marine Corps runs these places. Okay. Then there are other places that look like the clowns from Barnum and Bailey run it. I've seen fungus growing in places. I've seen other places that you could eat off the floor. Not that you would want to. So after 30 years, what do they have left that could potentially be tested? And that's what my big hope is because I think that whoever perpetrated this because there's a sexual component, I'd be looking for somebody that has or had a taste for boys this age that had sadistic tendencies. And I would think that they've perpetrated before.
- [93:18]
Brett
Well, they're doing some DNA testing and they're going to do some supposedly. Eventually we'll find out. One question has come from the chat which I should have asked you and I didn't ask you, but I'll ask it to you now if you'll give me two more minutes. So there are, to all the boys, ears and there are injuries to the inside of their mouths, including their tongues. Bruising. Things that appear to have happened while they were still alive. One theory of the prosecution was this was possibly forced oral sex.
- [93:44]
Alice
Do you have an opinion I'd agree with that. Yeah, I'd agree with that. And it's so disgusting where you've got. There's a couple of images that I saw where they've reflected the lips down and you can kind of see what they're referring to there. And people think that it's a joke relative to the movie Deliverance where, you know, squeal like a pig, that sort of thing, and he grabs the ears. That's kind of a real thing that has happened in the past where you control somebody. And if anybody ever had a. Has ever seen anybody grab somebody by an ear, you can make them do just about anything you want them to do. And if you got bilateral bruising and you're inflicting pain, again, we're back to this idea of sadism where you're inflicting pain and you're forcing oral sex on these precious little boys like this. Again, it just puts this at another level relative to who the perpetrator is and what was done. I'm really wondering if. And certainly they have, because I know that Douglas has gotten involved in this some years back, John Douglas, that is. I would assume that BSU and Quantico has been consulted on this, hopefully multiple times, that they've written out the profile of who the perpetrator is, and they would be looking for similarities in other cases if they put their weight behind it.
- [95:00]
Brett
Well, look, I really appreciate you coming on and being so generous with your time. Incredible. I hope everyone who's listening will go listen to Body Bags. People in the chat have all have already subscribed, so you got some new subscribers tonight, if nothing else. If you guys out there listening to this and you have specific questions, you want us to shoot to the doc, we can do that. And obviously we want to have you back sometime before we sign off. Is there anything else you want to add?
- [95:27]
Alice
Yeah, I mean, if you believe in prayer for the. Pray for the survivors. This is not something. I can tell you this as an old death investigator. With cases like this, you don't hear about these stories. But I'll leave you with this little story just so that you guys understand the world that I formerly inhabited. You hear about things when it makes it through the news cycle. We cover them every day in the media. I do it on Body Bags. And then people kind of forget. But you forget about the people that are sitting around a table and there's an empty chair and that pain there is. The biggest lie that American culture has been sold is the idea of closure. There is no Such thing as closure. Not with homicides and suicides, not with motor vehicle accidents. It's a lie. Do not believe it. Because if you buy into the lie of closure, it's a quick way of dismissing people's feelings about things and how it really impacts them. What they feel is real. These families, no matter how fractured they were. That's not for us to judge. There will always be an empty chair at Christmas time and at Thanksgiving. You can't get these babies back. You can never do that. Those people require a certain amount of compassion that still exists. And even the police that had to go down there and work this thing, the coroner that had to go down because this is something that will never be extricated from their minds. You know, I've got thousands of these cases that roll through my brain all the time. It's kind of the way I am. Explains a lot. Always remember those families, you know, relative to this. And I do hope the peace that will be found is getting this person that is responsible for this. And I'm hoping again, I just hope against hope that something will happen that will tip the scales. That is going to be related to science where you can have definitive proof. It's not going to be bite marks. That's gone the way of the dodo bird. Now you can go ahead and strike that off the list. It's going to rely on hard quantitative science and that could be the answer. I just hope it wasn't screwed up so bad at the beginning that you've lost everything.
- [97:30]
Joseph Scott Morgan
All right, thank you so much for. I mean, truly, this has been a really tough episode, but you handled it with such care. And thank you for bringing it back to the reality of this. You said you're an advocate for dead people, but I think you're also an incredible advocate for their loved ones as well. So thank you.
- [97:44]
Alice
Well, thank you guys and thanks for everybody that joined us tonight. You guys come on over and listen to Body Bags when you're not listening to prosecutors. The number one, the best clue award winning prosecutors.
- [97:56]
Joseph Scott Morgan
Can we just say Alabama might have a corner on. Great.
- [97:59]
Brett
There you go. State for podcast. That's right.
- [98:03]
Alice
Go on over to Apple and give me a review. There you go. Yes, I'll be mercenary here. Go to Apple, I beg you, please. All right, you guys take care.
- [98:13]
Brett
Thank you guys for joining us. I think this was incredibly enlightening. We will be talking more about this case next week, but until then, I'm Brett.
- [98:23]
Joseph Scott Morgan
And I'm Alice.
- [98:24]
Alice
And I'm Joseph. Scott Morgan.
- [98:26]
Brett
And this is the prosecutors.
- [98:50]
Joseph Scott Morgan
Yes. You've heard about this? It's kind of been sprinkled throughout the last 10 episodes or so. But the theory of turtle predation basically came about during the 1994 trials when Dr. Frank.
- [99:02]
Brett
Okay, ready? After the 1994 trials.
- [99:04]
Joseph Scott Morgan
Actually, it came after. You're right.
- [99:05]
Brett
Timeline strike.
- [99:07]
Joseph Scott Morgan
You know, her timeline.
- [99:09]
Brett
Barely functioning.
- [99:10]
Joseph Scott Morgan
I could barely hear. You're doing great.
- [99:13]
Brett
Oh, is it still me? It's you now.
- [99:15]
Joseph Scott Morgan
Is it me?
- [99:16]
Brett
It's you. Alice is barely with us. Guys.
- [99:44]
Joseph Scott Morgan
Sam. Okay. No, no, no. You're right, you're right, you're right. Sorry. I was still. I was still stuck on the chart. I'm sorry. I was still stuck on the chart. You're right. Everything's working. Don't worry. Accepting small amount of extravase. I don't know how to say that. Extravasated. Okay, we're gonna go with that. So you're gonna look for lack of bleeding from bitten tissue. Accepting small amount of extravasant. Oh, man.
- [100:45]
Brett
I think it's.
- [100:46]
Joseph Scott Morgan
It's escaping me how to say this. Extravasated.
- [100:50]
Brett
Extravasated.
- [100:51]
Joseph Scott Morgan
I mean, no, it's not right.
- [100:52]
Brett
Can they use a different word? It looks like extravas, right?
- [100:56]
Joseph Scott Morgan
It's not extravas, Sam.
- [101:27]
Alice
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Brett
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Alice
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Brett
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Alice
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Brett
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Alice
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- [101:52]
Brett
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- [101:54]
Alice
Pay never.