Falsehoods and Chaos

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Unforgotten — Season 4, Episode 4: “Falsehoods and Chaos”
Podcast: The Unforgotten
Episode Title: Falsehoods and Chaos
Date: December 29, 2025
Host: Wes Ferguson
Contributors: Charlie Scudder, Jonah Evans, Dr. Kendall Crowns, Robert Whiteley

Episode Overview

This episode dives into the confusion, controversy, and institutional chaos swirling around the investigation of Christopher Whiteley’s death in Hood County, Texas—a death swiftly ruled a mountain-lion attack despite glaring gaps in evidence. Host Wes Ferguson and journalist Charlie Scudder pick apart the official narrative, dissect the rare reality of mountain lion attacks in Texas, and expose how overlapping scandals, pandemic protocols, and human error at the Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office may have undermined the search for truth. The episode also explores the role of bias and the impact of Christopher’s criminal background on the thoroughness of the investigation.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Initial Investigation & Skepticism

• Timeline: Christopher’s body was found outside Lipan; a month and a half later, Hood County Sheriff’s Office closed the case, attributing the cause to a mountain lion attack ([00:30]).
• Charlie Scudder’s Digging: Charlie requests records, interviews family, and quickly finds oddities: “I also started reading as much as I could about mountain lions, and I learned really quickly a couple big things about mountain lions, which also made it weirder and weirder and weirder.” ([02:10])

2. The Rarity of Mountain Lion Attacks in Texas

• Expert Input:
  • Jonah Evans, Texas Parks & Wildlife:
    • “Mountain lion attacks on people are extremely rare. Right. Like, it just doesn't happen.” ([02:39])
    • No record of fatal mountain lion attacks on humans in Texas history; only two confirmed non-fatal attacks, both in Big Bend ([02:56]).
    • Emphasizes the abundance of supposed sighting reports, most of which are incorrect: “90% of the time, it's a house cat... 1% of the time is it a mountain lion.” ([05:46])
  • No Confirmed Sightings in Hood County: “We don't have any record of a mountain lion ever in Hood County.” ([04:51])

3. Media Hype & Recent Sightings Blurring the Narrative

• Rowlett Sighting (Dallas County): Security camera footage confirmed a mountain lion—the first official sighting in Dallas County ([07:06]).
• Princeton Sighting: Days later, the same mountain lion appeared 25 miles north, featured heavily in news media. Shortly after, a deer hunter shot the mountain lion not far from this second sighting ([09:10]).
• Distance and Improbability:
  • “Could a mountain lion really travel 100 miles from Rowlett, where it was spotted, to laipan, where Christopher was killed?” ([08:11])
  • Jonah Evans dismisses the theory: The lion was heading north, not toward Lipan ([08:32]).
• Host Observation: Mountains lions were fresh in everyone’s minds, possibly influencing official thinking ([10:31]).

4. Absence of Forensic Evidence for Animal Attack

• Charlie Scudder:
  • “There were no tracks. There was no scat. There was no evidence of predation on the body itself. So all of those things mounted up like, it just seemed odd that this could be a mountain lion.” ([10:13])
• Speculation about Other Big Cats: Even joked about “Tiger King” and stray tigers, but experts found nothing to support any animal attack theory ([10:35]).

5. Sheriff’s Office Perspective & Defensive Closure

• Hood County Sheriff's Office:
  • Charlie describes the department as small and overworked. Johnny Rose, lieutenant and chief spokesman, told Charlie: “No, yep, we're done. Like, no real excuse given, no real sense of, you know, responsibility beyond. We checked it out. We're good.” ([11:38])
• Autopsy Outsourced: Body sent to Tarrant County Medical Examiner, which quickly ruled an animal attack and case was closed ([12:18]).

6. The Medical Examiner’s Office in Turmoil

• COVID-19 Pandemic Effects: Refrigerated trucks for bodies, slowed operations, rigorous PPE protocols, bleaching bodies—which destroyed potential DNA evidence ([13:18], [14:10]).
• Scandals and Distrust:
  • Deputy Medical Examiner Dr. Mark Kraus suspended for falsifying autopsy reports—“looked at 41 cases and ended up finding issues in 27 of them.” ([15:31])
  • Errors included misattributing homicide causes, raising suspicions about whole office ([16:05], [16:39]).
  • Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Nizam Pirwani later resigned after being found to have given false/misleading testimony in a murder trial, resulting in a new trial for a death row inmate ([18:34]).

7. Potential for Confirmation Bias

• Influence of Provided Context: Medical examiners rely on information provided by law enforcement.
• Charlie Scudder:
  • “From moment one, investigators in Hood county said, oh, this must be a mountain lion, and shut themselves off to any other possibilities. Made it very hard to change that track.” ([20:50])
• No Direct Evidence of Fault in Christopher’s Autopsy: Procedures adhered to, but the surrounding chaos likely contributed to the rapid closure ([21:28]).

8. Forensic Mystery: What Actually Killed Christopher?

• Photos Show Bizarre Wounds:
  • “It’s unlike anything I’ve seen before.” ([25:10])
  • Not a slice or knife wound. Not canine -, feline-, or machine-made apparent. “It didn't look like a bite. It looked like a tear. Like a rip and a tear.” ([26:38])
• Dog or Human Involvement Ruled Unlikely—But Not Impossible:
  • Dog bite expert: Wound too big for domestic dog ([27:05]).
  • Medical examiner Dr. Kendall Crowns: “It does not look like a domestic dog at all, but it does look like a big bite mark.” ([27:44])
  • Crowns: “It could be suicide, accident, or homicide. And that would be based on the scene investigation. I think that's where you get people kind of backing off because they don't know how it happened.” ([28:53])
  • Crowns is later appointed as the new Tarrant County chief medical examiner, underscoring the insularity of Texas forensics ([29:13]).

9. Family Perspective & Allegations of Bias

• Robert Whiteley (Christopher’s father):
  • Deep frustration, believes Sheriff’s Office didn’t investigate fully due to Christopher’s criminal record ([30:12]).
  • Suspects cover-up or willful neglect: “They considered him as a convict or a felon, and they weren't gonna do nothing about it. … They didn't give a crap about him.” ([30:25])
  • Offers his own theory: Christopher was killed, a dog attack staged, and his shirt with possible DNA evidence was taken by the killer ([31:02]).

10. Law Enforcement’s Justification

• Lt. Johnny Rose:
  • Asserts they would have pursued murder if there was “one little thing” indicating it, but rationalizes the decision by referencing Christopher’s “poor life decisions” ([32:26], [33:35]).
  • Wes remains skeptical: “That’s kind of beside the point, right? Whether you care about Christopher Whiteley or not, an unknown killer is a danger to all of us.” ([33:37])

11. Lingering Questions

• Unanswered questions persist about the moments before Christopher’s death, the people involved, and what really happened if not an animal attack ([33:37]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the Rarity of Mountain Lion Attacks

  • Jonah Evans: “More people are killed by bee stings by orders of magnitude than are killed by mountain lions.” ([04:11])

• On the Tarrant County Scandal

  • Charlie Scudder: “They looked at 41 cases and ended up finding issues in 27 of them.” ([15:31])

• On Forensic Ambiguity

  • Charlie Scudder: “It’s unlike anything I’ve seen before.” ([25:10])
  • Dr. Crowns: “It does not look like a domestic dog at all, but it does look like a big bite mark.” ([27:44])
  • Dr. Crowns: “You’ve got sharp horse injuries. It could be suicide, accident, or homicide. And that would be based on the scene investigation. I think that's where you get people kind of backing off because they don't know how it happened.” ([28:53])

• Raw Family Pain and Accusation

  • Robert Whiteley: “They considered him as a convict or a felon, and they weren’t gonna do nothing about it. … They didn't give a crap about him.” ([30:25])

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [02:10]: Charlie realizes mountain lion theory doesn’t add up
• [02:56]: Jonah Evans on rare attacks and confirmed sightings
• [07:06]: Discussion of the Rowlett mountain lion sighting
• [10:13]: Absence of animal attack evidence
• [12:18] – [19:45]: Dissection of medical examiner scandal, COVID pressures
• [25:10]: Charlie's reaction to Christopher’s wounds
• [27:44]: Dr. Crowns’s forensic analysis
• [30:12]: Robert Whiteley’s criticism of the investigation
• [32:26]: Lt. Johnny Rose’s defense of case closure

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Tone and Language

The episode combines measured investigative rigor with frustration and pathos. Speakers maintain a matter-of-fact, journalistic tone with occasional emotional undercurrents, particularly evident in family interviews and discussion of institutional failures. Quotes and exchanges often feature the speakers’ plainspoken, matter-of-fact style, sometimes colored by disbelief, exasperation, or exhaustion.

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Summary: Takeaways for Unheard Listeners

This episode of The Unforgotten unpacks how official narratives can quickly cement in a swirl of media hype, institutional chaos, and implicit bias—especially when a marginalized victim is involved. Despite the absence of clear animal attack evidence and the presence of unmatched forensic anomalies, authorities seized on a mountain lion explanation and never seriously revisited it. Widespread chaos at the medical examiner’s office, compounded by pandemic chaos, questionable autopsy reliability, and possible prejudice against Christopher due to his criminal history, all cast further doubt on the official story—with the truth of Christopher Whiteley’s fate still out of reach.

Transcript

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[Charlie Scudder]

In between.

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[Wes Ferguson]

If you haven't signed up for it yet, head on over to unforgottenpod.com to sign up for our newsletter. We have a totally free version where we share links to each episode along with photos, case files and more. We also have a premium version where you can get episodes early and ad free. That's unforgottenpod.com It's January 26, 2021, and it's been about a month and a half since Christopher Whiteley's body was found in the woods outside Laipan. The Hood County Sheriff's office has just closed its case, although we still don't really know what happened to Christopher in the woods that morning.

[Charlie Scudder]

At that point, I was like, okay, we gotta look at this.

[Wes Ferguson]

That's Charlie Scudder again, digging in. He was about to uncover how the investigation into one man's death collided with a moment of extraordinary chaos and how all the controversy may have undermined the search for truth and the search for a killer. From Free Range Productions in association with the Dallas Morning News, this is season four of the Unforgotten Kill site. I'm your host, Wes Ferguson, and this is episode four, falsehoods and Chaos. Charlie's filing all these requests for public records so he can get his hands on the case files, the autopsy, and the other documents he needs to try to find out what really happened to Christopher. He talks to Christopher's family members, and he tries to speak with Christopher's girlfriend Tyler, who was with him the night before he disappeared.

[Charlie Scudder]

I also started reading as much as I could about mountain lions, and I learned really quickly a couple big things about mountain lions, which also made it weirder and weirder and weirder.

[Wes Ferguson]

So I know I've mentioned a few times that there has never been a fatal mountain lion attack on a human in Texas history. And that's very true, but it's not outside the realm of possibility. If you go back over the last hundred years, across the entire United States, but mostly out west, cougars have killed 20 or 30 people.

[Jonah Evans]

Mountain lion attacks on people are extremely rare. Right. Like, it just doesn't happen.

[Wes Ferguson]

This is Jonah Evans for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, the same guy you heard from in the last episode. He was interviewed By Charlie for the Dallas Morning News.

[Jonah Evans]

Now, it's very common for law enforcement to send me things like, hey, this person says a mountain lion killed their dog. Do you think that happened? We've had two situations in the state since I've been with the state where we've had confirmed mountain lion attacks on people. Both were in Big Bend National Park. One was a very old, sick mountain lion, an old female that was starving and jumped out in a campground and attacked a four year old boy. The dad fought it off and boy got some, you know, got some injuries, had to get some stitches on his face, maybe like 20 stitches. He got cut up. They went in and, you know, hunted down the mountain lion and killed it. Another one was an ultra runner a couple years later who a female ultra runner running with a group of people and had a mountain lion kind of jump out and she fought it off with her friends. They finished their, you know, hundred mile run, reported it, refused any medical care and went home and just, you know, apparently she's ultra running and fighting off mountain lions are all in a day's work for whoever this was. I mean, whoever that is, you know, good luck to the mugger that tries to jump out, you know.

[Dr. Kendall Crowns]

Right.

[Charlie Scudder]

Why do you think we are as a culture, I guess, so fascinated by big predators like this?

[Jonah Evans]

You know, it could be evolutionary, it could be that, you know, humans evolved with big predators and big things with teeth are scary and they can eat you. And I mean, you know, there's things like tigers and other kinds of, you know, large predators that have eaten people for a long time. And so I think it's just about basic survival. But keep in mind, we tend to overemphasize the threat of large predators. More people are killed by bee stings by orders of magnitude than are killed by mountain lions. The other thing I will touch on is we don't have any record of a mountain lion ever in Hood County.

[Wes Ferguson]

I'm sure you're aware of this by now, but Hood county is where the sheriff's office said Christopher was mauled to death by a mountain lion.

[Jonah Evans]

Now, mountain lions can travel really long distances. It's certainly possible for one to turn up there. If I had evaluated this whole scene in the middle of a county that had to 200 lions in it, I would have come to the exact same conclusion just as quickly as I came to this conclusion. But it's also important to note that on top of everything else, there's this fact that we've had no records of confirmed mountain lions.

[Wes Ferguson]

There this is pretty controversial, actually. So many folks like you or me think we've seen a mountain lion in the woods or a field or wherever. And then we call Parks and Wildlife, and they say it doesn't count unless we can prove kind of ruffles people's feathers. But there's a good reason for Parks and Wildlife to be so particular.

[Jonah Evans]

In my job, everybody who thinks they saw a mountain lion in the state calls me, right? So my phone's ringing all the time. I think I saw a mountain lion. If I ask if they got a photo and they say, oh, yeah, I have a photo of it, I'll send it to you. 90% of the time, it's a house cat. 5, you know, 10% of the time, it's A domestic dog. 1% of the time is it a mountain lion. And so given that, when someone calls and says, I saw a mountain lion and I don't have a photo, what do I do with that? Right? All I can say is I. Given the accuracy rate from the rest of the public, I don't know if this is accurate or not. But what I do know is if I start digging around and asking people in my town if they think they've seen a mountain lion, if they know someone who's seen a mountain lion, I. I will quickly be able to build up a big, long list of people who think they've seen mountain lions. And that's why we are very careful to write down confirmed sightings. I mean, everybody has trail cameras up for deer hunting now. We get so many reports from deer cameras and things like that. So that's really made a big difference in our ability to track the distribution of this animal. But I just want that to be clear, that I do not consider anecdotal reports as much as the way of evidence.

[Charlie Scudder]

Speaking of that. So this was all happening when that confirmed sighting was found in Rowlett?

[Jonah Evans]

Yeah.

[Wes Ferguson]

Rowlett is a suburb in Dallas county, right on the shores of Lake Ray Hubbard. And it would have nothing to do with Christopher WH's case if the town hadn't been in the news right before he died. Dallas county had an extremely rare visitor last week.

[Charlie Scudder]

But it's the kind of visitor that.

[Wes Ferguson]

Honestly would maybe give some of you the chills. On a Sunday night in late November, a security camera at a house in Rowlett captured video of a cat walking near the lake. This time, though, it wasn't a house cat. They had a long tail dragging the ground. So it wasn't a bobcat either. This was a real Mountain lion, the first confirmed lion sighting in Dallas county history. Parks and wildlife employees even found mountain lion tracks to back up their suspicions. They said it was probably a juvenile male and was just passing through, maybe looking for feral hogs.

[Charlie Scudder]

We wrote a story about that, too. Yeah, it was a big deal.

[Jonah Evans]

Yeah, we had that Rowlett lion show up. It was all over the news. Lots and lots of articles. It was definitely fresh in people's minds.

[Wes Ferguson]

Could a mountain lion really travel 100 miles from Rowlett, where it was spotted, to laipan, where Christopher was killed?

[Jonah Evans]

Not an unheard of distance for a lion to move if it's going in some crazy direction. Also between that distance was Dallas and Fort Worth. It was 100 miles as the crow flies. For a mountain lion, it would be way longer to go around the cities.

[Wes Ferguson]

But this mountain lion wasn't heading south or west to laipan. It was making its way north, and it was about to make an even bigger splash.

[Robert Whiteley]

I was in this car. I'm sitting out here, just taking a breather.

[Wes Ferguson]

This is a resident of Princeton, Texas, named Jovan Humphrey, talking to local TV stations. Jovan is sitting in her car out in her carport late at night. In the corner of her eye, she thinks she sees one of her kids.

[Charlie Scudder]

I let the window down like this.

[Robert Whiteley]

And when I turned over to look.

[Charlie Scudder]

I was like, that's other kids. I said, oh, my God.

[Robert Whiteley]

I was in disbelief. And then it turned into shock.

[Wes Ferguson]

It was the same mountain lion caught on the security camera in Rowlett. This time it was 25 miles north in Princeton, walking past Jovan's car, looking at me.

[Charlie Scudder]

And at this point, I'm shrieking.

[Robert Whiteley]

And I was like, oh, no.

[Charlie Scudder]

I said, oh, my God.

[Wes Ferguson]

Jovan calls a 911 dispatcher.

[Robert Whiteley]

There is a mountain light in my backyard.

[Charlie Scudder]

And she says, like that. And I said, there's a mountain light in my backyard.

[Wes Ferguson]

This is big news.

[Charlie Scudder]

It's national geographic in here sometime, and.

[Wes Ferguson]

It'S literally in the headlines and on the airwaves right when Christopher is found mauled to death. Could it have been the same mountain lion? That's what a lot of people were wondering. But it defies reason that a mountain lion would have crossed through the Dallas Fort Worth metroplex when it could have just kept heading north. And sure enough, a week later, a deer hunter shot that same mountain lion not too far from where Jovan Humphrey saw it in her carport.

[Charlie Scudder]

Hours. Drive away. Hours, hours and hours.

[Wes Ferguson]

Not to mention the lack of evidence tying Christopher's death to a lion.

[Charlie Scudder]

Anyway, there were no tracks. There was no scat. There was no evidence of predation on the body itself. So all of those things mounted up like, it just seemed odd that this could be a mountain lion.

[Wes Ferguson]

Is it possible the sheriff's office just had big cats on the brain?

[Charlie Scudder]

And I remember even at the time, like, this was in the months after the Tiger King documentary dropped. So I even thought, oh, my God, I wonder if there's one of those tiger people out there. And a tiger got loose. Like, I even went through that in my head and tried checking that out with wildlife experts and that kind of thing. And it's same thing like, it just nothing matched an animal attack of an animal that we know of.

[Wes Ferguson]

And I'm sure in your reporting, you know, you called the local sheriff's office, you were talking to these people that were standing by this, you know, mountain lion attack theory or wild animal attack theory. What was the sense you got from them about how they were when they were standing by that theory?

[Charlie Scudder]

They stuck by it.

[Wes Ferguson]

Charlie was primarily talking with Johnny Rose, who worked for the sheriff's office at the time and was doing double duty as a lieutenant and the chief spokesman.

[Charlie Scudder]

So it was a small department kind of. People did multiple things. And he was very frank about just like, no, yep, we're done. Like, no real excuse given, no real sense of, you know, responsibility beyond. We checked it out. We're good. And part of that was that they had sent it to the Tarrant county medical examiner's office. So Hood county sent the body to Fort Worth to get an autopsy. And for a number of reasons, it was also very quickly, wipe our hands, animal attack. Cool, let's move on.

[Wes Ferguson]

But what Charlie was starting to learn was that the Tarrant county medical examiner's office was dealing with its own set of crises.

[Charlie Scudder]

It was in the middle of COVID They were slammed. They were being accused of falsifying death reports.

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[Charlie Scudder]

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[Wes Ferguson]

In between.

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[Wes Ferguson]

Ugh. Covid.

[Charlie Scudder]

Like, it's hard to, you know, five years out, six years out. Think about it that way. But, like, the stress of COVID on the entire medical system, healthcare system, including medical examiner's office, was extreme. This was not long after the refrigerated trucks sent to help keep bodies stable left the medical examiner's office. They were slammed with an influx of bodies both in Tarrant county and in surrounding counties. Things were slowed down tremendously because of the pandemic, because of protocols that were put in place. I think we talked about, like, one of those protocols included bleaching the bodies.

[Wes Ferguson]

Now, we told you in episode three that Christopher's body was bleached, destroying any potential DNA evidence. But there's more context to that.

[Charlie Scudder]

It also meant, like, you know, donning PPE and not just masks, but, like, the full suits, right. To be able to go into an examination room for an autopsy, it. So that slowed things down. We all had to wear masks, and there were some people upset about that. But these are people who, day in, day out, had to constantly be donning and doffing these, you know, PPE suits. Made them look like spacemen, you know, and part of that was because the science of it, especially in early pandemic, we didn't know, right? Like, did we need to bleach it? Did we need. I remember there was a time where we were bleaching our countertops. We were bleaching vegetables. Like, we didn't know what we needed to do and what was over the top. And the same was true in these kinds of labs, right? Like, we just didn't know what we needed to do or not do to be safe.

[Wes Ferguson]

But Covid stress was just one problem, because at that exact moment, the medical examiner's office was dealing with multiple overlapping scandals. Just months before Christopher died, a deputy medical examiner had been suspended for falsifying autopsy reports.

[Charlie Scudder]

So one of the big issues was that a deputy medical examiner named Dr. Mark Kraus was suspended for misleading information. And a bunch of different issues in autopsies dealing with homicides, omissions, lapses, basically manufacturing information, all kinds of problems. Which meant there was a lot of these autopsies that went through. I think they. They looked at 41 cases and ended up finding issues in 27 of them.

[Dr. Kendall Crowns]

Oh, my God.

[Charlie Scudder]

Yeah. That Kraus did that basically falsified information. There were issues about attributing deaths to gunshot wounds that weren't related or vice versa. There were issues of attributing deaths to the wrong thing in homicide cases, Right? Like, these are big errors.

[Wes Ferguson]

27 out of 41 cases. And these weren't just any cases. These were homicides. People had gone to prison based on Dr. Krause's testimony.

[Charlie Scudder]

Kraus had been working there since 1978. He'd been there a really long time. He was kind of the right hand man in the office to the chief medical examiner, a guy named Nizam Perlani. But Kraus, the fact that this audit again in 2020 found these egregious errors raised questions for defense attorneys about any homicide that he looked at over his entire career. If we can't trust that this was actually a homicide, like, what does this mean for all of the people that have been sent to prison over these years? So there were those kinds of egregious errors. It led to questions about how all autopsies were being done in the office. Again, this is one doctor in particular, but it led to a lot of scrutiny on the entire office.

[Wes Ferguson]

As we've mentioned earlier, Hood county contracted with Tarrant county to perform all of its autopsies. But Tarrant county was also the go to for a bunch of other counties throughout that part of Texas.

[Charlie Scudder]

So that was another thing that was happening at that time, is that all of these other counties outside of Tarrant county were sending more and more bodies to this office. They're down a deputy medical examiner because Kraus has been suspended at that time. Ultimately, he was fired.

[Wes Ferguson]

The troubles didn't stop with Dr. Kraus. His boss, the chief medical examiner was also about to get swept up in a scandal of his own making.

[Charlie Scudder]

The chief medical examiner at the time was Dr. Nizam Perwani. Very well respected in the field, longtime guy in Tarrant County. He did the autopsies for the people who died at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco back in the 90s. Like I said, had been there a very long time. It was kind of a fixture.

[Wes Ferguson]

So Dr. Pirwani suspends and ultimately fires his number two deputy for a long string of errors and falsehoods. Then Dr. Pirwani gets himself in trouble when testifying in the case of a Fort Worth murder suspect. This guy was accused of breaking into the house of an 89 year old man, robbing him, binding him with duct tape, and allegedly killing him. But a judge found that Dr. Pirwani made at least 10 false, inaccurate or misleading statements during his testimony. The false testimony was so damaging, the murder case was overturned.

[Charlie Scudder]

Pirwani testified to this in court and the judge had to say that it was false and misleading and led to a new trial for somebody who was on death row. And that, on top of the Kraus scandal, ultimately forced Pirani out of his office. He ended up resigning in April of 2021, in part because of these scandals. So all of this stuff is happening at the exact same time that Christopher's body comes in.

[Wes Ferguson]

So picture this refrigerated trucks, COVID protocols, a deputy medical examiner suspended for falsifying reports. The chief medical examiner accused of false testimony, increased caseload from surrounding counties. And into this chaos arrives Christopher Whiteley's body.

[Charlie Scudder]

So there were several deputy medical examiners. Kraus was one, but the other medical examiner is pulling double duty, basically.

[Wes Ferguson]

And that was Susan Rowe.

[Charlie Scudder]

Yes, Susan Rowe. So she had her cases, the increase of cases because of COVID and now they're having to split duties among fewer people because they're down a deputy medical examiner.

[Wes Ferguson]

Unfortunately, Dr. Rowe declined to speak with Charlie. She no longer works for the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office. We've also reached out to Dr. Rowe and would love to hear back from her. Do you think that the medical examiner's office was also jumping to conclusions because Hood county had told them it was a mountain lion attack?

[Charlie Scudder]

Yes and no. So medical examiners are just like people, Right. They can be biased by the information they get. And when Hood county calls in and says, hey, we're pretty sure this is an animal attack, that goes on the paper first. And it's hard to change that. From moment one, investigators in Hood county said, oh, this must be a mountain lion, and shut themselves off to any other possibilities. Made it very hard to change that track.

[Wes Ferguson]

It's important to point out, though, that there's no direct evidence that the chaos affected Susan Roe's ability to correctly perform Christopher's autopsy.

[Charlie Scudder]

She checked all the boxes she was supposed to check. She followed the procedures that were supposed to be followed, including the washing of the body. At this point, it is a bit of conjecture. It would be irresponsible for us to say that it definitely had an impact.

[Robert Whiteley]

Right, right.

[Charlie Scudder]

But contextually, you have to understand that there's all these scandals swirling, there's all of this extra work to be done. And the fact that Christopher's body comes in. Sheriff's deputies already say, we already think it's this. We're going to go ahead and call it. Cool. Great. In and out. There were several other examples like that, several other low profile cases where there was a questionable result from the medical examiner's office during that year or so. None of them were on their own enough to make a story. All of them were just, huh, that's interesting, but not news. Private deaths, you know, but again, when they start to stack up like that, it's hard for it to not be relevant.

[Wes Ferguson]

By my estimation, the outside controversies swirling around also might explain why Jonah and his fellow mountain lion expert, Mike Bodenchuk found the team of medical examiners to be so defensive and so focused on their public image during that tense meeting in front of Christopher's body. It also could explain why they were so quick to pivot from the initial theory that a mountain lion killed Christopher to their new conclusion that a dog ripped open his throat. When it comes to holiday gift giving, I want to give things people really love. Beautiful, timeless pieces they'll wear for years. That's why I'm going with Quince. From Mongolian cashmere sweaters to Italian wool coats, everything is premium quality at a price that actually makes sense. Quince has something for everyone. Soft Mongolian cashmere sweaters for $50 that look and feel like designer pieces. Silk tops and skirts for dressing up, perfectly cut denim for everyday wear and outerwear that actually keeps you warm. We just had our first little cold front in Texas, so I broke out my quint sweater, and it's so soft I can't get enough of it. And I know it's about to get a lot more use with the holidays right around the corner. Find gifts so good you'll want to keep them with quince. Go to quince.com unforgotten for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N c-e.com unforgotten to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quence.com unforgotten what do you think happened?

[Charlie Scudder]

You know, when I initially wrote the story, I kind of. I had an answer in my head of like, I don't know. I don't know. I do not have enough information to say definitively one way or another today. Looking back on it, I do not believe, I definitely don't believe that it was a cougar. I think it would be extraordinarily unlikely that it was any other kind of wild animal. But I don't have enough information to say. And I'm not, you know, I am not an investigator. Right. I don't have the information to say for sure what it was. So much of this is speculative, right?

[Wes Ferguson]

Yeah.

[Charlie Scudder]

But let's go down the mind track that it was murder. How did this person get out there and away? What did they use? I mean, that's the thing that really gave me pause. One of the early record stumps I got back included photographs of Christopher's body. And it is. I've. I've seen a fair share of these kinds of photos before, and it's unlike anything I've seen before. That's one question that I kept bringing to investigators as well, of, okay, if this is not a wild animal, what is it? Like that it's. I don't want to get graphic, but, like, it's troubling. It's a troubling image. And I go back to when I think about, you know, if I start to go down that path of, well, it must have been murder. That's where I press the pause button. I can't imagine what did that.

[Wes Ferguson]

Like, how a human could have done something like that.

[Charlie Scudder]

Well, not even just how a human could have done something like that, but, like, it's not a slice like you would expect from a knife. It's not, you know, the pattern of the wound is not such that. I don't know what kind of machinery could have done that.

[Wes Ferguson]

Did it look like a bite?

[Charlie Scudder]

No, it didn't look like a bite. It looked like a tear. Like a rip and a tear.

[Wes Ferguson]

Maybe something that, like, if a dog had lunged at his neck, could have just torn it open like that.

[Charlie Scudder]

Possibly. So that's kind of. Again, what you go back to is, like, that's not unrealistic either.

[Wes Ferguson]

You talked to a dog bite expert with Travis county in Austin, Texas.

[Charlie Scudder]

Yeah.

[Wes Ferguson]

Who said that it was too big to be caused by a domestic dog.

[Charlie Scudder]

Yes. And see, this is the thing is, like, every time you're like, oh, that could be it, there's someone saying, no, that's not possible. Yeah. And you just end up going in circles. I mean, that's a specific reason, because I thought, oh, maybe it was a dog. Let's go find a dog bite expert.

[Jonah Evans]

Foreign.

[Dr. Kendall Crowns]

Yes.

[Wes Ferguson]

Here's a quick clip from Charlie's interview for the Dallas Morning News with medical examiner Kendall Crowns.

[Dr. Kendall Crowns]

I'm the deputy chief in Travis county in Austin.

[Wes Ferguson]

Charlie had sent Dr. Crowns the photos of Christopher's neck wounds.

[Dr. Kendall Crowns]

It doesn't fit for dogs, that's for sure. Usually dogs, when they attack, they kind of go for your extremities and knock you down because dogs usually aren't all that big. And then they rip the hell out of you, and then they don't usually feed from you because, you know, most domesticated dogs aren't looking to eat something. But looking at the pattern of the injuries, it really looks like a bite.

[Wes Ferguson]

Charlie also asked about the possibility of stab wounds.

[Dr. Kendall Crowns]

It'd be odd that they'd be all located in the neck like that. I mean, people do odd things, and you never know when methamphetamine is involved. To me, it Looks like a bite, something bigger than a dog. So that would rule out coyotes quite quickly. It does not look like a domestic dog at all, but it does look like a big bite mark. So that's my feeling, just based on what I've seen and experienced in the past.

[Wes Ferguson]

Dr. Crowns also didn't think it was a cougar.

[Dr. Kendall Crowns]

It really looks like it's some sort of sharp horse injuries. And then, you know, it becomes more of a question of manner of death. You've got sharp horse injuries. It could be suicide, accident, or homicide. And that would be based on the scene investigation. I think that's where you get people kind of backing off because they don't know how it happened.

[Wes Ferguson]

By the way, an interesting little wrinkle to all this is that not long after his interview with Charlie, Dr. Crowns was hired as the chief medical examiner in Tarrant county, replacing Dr. Pirwani. I guess forensic science in Texas is a small world.

[Charlie Scudder]

It doesn't match anything. I mean, it's too big for a dog bite. It's too big for a mountain lion. This case is something where every time you start to think, oh, that must be it, there's something that pushes you away from it.

[Wes Ferguson]

It's still just such a mystery to me. I was wondering what Christopher's dad thought about all this. If you'll remember, his name is Robert and you heard him on the phone with Hood County Sheriff's deputies back in the first episode when he was worried that Christopher was in a ditch somewhere. I found a number and gave it a ring. Hey, Robert, are you the father of Christopher?

[Robert Whiteley]

Yes, I am.

[Wes Ferguson]

I asked Robert if he'd be willing to talk with me for the podcast.

[Robert Whiteley]

For what reason?

[Wes Ferguson]

Well, because some of his loved ones have questions about how he died and how the sheriff's office handled it.

[Robert Whiteley]

Well, I do, too, but, I mean, this coming December, be five years, Mr.

[Wes Ferguson]

Oh, I, I understand.

[Robert Whiteley]

So what's, what's it gonna do? Five years? What's he gonna do in five years? I know his mother's really obsessed about this crap. She tried to do this after he's got the Hood County Sheriff Department wasn't going to do nothing. They considered him as a convict or a felon, and they weren't gonna do nothing about it. That's what I grabbed in the whole thing. He got released from prison after spending five years in there. After that, he was a convict, he was a felon. They didn't give a crap about him. They didn't give a. Because he was a felon. They weren't going to investigate.

[Wes Ferguson]

Well, that's why I'm reporting on it. I think that there might have been.

[Robert Whiteley]

You go back and ask them and ask them why they didn't report on it, why they didn't do nothing about. Because, yeah, I figured he had his throat sliced, had a dog attacking, make it look like something animal attacking. The guy walked off with his dog because they never did find his shirt. If you going to put this in your report, he never did find his shirt. So his shirt had to have plenty of blood on it. Had the dog's DNA on it, all that on it. So whoever killed him, sliced his throat, got the dog, attacked him, pulled his shirt off of him and left him for death. He crawled underneath the tree and died. That's the way I understand. That's where I'm going to leave it. Mr.

[Wes Ferguson]

Yes, sir. That's what I.

[Robert Whiteley]

You're. You're just uprooting a bad memory right now. And I just. That's all. That's it. Thank you.

[Wes Ferguson]

Well, hey, before you hang up. So. People hang up on me all the time. That just comes with the job. But I was really interested in what Robert said about the sheriff's office supposedly not giving a crap about Christopher because of his criminal background. And maybe that's why they settled on a convenient theory about the mountain lion and they never really bothered to look deeper. I don't know if that's true or not, but to me, it did indicate a lack of concern when I read that sheriff's deputy's report about how they left Christopher's body in the woods overnight when a lion was supposedly on the prowl. Here's what former sheriff's lieutenant Johnny Rose had to say.

[Robert Whiteley]

If we had one little thing that felt like it was a murder, we would have pursued it to the end because you're dealing with a victim that, you know, he's not always making good life decisions. And it was his kind of his deal to walk through wooded areas to take the shortcut to the road and hitch a ride to work. So it's something he did many times. But it just to me didn't make any sense that somebody would have drug him out there, you know, caught him there and killed him.

[Wes Ferguson]

From my brief phone call with him and the interviews that he's given in the press, Johnny seems like a nice guy to me. He's sincere. But I don't think he's right about Christopher cutting through the woods to get to work. I mean, nobody really says that in the body cam footage or the public files or the interviews Charlie and I have done with anybody. And it doesn't really make any sense when you look at the property on a map either. We got into more detail about that in an earlier episode, so I won't rehash it here. Also, it really stood out to me the way that Johnny brought up Christopher's character when explaining why they closed the case.

[Robert Whiteley]

You know, he's not always making good.

[Wes Ferguson]

Life decisions, but that's kind of beside the point, right? Whether you care about Christopher Whiteley or not, an unknown killer is a danger to all of us. And while we're on the subject, what was Christopher really doing that morning when he called his dad saying there was some kind of emergency? Who were the people with him and what had he gotten himself mixed up with if he wasn't killed by a mountain lion? And at this point, I don't think he was, what really happened? Thank you for listening to the Unforgotten. To dig deeper into the story and see photos, case files and more, check out our [e-mail] the Unforgotten is a free range production. Season 4 Killsight was produced here at Free Range in association with the Dallas Morning News. Editing by Aislin Gaddis, sound design and audio engineering from Austin Sisler with Eastside Studios. Charlie Scudder and I are executive producers. Special thanks to Morgan O'. Hanlon. Don't forget on forgottenpod.com see you soon.