Speaker 1: Mother Knows Death Presents External Exams with Nicole and Jimmy.
Speaker 2: Hi, everyone, Welcome The Mother Knows Death. Today is our
Speaker 2: one hundredth episode, and to celebrate, we are having a
Speaker 2: special episode with the host of Body Bags Podcasts, Joseph
Speaker 2: Scott Morgan. You may know Joseph from his frequent appearances
Speaker 2: on Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, Court TV and other
Speaker 2: major news outlets, or as the author of Blood Beneath
Speaker 2: My Feet, The Journey of a Southern Death Investigator. Joseph
Speaker 2: holds a Master of Forensic Science degree from National University
Speaker 2: and is a Board Certified Fellow of the American Board
Speaker 2: of Medical Legal Death Investigators. Currently, he's an Associate Professor
Speaker 2: of Applied Forensics at Jacksonville State University in Alabama. Joseph
Speaker 2: started working in forensics in the eighties, and throughout his
Speaker 2: career he's been involved in thousands of medical legal death
Speaker 2: investigations and autopsies. Please welcome Joseph Scott Morgan to Mother
Speaker 2: Knows Death. Hi, Joseph, it's so exciting to have you
Speaker 2: here today.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me. It's truly I would have appear
Speaker 3: on a lot of podcasts and chat with people I
Speaker 3: feel like I'm talking with a colleague right now, and
Speaker 3: so that's really cool for me. A different kind of colleague,
Speaker 3: but a colleague just the same. It's an honor to
Speaker 3: be with you and to chat with you and your audience.
Speaker 4: Thank you.
Speaker 2: I think it's I'm so excited to speak with you
Speaker 2: because there's not really many of us that do autopsies anymore.
Speaker 2: So when you get to meet someone that does the
Speaker 2: same thing that you do or has done or whatever
Speaker 2: you're doing right now, that it's so exciting that you
Speaker 2: get to kind of talk shop because there's just a
Speaker 2: limited amount of people that actually do it. Maybe we
Speaker 2: should talk about a little why autops aren't as common
Speaker 2: as they used to be.
Speaker 3: I don't know if you're from my little slice of
Speaker 3: the pie, just from my perspective of what I observe,
Speaker 3: because I know I'm a college professor now and I
Speaker 3: have kids that I know you've had this happen for you.
Speaker 3: It's I've had kids that you know. They come to
Speaker 3: me and they beg and they plead, Professor Morgan, can
Speaker 3: you please take us to an autopsy? Can we go
Speaker 3: see an autopsy? And when I was their age and
Speaker 3: was getting started in the field. You know, there were
Speaker 3: any number of places you could go. Corners, offices many
Speaker 3: times would welcome you in these offices, and even hospitals.
Speaker 3: But now one word lawyers. That's what I think it
Speaker 3: comes down to. I think it comes down to liability,
Speaker 3: and it's it's tough to get people in the door.
Speaker 3: I don't know that hospitals in particular are doing as
Speaker 3: many autopsies as they used to. Hospital pathologists always always
Speaker 3: kind of had a reputation that they would spend They
Speaker 3: would prefer to spend more time in front of a
Speaker 3: scope than being down and doing you know, the actual
Speaker 3: gross dissection of you know, the remains in total and
Speaker 3: you know, and my my career as a death investigator
Speaker 3: kind of leached over into that area because I would
Speaker 3: go around to private hospitals and the pathology groups and
Speaker 3: I'd say, look, you know, I'm looking to pick up
Speaker 3: some extra change. If you guys want me to go
Speaker 3: in and do this autopsy for you and I can
Speaker 3: report what I see, you know, cutting all the tissues,
Speaker 3: you know, do everything for you, organ weights dimensionally, you know,
Speaker 3: do everything for you. If I see anything, I'll call you.
Speaker 3: And they would prefer that I didn't call them, and
Speaker 3: so it was a great It was a great opportunity
Speaker 3: for me to sit at their feet and learn, because
Speaker 3: it's always a learning opportunity.
Speaker 4: It's kind of nice when.
Speaker 2: They don't call you, right because then you really get
Speaker 2: time alone with the body to look at things. And
Speaker 2: that's how I feel like. I would say, if I
Speaker 2: see anything different, I'll call you. But that gave me
Speaker 2: time to really see what was normal anatomy and what
Speaker 2: was you know, looking crazy without someone else down your neck,
Speaker 2: breathing down your neck, you.
Speaker 3: Know yeah, and you feel like you've got uh, you
Speaker 3: know that you're the you're the apprenticed and and they're
Speaker 3: the master, you know uh, And they're standing over you,
Speaker 3: hovering about you know, good and well they don't want
Speaker 3: to be there. I still have yet to come across
Speaker 3: a clinical pathologists that just she whiz. I wish it
Speaker 3: could do an autopsy today the show.
Speaker 2: I know a couple that really yes, and they're.
Speaker 3: The best, and you've got a much broader scope than
Speaker 3: I do. So and I'm comparing them to forensic pathologist.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, because the pathology residents that I used
Speaker 2: to teach, the only ones that were really interested in
Speaker 2: doing the actual autopsies were the ones that ended up
Speaker 2: going into forensics.
Speaker 3: So yeah, and you know there's certainly no limit on those.
Speaker 3: Isn't it interesting? You know pathology from a physician standpoint,
Speaker 3: I think is I say this, uh frequently, it's like
Speaker 3: the only the only medical training that one can go through.
Speaker 3: And the more training you get, the less money. And
Speaker 3: so if you're going to become a forensic pathologist, yeah,
Speaker 3: you're going to start out as a government employee. That's
Speaker 3: that's the way that happens. And you can develop a
Speaker 3: private consultancy and do very well, but that has its
Speaker 3: hazards along the way. I can discuss that, you know,
Speaker 3: for you know, for people that are curious because you know,
Speaker 3: there's I have people that reach out to me because
Speaker 3: I cover all true crime stuff and they know my background.
Speaker 3: They're like, families, can you recommend a forensic pathologist to me?
Speaker 3: The problem with that is, yeah, I can recommend them,
Speaker 3: but as we say, down here in the South, there
Speaker 3: there's rare hen's teeth. You don't you can't, you can't
Speaker 3: find them very frequently. He probably find and I'm talking
Speaker 3: about a board certified forensic pathologist not somebody that is
Speaker 3: a pathologist that claims they practice forensics. Gulf of difference,
Speaker 3: it'd be easier to find a neurosurgeon in most places.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people don't really, They're like the most highly specialized doctors, right.
Speaker 2: People just don't realize that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah they are. And they've left the clinical, the
Speaker 3: traditional clinical world behind. I mean we in forensics, we
Speaker 3: have our own clinical you know, dynamic. Obviously we're examining bodies,
Speaker 3: were making diagnosies, uh, and we're assessing you know, laps
Speaker 3: that come in. Lord knows, histology is a big part
Speaker 3: of what we do. Uh, and obviously talks uh and
Speaker 3: then just stand their panels, you know, with everything you
Speaker 3: know that walks through the door, well rolls for the
Speaker 3: because we're I've never been a big fan of of
Speaker 3: partial autopsies. I'm of the opinion, once you break out
Speaker 3: the cold steel, everybody should go through because you're you're
Speaker 3: you're running too much of a risk by only doing
Speaker 3: a partial autopsy. There was a whole group of people
Speaker 3: for a long time I remember that you could have,
Speaker 3: for instance, a self inflicted gunshot, one with suicide case,
Speaker 3: and they bury bodies with bullets in the head. I've
Speaker 3: never been a fan of that at all, and I've
Speaker 3: seen that happen over and over and over again, and
Speaker 3: a lot of times it's I think that it's because
Speaker 3: of expediency, but you know, it's those cases that you're
Speaker 3: going to wind up giving a deposition on them because
Speaker 3: somebody's going to get in a twist over it, or
Speaker 3: new evidence will be being covered in in the future.
Speaker 3: And you know in forensics, if you don't do it
Speaker 3: out of the gate, that body is going to wind
Speaker 3: up in one or two places, either bare married and
Speaker 3: vaulted and having been embombed in most cases, or cremated.
Speaker 3: And so now you're you're looking for for evidence in
Speaker 3: a case. And a great example I think that I
Speaker 3: covered for years now has been the Tammy Davell case
Speaker 3: out of Idaho, where you know, she presented early in
Speaker 3: the morning, her husband found her, found her dead on
Speaker 3: the floor. She had some kind of frothy cone that
Speaker 3: her children actually came to the house, or adult children,
Speaker 3: and UH visualized it was issuing forth from her nose
Speaker 3: and her mouth. And most of the time, you know,
Speaker 3: we're only going to see that. You know, if we
Speaker 3: have we see it a lot in drug odes, particularly
Speaker 3: was opiates, and you see it with his six illed
Speaker 3: us and of course he was like found guilty in
Speaker 3: her case in addition to two children, they killed her
Speaker 3: husband that is. But here's the thing. The corner rolled
Speaker 3: out to the scene and I made the determination then
Speaker 3: that she was not going to have an autopsy. And
Speaker 3: this is a forty nine year old woman that famously
Speaker 3: had been training for a marathon. It's not like she's
Speaker 3: in she's stabilitate, you know, like God called and suddenly
Speaker 3: she's gone. And you really run the risk if you're
Speaker 3: the medical legal authority and you decide not to do
Speaker 3: the autopsy. And I don't have much patience with people
Speaker 3: saying that the family didn't want it. It's when you're
Speaker 3: in a clinical environment. And at least this is my assessment.
Speaker 3: Families will come, I think, to the clinical environment that
Speaker 3: is a hospital environment where there's a known natural, you know,
Speaker 3: pathology that's going on, and they will say we want
Speaker 3: an autopsy. Most time, they're going to have to pay
Speaker 3: for it, unless there's some kind of overriding interest the
Speaker 3: hospital has for either research or maybe you know, liability,
Speaker 3: They want to do it, and they'll compel the pathologists
Speaker 3: to do it. But in the medical legal world, we
Speaker 3: try as best we can. I promise we really do
Speaker 3: to be as compassionate with the families that we try
Speaker 3: to extend as much compassion as we can and take
Speaker 3: everything into consideration. But when you're faced with something that
Speaker 3: might wind up being very dark, very very dark, and
Speaker 3: you just have that gut feeling. I don't go on
Speaker 3: gut feelings. I'm a scientist for as at the time,
Speaker 3: but you just you get that feeling about a case.
Speaker 3: It's like, we really, we really need to do the
Speaker 3: autopsy on this case. Family's going to protest, well, you know,
Speaker 3: you go in and make your apologies because the authority
Speaker 3: of the corner of the medical examiner is generally going
Speaker 3: to trump any of the families wishes. Now they can
Speaker 3: retain an attorney and they can get an injunction, and
Speaker 3: we've had that happen for in those sorts of things.
Speaker 3: But I think that it's probably in the best nentwest
Speaker 3: certainly of the courts and the community, for the autopsy
Speaker 3: to be performed.
Speaker 2: You're making me think of a vintage case of Mary
Speaker 2: Joe Capacni. Does her name sound familiar to you? That
Speaker 2: Ted Kennedy chap equittickquit but when they pulled her out
Speaker 2: of the water, they just were like.
Speaker 4: Yeah, she drowned.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And and you know, and famously, that case, famously,
Speaker 3: that case, uh, for years and years has gone there
Speaker 3: have always been questions, and I'll go one even better,
Speaker 3: and Lord knows, I don't want to go down a conspiratory,
Speaker 3: conspiratorial rabbit hole. However, I extensively last year I covered
Speaker 3: in on my podcast. I spent time talking about the
Speaker 3: Kennedy assassination and arguably they had Yeah, I could safely
Speaker 3: say probably two of the biggest incompetents on the face
Speaker 3: of the planet that they turned that precious man's body
Speaker 3: over to after a homicide. He was a homicide victim.
Speaker 3: Doesn't matter that he was a president. There were no rules,
Speaker 3: no laws in place regarding the assassination investigations relative to
Speaker 3: the president until like sixty six. This happened in sixty three,
Speaker 3: So he's a homicide victim. That took place in Dallas County,
Speaker 3: and there was a forensic pathologist, doctor Rose, who had
Speaker 3: done all of his training up in Iowa, and he
Speaker 3: famously attempted to prevent them from removing the president's body
Speaker 3: from Parkland, and there's eyewitnessed this, eyewitnesses saying that they
Speaker 3: pushed him against the wall, put their hand on their
Speaker 3: weapon and said, his body's going with us, and he's
Speaker 3: he's like you know, and he was newly And here's
Speaker 3: the interesting intersection here. I love history. He was the
Speaker 3: first medical examiner they'd ever had. Texas does not have corners,
Speaker 3: and they don't take they have medical examiners. But did
Speaker 3: you know that the justice of the peace in Texas
Speaker 3: is the de facto corners. It's an interesting little law,
Speaker 3: and you'll find those all over the country. But my
Speaker 3: point is is that you had this man who was
Speaker 3: turned out to be a very highly esteemed forensic pathologist
Speaker 3: that saw gunshot ones regularly, and he was at their
Speaker 3: disposal and they put the president's body on that plane
Speaker 3: and flew him back to BETHOSDA, and he was under
Speaker 3: the care of two people that had never they were forensic,
Speaker 3: they were pathologists, not forensic, but had never done a
Speaker 3: forensic case between the two of them, and you're talking
Speaker 3: about obviously the biggest forensic case in I don't know.
Speaker 3: I guess you could argue us history because it's still
Speaker 3: impacting us today as we speak right now, and so
Speaker 3: his body has turned over to these people and did
Speaker 3: it in front of an audience. There's some estimates there
Speaker 3: were probably thirty people in the autopsy suite, little or
Speaker 3: no accountability of chain of evidence was not intact. You
Speaker 3: actually had FBI agents sitting there taking notes and they
Speaker 3: couldn't believe what they were seeing.
Speaker 2: It was.
Speaker 3: And it's interesting, isn't it. Where it seems the more
Speaker 3: high profile the case gets, the more fingers get in
Speaker 3: the pot. And many times I believe that if you
Speaker 3: will just allow allow these experts to do their job
Speaker 3: to begin with, from Jump Street, there'll be a well
Speaker 3: many less headaches in the world, you know. And again
Speaker 3: I can't emphasize enough. We're still paying the price for this.
Speaker 2: I feel like that I say this often. We call
Speaker 2: it in the hospital the VIP treatment because when they
Speaker 2: come into the hospital, a person that's famous or high
Speaker 2: profile or anything, it just starts off with them getting
Speaker 2: a fake name and the mix ups and the just
Speaker 2: the special treatment. And you know, normally you just get
Speaker 2: your specimen thrown on a bag on the countertop, but
Speaker 2: now you're just someone brings it down to you, and
Speaker 2: it's getting handled specially it's going on the machine for
Speaker 2: histology faster than it normally would. And then this is
Speaker 2: when mistakes happen because you're not just letting people do
Speaker 2: the proper procedure. And it happens all the time. There's
Speaker 2: so much documentation of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and any times someone is allowed to isn't that interesting?
Speaker 3: You know? Even after death people jump on the line
Speaker 3: or cut the line. Yeah, and you start acting outside
Speaker 3: the norms, the acceptable norms of what your standard procedure is.
Speaker 3: Anytime you deviate from that, there's a price to be paid.
Speaker 3: And when it comes to the courts, it comes to
Speaker 3: the courts when you deviate from your normal sop, that's
Speaker 3: a real problem if you're trying to prosecute a case
Speaker 3: or And I don't care either way, you know, even
Speaker 3: though I'm a medical legal death investigator by trade and
Speaker 3: a forensic practitioner, I'm neither pro prosecution or pro defense.
Speaker 3: I want the answers. I want those black and white
Speaker 3: scientific answers and let everybody else sort it out at
Speaker 3: the end. I'm not about seeking justice, and there's enough
Speaker 3: people there on that train. I like my little space
Speaker 3: on my train, my little space on my train. We
Speaker 3: love to make scientific discovery and hand it over to
Speaker 3: everybody here. You can take a look, you can take
Speaker 3: a look, you can make your own assessment. But this
Speaker 3: is the judgment that we've made. And going back to Kennedy,
Speaker 3: one of the really interesting things I think that people
Speaker 3: might find fascinating about the Kennedy case is that when
Speaker 3: Bobby Kennedy was assassinated doctor Tom Magucci, who is arguably
Speaker 3: one of the most famous forensic pathologists, American forensic pathologists ever,
Speaker 3: and he was referred to as the coroner to the stars.
Speaker 3: You know, this kind of goes along with what you
Speaker 3: were saying, but you know, stars were not for him.
Speaker 3: You know, he had done Marilyn Monroe, he did John Belushi,
Speaker 3: he did Tate lot Bianca. He was physically the scene
Speaker 3: in those cases. But he also did the bombs, you know,
Speaker 3: he did the homeless people, the unknowns, all the serial
Speaker 3: victims that had come through during the sixties and into
Speaker 3: the seventies in the eighties. He he was no respector
Speaker 3: of persons in that sense. He viewed everybody the same.
Speaker 3: And when it came Tom in this one exception and
Speaker 3: This is a good exception. When Bobby Kennedy was assassinated
Speaker 3: I think it was the Ambassador Hotel. Doctor Magucci said, Okay,
Speaker 3: this is what we're going to do. First off, no
Speaker 3: one is going to be allowed into the autopsy. Was
Speaker 3: sweet unless I allow them in because he as you know,
Speaker 3: I field is so small, news travels fast, and back
Speaker 3: then it was even smaller. He only allowed the technicians,
Speaker 3: the photographer, and fell a forensic pathologist in that suite.
Speaker 3: And he personally invited one of the forensic pathologists, the
Speaker 3: guy that headed up the ballistic section for the Armed
Speaker 3: Forces Institute of Pathology, which by the way, no longer
Speaker 3: exists and it's old construct. It's that's the meta. It
Speaker 3: was back then considered the medical examiner for the Armed Forces.
Speaker 3: They did a lot of the ballistic studies on cadavers
Speaker 3: and that sort of thing years and years ago. Anyway,
Speaker 3: this guy headed up that program. He's a forensic pathologist boarded.
Speaker 3: They invited him to fly out to LA and so
Speaker 3: Nogucci had witnessed everything and this is a real touched
Speaker 3: on moment in history, forensic history and forensicthology in particular.
Speaker 3: He was so impacted by what had happened to Kennedy.
Speaker 3: He was like, well, it wouldn't have happened on my watch,
Speaker 3: but by God that ever happens here, I'm gonna have
Speaker 3: eyes on this thing and it's going to be documented
Speaker 3: from stem to stern. And he did a great job
Speaker 3: of that. But guess what, there's still tons and tons
Speaker 3: of conspiracy theories that surround Bobby Kennedy's death. How much
Speaker 3: more so if you look at his brother, where you
Speaker 3: had two people that had no background in forensics doing
Speaker 3: those doing that autopsy. Now you've left the door open
Speaker 3: even wider.
Speaker 2: Well, that's what happens people. One thing, you give people doubt,
Speaker 2: and now you see it happening in modern day. Right now,
Speaker 2: even that you just don't trust anything because of the
Speaker 2: way things were handled.
Speaker 3: Right, you don't. You don't as far as you can
Speaker 3: throw it.
Speaker 2: And it's interesting that you we were talking earlier about
Speaker 2: how students can't observe autopsies anymore. It's it's very difficult
Speaker 2: when you think about back in the day, there was
Speaker 2: audiences watching these autopsies, and I think that now that's
Speaker 2: part of the reason, at least I've seen in the
Speaker 2: hospital because I've been in the hospital system now twenty
Speaker 2: five years around the autopsy, and I saw it when
Speaker 2: I first started that I was able to have, you know,
Speaker 2: if there was a student that was interested in being
Speaker 2: a nurse, they could come observe the autopsy, right. And
Speaker 2: I do think that that's important because you should really
Speaker 2: understand every aspect of life and death, if you're dealing
Speaker 2: with live patients or not. But I saw that to
Speaker 2: having med students all the time, and then at my
Speaker 2: most recent job, they just wouldn't even let medical students
Speaker 2: in to watch the autopsy. They were like, only essential
Speaker 2: personnel that needs to be there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a terrible state of affairs. I can't speak
Speaker 3: about your experience, but I can talk to you about mine.
Speaker 3: I don't have the same clinical academic experience that you have,
Speaker 3: having come through a pathology assistant program. My master's degree
Speaker 3: is in forensic science. And so I was a true
Speaker 3: real life deaner, you know, the old term that they
Speaker 3: would use for autopsy assistant, which I think is German
Speaker 3: roughly translates like a servant of the dead or something
Speaker 3: like that. And I was proudly a deaner because I
Speaker 3: learned from a lot of really talented old guys, guys
Speaker 3: that you know, I could tell you stories about them
Speaker 3: taking a striker saw in beveling, doing beveling on the
Speaker 3: skull cap and so they could make it perfectly lock
Speaker 3: and they would take and they could do it quickly
Speaker 3: because they had to deal with such a volume of cases.
Speaker 3: Guys that could use a handsaw to take a calvarium
Speaker 3: off where you know, it's hard, it is very hard task.
Speaker 3: Whether it would take it would take hours. But these
Speaker 3: old guys that were so uniquely trained, where if you
Speaker 3: had an agitating striker saw, it was a luxury for them,
Speaker 3: you know, the first can you imagine the first one
Speaker 3: they ever got. And I know this seems a bit
Speaker 3: out in the weeks.
Speaker 4: They still suck and break all the time.
Speaker 3: It's like, yeah, they do, they do. And you know
Speaker 3: it's it's that weld right at the axis right there
Speaker 3: that always fractured for me. And of course the blades
Speaker 3: are that's you know, you'll buy the body itself, the
Speaker 3: body of the saw itself, and that's that is it's
Speaker 3: kind of like buying razor blades. They'll almost give you
Speaker 3: the handle. It's the damn blades that cost so much
Speaker 3: over a period of time. But you know, I think
Speaker 3: back from my experience the autopsy suite, by far in
Speaker 3: my field is a medical legal death investigator, hands down,
Speaker 3: best classroom I've ever been in in my life. It's nothing,
Speaker 3: I mean, nothing compares to the experiences I had in
Speaker 3: the autopsy suite, and it dealt dealing with everything from
Speaker 3: just starting out as a scribe for the forensic pathologist
Speaker 3: and having I still have visions of all of those
Speaker 3: clipboards lined up, you know, on the table, and having
Speaker 3: five and six bodies laid out and ready for the
Speaker 3: pathologists to walk in and Buddy, when we're rolling, we're rolling,
Speaker 3: we're hitting and getting it. We're going. And some of
Speaker 3: these cases, some case might take us an hour and
Speaker 3: ten minutes from open to clothes. And then you might
Speaker 3: have some young person that has died of some mysterious
Speaker 3: circumstance where you think that it might be natural, but
Speaker 3: there might be you know, other issues. And then you
Speaker 3: might have I don't know, and this is not in common.
Speaker 3: You have somebody that is morbidly obese and they're shot
Speaker 3: multiple times with small caliber weapons and you have to
Speaker 3: track all of those rounds through the body and document
Speaker 3: that as you're doing it photographically. That case can take
Speaker 3: sometimes four or five hours, not to mention the X
Speaker 3: rays that come along with it. And so the reason
Speaker 3: I'm saying this is that everything everything that I did
Speaker 3: in the morgue, and I think I wound up doing
Speaker 3: close to seven thousand autopsies over the course of my career,
Speaker 3: everything I did in the morgue translated to the field.
Speaker 3: And the reason it translated to the field so well
Speaker 3: is that I was the eyes in the ears of
Speaker 3: the forensic pathologist, and I've had forgive my language. I'd
Speaker 3: had my assitude out enough that I knew what they
Speaker 3: wanted in the field, and that would translate to me
Speaker 3: clinically in my brain when when I was observing a
Speaker 3: body of a scene, whether it was a homicide, of suicide, undetermined,
Speaker 3: industrial laxity, it didn't matter. I knew my pathologist like
Speaker 3: the back of my hand, and I could say, Okay,
Speaker 3: for this particular pathologist, They're going to want this, this,
Speaker 3: and this, and gonna want to know why I didn't
Speaker 3: get it if it was not not obtained.
Speaker 2: So you're exactly like a PA, Yeah, I memstance, Yeah
Speaker 2: it is you know, and we you know, and so
Speaker 2: we have to do things with trace evidence that you
Speaker 2: guys probably don't do, and nail scrapings and nail clippings
Speaker 2: and doing rape kits and.
Speaker 3: You know, swaps for DNA, and I mean you name it, printing,
Speaker 3: printing the dead and then dealing I think one of
Speaker 3: the probably for me, you get used to it, but
Speaker 3: bodies in advanced states of decomposition because if you get
Speaker 3: past the grotesque nature of it, which eventually you do,
Speaker 3: there's so many other hidden, hidden, hidden secrets within those
Speaker 3: bodies because of decay and the obstacles that that presents
Speaker 3: for you if you're trying to do an assessment of
Speaker 3: the remains or what remains of the soft tissue that's there,
Speaker 3: because it's I hate this term because it's thrown around
Speaker 3: a lot, but it is nuanced. It's nuanced by the
Speaker 3: fact that are they in an early state of decomposition?
Speaker 3: Is it a moderate? Isn't advanced? Is it like super advance?
Speaker 3: Where you've got you've got sculptal remains that are visible,
Speaker 3: you know, with kind of a bit of soft tissue
Speaker 3: still left over stretched over you know, where your knee
Speaker 3: is going to be am I going to have to
Speaker 3: cut the jaws out of this person? Am I going
Speaker 3: to have to clip their fingertips off and shoot them
Speaker 3: with tissue builder in order to get the fingertips to
Speaker 3: swell up so I can get a print off of them.
Speaker 3: You know, all of these little things that you have
Speaker 3: to learn how to do, and you have to learn
Speaker 3: to do it on the fly because you move it
Speaker 3: such you move at such a rapid pace if you're
Speaker 3: at a big medical examiner's office, there's not time to
Speaker 3: kind of linger and think about it. You. Starting my
Speaker 3: career down in New Orleans, there was I love this
Speaker 3: by the way, the er nurses would and the er
Speaker 3: physicians in particular. I developed an affinity for them because
Speaker 3: I'd always go to the emergency room because I'd have
Speaker 3: so many traumatic cases gunshot wounds and motive a collapse.
Speaker 3: They got to know them a lot. And so we
Speaker 3: had faculty members there from LSU and Tulane Med and
Speaker 3: they had a theme and for a while they had
Speaker 3: it up on the wall and in one of the
Speaker 3: emergency areas and it said see one, do one, teach one,
Speaker 3: and so you've seen it, now to do it now.
Speaker 3: The next person up you have to teach it to them.
Speaker 4: I love that.
Speaker 3: Just imagine that, And that's really the only way you
Speaker 3: can deal with the volume you know that's coming in.
Speaker 3: It doesn't mean that just because you've seen a lot
Speaker 3: of cases that you're smarter than anybody else. Far from it,
Speaker 3: because there are people that work in rural areas that
Speaker 3: have seen things I can't even begin to imagine. But
Speaker 3: there's something to be said for volume. You know, you
Speaker 3: it's not a drips, it's steady parade of bodies coming in.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you got a.
Speaker 2: Good representation of pathology and just it is interesting though
Speaker 2: when you're in different areas how you see different injuries
Speaker 2: that are more common in that particular part of the country.
Speaker 2: And then, like I was writing about a case recently
Speaker 2: of a town in Africa that sees a lot of
Speaker 2: people who get stabbed in the eye, and that's not
Speaker 2: something that really happens that often in America that you
Speaker 2: wouldn't see those wounds commonly, but in that particular gang,
Speaker 2: that's something they see more often.
Speaker 3: So Wow, it's cool, that's very interesting finding. Yeah, you
Speaker 3: don't see that a lot. I've had it with overkill before,
Speaker 3: with stabbings but it was a very impassioned kind of thing,
Speaker 3: like there was generally some kind of underlying sexual tone.
Speaker 3: I'm going to rip you the strid so nobody else
Speaker 3: will have you. But you're right, that's that type of
Speaker 3: event is very rare, you know, where you would have
Speaker 3: somebody attacked with a sharp instrument in the eyes.
Speaker 2: And one of the cool things that I love about
Speaker 2: autopsy is that it just like I'll do as many
Speaker 2: as I can for the rest of my life because
Speaker 2: I always will be able to see something different at
Speaker 2: some point. You just see even if it's just like
Speaker 2: a normal anatomic variation or something someone's got to your orders.
Speaker 2: And one time I just found a horseshoe kidney by accident.
Speaker 2: It was the greatest day of my life.
Speaker 3: I know my too, I had the same experience for
Speaker 3: a horseshoe kidney, and as a matter of fact, I
Speaker 3: wrote about it not too long ago, and a piece
Speaker 3: that I was working on and I was with my
Speaker 3: mentor who's passed on now got rest his soul, Bill Donovant.
Speaker 3: He's actually from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and transplanted down here in
Speaker 3: South to go to college and became probably arguably one
Speaker 3: of the best forensic scientists I'd ever known, and I
Speaker 3: found we were working on case and I came across
Speaker 3: the horseshe kidney and I've never seen it, you know.
Speaker 3: It was amazing to me. And I said, wow, checked
Speaker 3: us out and he was like, that's a horseshoe kidney.
Speaker 3: I said, never seen none. He says, well, go ahead
Speaker 3: and dissect it out, you know, and I'll grab a camera.
Speaker 3: And so I held it from my face like I
Speaker 3: had a big handlebar mustach and you know, that's that's
Speaker 3: typically you know, kind of how how we would you know,
Speaker 3: that was like a treat for us to do something
Speaker 3: like that, and you you know, the cool thing about
Speaker 3: it is you never know. And I don't know. Maybe
Speaker 3: I'm I'm I've always been and occupied the space in
Speaker 3: the world of the dead. But I'm also kind of sentimental,
Speaker 3: I think, which is a dangerous combination. And one of
Speaker 3: the ways I would look at it is that every
Speaker 3: opportunity I had to do an autopsy, I would think
Speaker 3: to myself, when it wasn't going fast and furious, I
Speaker 3: would think, you know what, this is really cool because
Speaker 3: I'm seeing something that no one else has ever seen,
Speaker 3: you know, we talked about going to the depths of
Speaker 3: the ocean, or going to space, or climbing the mountain
Speaker 3: or something like that. But literally, in an autopsy suite,
Speaker 3: you're doing an autopsy on somebody. You're opening the space
Speaker 3: up and it's being viewed. You're viewing the space for
Speaker 3: the first time. And that that's kind of an odd
Speaker 3: thing when you think about. It's a unique thing, you know.
Speaker 3: And then once you begin to do the examination, you're
Speaker 3: going to find these little anomalies, you know, like like
Speaker 3: the horse of kidney. And I got to tell you
Speaker 3: about a really cool case that one of the things
Speaker 3: that really stuck with me and will for until my
Speaker 3: final breath. I had I'd spent time in the Army Guard,
Speaker 3: and so I have an affinity for old soldiers. And
Speaker 3: when I started my career there was still a lot
Speaker 3: of war work two vets around, And I actually played
Speaker 3: golf with a War War two vet when I was
Speaker 3: like maybe twenty three twenty four. He only had one
Speaker 3: arm and he could play golf. Wow, he was an
Speaker 3: amazing golfer. He couldn't hit it any further than about
Speaker 3: one hundred and twenty yards, but his swing was so
Speaker 3: grooved with the one arm that he would always fit
Speaker 3: in the middle of the fairway. Neat Man lost his
Speaker 3: lost his arm in South Pacific and just you know,
Speaker 3: he didn't let anything bothering, you know. But I get
Speaker 3: a I was on duty as as an investigator with
Speaker 3: the Corner's office. I had split time. I worked as
Speaker 3: an investigator at night and I work in the morgue
Speaker 3: end of the day. And that's the way you did
Speaker 3: it back then, very tiresome. Couldn't do it now. I
Speaker 3: got a call from a nursing home, a nursing home
Speaker 3: descert not normally reportable to the Corner of Medical Examiner
Speaker 3: nursing homes and or back then they weren't in hospice cases.
Speaker 3: But they called me and it was like, yeah, hey,
Speaker 3: how are you guys doing. Where are you calling me?
Speaker 3: He said, yeah, we've got a death of a gentleman here.
Speaker 3: And he's literally been this would have been I think
Speaker 3: in eighty eight or eighty nine. And he said he
Speaker 3: has been under the care, constant care of a physician
Speaker 3: since nineteen forty six, like in a retirement home or
Speaker 3: in a nursing facility, and he just died. I was
Speaker 3: like okay, and said, well he sustained a gunshot wound.
Speaker 3: Well there's I was like, okay, I'm interested, what's the story.
Speaker 3: And you know, because with homicide, it's true, there is
Speaker 3: in a statute of limitations. It doesn't matter how far
Speaker 3: out it goes. And it turned out that this guy
Speaker 3: had fought as an eighteen year eighteen or nineteen year
Speaker 3: old at the Battle of the Bulge.
Speaker 5: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: So on that frozen ground in Western Europe Belgium, some
Speaker 3: probably equally young German soldier took his Mouser bolt action rifle,
Speaker 3: loaded it with I think it was a seven millimeter round.
Speaker 3: I think that's what they fired, I can't recall, and
Speaker 3: took aim and shot this young kid from New Orleans
Speaker 3: when he was eighteen or nineteen, and it was superior
Speaker 3: to the umbulcus and the round tore through his bowel
Speaker 3: and lodged immediately adjacent to I don't know his the
Speaker 3: I don't know if it had the upper lumbar region,
Speaker 3: I think, And the technology was at a point and
Speaker 3: they had such a volume of cases that they were
Speaker 3: able to stem the bleeding. They did a bower section
Speaker 3: on him, so I remember correctly. But he was essentially
Speaker 3: paralyzed from that level of his body down and had
Speaker 3: remained in that state. So this is a young man,
Speaker 3: the bloom of youth, as they say, never got to
Speaker 3: have a family, never got to have babies. And he
Speaker 3: had languished in this bed for loath these many years.
Speaker 3: And obviously, if you can live this long in the
Speaker 3: nursing facility, somebody's taking good care of you. And I
Speaker 3: remember having him on the table and you know, his
Speaker 3: tiny asty legs, he's withered in appearance, beautiful mane of
Speaker 3: gray hair that was combed back. You know, his dentition
Speaker 3: was intact. He'd been taken well, it didn't have bed sores,
Speaker 3: which is a rarity and to have been in that long.
Speaker 3: And we did X rays on him and you could
Speaker 3: see that round and it was deformed, and it had
Speaker 3: the bone had fused around it, and it was just
Speaker 3: this kind of ossified chunk that was adjacent to his
Speaker 3: final column.
Speaker 4: Yeah, imagine how much pain that would have caused.
Speaker 3: I know it, and I really often wonder how much
Speaker 3: pain did he experience throughout his life and just endure
Speaker 3: it like that. And I remember taking the saw and
Speaker 3: gently cutting around it and removing it, and it was
Speaker 3: one of those weird kind of experiences where I literally
Speaker 3: held history in my hand for a moment. This is
Speaker 3: this is a this is a battlefield artifact that I'm
Speaker 3: holding that some faceless kid on the other side fired
Speaker 3: this weapon at this other young kid who probably in
Speaker 3: his mind, I don't know, probably in his mind he
Speaker 3: didn't think he was going to get out of there,
Speaker 3: but he did get out of there, and then he's
Speaker 3: you know, he's thinking, you know, what kind of hope
Speaker 3: that I have in the future, It's going to happen
Speaker 3: for me? And here I held it, and I want
Speaker 3: you to know. The pathologist that I did the autopsy with,
Speaker 3: he ruled the case as a homicide. Interestingly, I was going.
Speaker 2: To ask you that because I had a case once
Speaker 2: that I had a guy who was a Vietnam vet
Speaker 2: that was shot. But I don't really think he died.
Speaker 2: He just he had cancer and stuff, you know, he
Speaker 2: had another cause of death. But when I called the
Speaker 2: EMMY and told them, I was like, I'm just calling
Speaker 2: you to report this. You take it if you want.
Speaker 2: I'm just and they're like, we don't care. We like,
Speaker 2: we don't need that. But but your case is a
Speaker 2: little bit different because his death was ultimately caused by
Speaker 2: consequences of that initial gunshot wound.
Speaker 4: So it's really interesting.
Speaker 3: It was fascinating to me, and I'll never forget it
Speaker 3: when he signed when he primary cause of death was
Speaker 3: we'll see, I think it was multi system failure secondary
Speaker 3: to gunshot wound from the distant past. Part three was
Speaker 3: gunfire by unknown enemy combatants and that was so weird.
Speaker 3: It was so weird, and they ruled it as a
Speaker 3: homicide and you know, just being there, you know, for
Speaker 3: that and actually being the one to retrieve that as
Speaker 3: the old pathologists used to refer to it, retrieved that missile.
Speaker 3: That's the way they refer to projectile back then, to
Speaker 3: retrieve that missile. And I remember we turned it over
Speaker 3: to the State Crime Lab and they retained it, and
Speaker 3: it was just it was just part of history. And
Speaker 3: that just goes to the point you never know what
Speaker 3: you're going to see. And back to our earlier thesis here,
Speaker 3: the idea that people are not having the opportunity to
Speaker 3: come into our environment and the world that that you
Speaker 3: currently inhabit and that I inhabit because it's like gold
Speaker 3: to me. I mean it's like gold being found on
Speaker 3: the ground. It's so sad. I've done autopsies. I remember
Speaker 3: down in years and years ago, I used to assist
Speaker 3: with the State Medical Examiner in Georgia. I was assigned
Speaker 3: to the State Medical Examiner there, and I'd have to
Speaker 3: travel a little bit and i would go about sixty
Speaker 3: miles south to Macon, Georgia, which is home of Mercer
Speaker 3: Medical School. And I'd only do weekends. But it was
Speaker 3: a busy shop because you would you know, you might
Speaker 3: have after a Friday night and cases come in from
Speaker 3: the surrounding area, from the other counties. We might be
Speaker 3: looking at sixteen cases in one day, and we would
Speaker 3: literally have medical students from Mercer Medical College or medical
Speaker 3: school outside the door waiting for us at six o'clock
Speaker 3: just to get in because they didn't get see enough thought,
Speaker 3: they didn't get see enough gross anatomy. They didn't have
Speaker 3: enough bodies back then to go around. That's terrifying.
Speaker 2: Wait, I'm going to tell you the most outrageous thing
Speaker 2: right now. So I went and did an autopsy last summer,
Speaker 2: and there was a medical student there and he was
Speaker 2: in his fourth year, like almost getting ready to get
Speaker 2: a residency. He was telling me where he was applying
Speaker 2: and stuff. He looks white as a ghost as soon
Speaker 2: as I make the incision right, and I'm just like, okay, dude,
Speaker 2: you're going to pass out.
Speaker 4: Like we good.
Speaker 2: And he told me that he did not see an
Speaker 2: autopsy or do gross anatomy.
Speaker 4: Because of COVID.
Speaker 3: Like what, How's that? Even?
Speaker 4: I don't know. I just I was mind blown.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's interesting. I was. I had like this kind
Speaker 3: of weird moment. Actually, it was just yesterday. I was
Speaker 3: I'm teaching actually a section I teach a section called
Speaker 3: a class that I created years ago called Medical Legal
Speaker 3: Debt Investigation, and I teach you at Jacksonville State in
Speaker 3: our forensics program. And I was trying to educate my class.
Speaker 3: These are all undergraduates on lines of languor and you know,
Speaker 3: and I try to tell them from the perspective of
Speaker 3: like a contour map, you know, because these kids, most
Speaker 3: of these kids have never had excuse me, have never
Speaker 3: had human anatomy, certainly not at the level even at
Speaker 3: the upper levels of undergraduate. And there's a reason why
Speaker 3: certain incisions are made in the body. And because if
Speaker 3: you go essentially against these contours, almost like going against
Speaker 3: the grain. You'll get these nasty, nasty injuries, surgical injuries
Speaker 3: as a result. And I was telling them about the
Speaker 3: position of an app and decty with the primary side
Speaker 3: the McBurney incision, and how it kind of runs in
Speaker 3: this weird diagonal way. And I was twenty years ago.
Speaker 3: I would have had students in the class looking at
Speaker 3: me going, yeah, I've had an app indectomy. Well, now
Speaker 3: all the app anddctomies are done laparoscopically, so you lose.
Speaker 3: What I'm saying is we're advancing now to the point
Speaker 3: where I've heard of medical schools that we're going to
Speaker 3: go all digital with their anatomical studies. I'm thinking, this
Speaker 3: is this is utter madness that you would do this,
Speaker 3: because the tactile when you stick your hands into that world,
Speaker 3: the tactile nature of that you're learning through your fingertips.
Speaker 3: I don't care how much AI there is or where
Speaker 3: You'll never learn like this. You know, when you slip
Speaker 3: on the surgical gloves and you're holding things and you
Speaker 3: feel that weight, you feel the weight of a lung
Speaker 3: that has pneumonia, you know, and are you you hold
Speaker 3: somebody's heart with cardiomeg or you've got a fatty liver
Speaker 3: or cirrhosis and you feel those nodules, or you run
Speaker 3: your hand over the plural surface of the lungs and
Speaker 3: you've got the tiny blebs as a result of in
Speaker 3: physima or whatever it is. There's something, there's something about
Speaker 3: that that translates to the brain, and it's going to
Speaker 3: be laws. It's going to be lost. I think in
Speaker 3: this world that we're heading into with AI, I know.
Speaker 2: Really it really is a shame and it scares me
Speaker 2: to think that these people are actually going to be
Speaker 2: responsible for people's lives, because it really is the only way.
Speaker 2: And I saw the transition when I was working in
Speaker 2: surgical pathology because I was the lead PA and I
Speaker 2: was in charge of training the residence, and one of
Speaker 2: my biggest things was I wanted all of the residents
Speaker 2: to do autopsy rotation first because I was like, they'll
Speaker 2: see how all the bodies are inside or all the
Speaker 2: organs right inside, because it's just different than gross anatomy,
Speaker 2: you know, It's just it's different when it's fresh. And
Speaker 2: then because what happens was they would come into surgical
Speaker 2: pathology and they would get something called a Whipple specimen,
Speaker 2: which is a pancreas with the piece of the duodenum attached,
Speaker 2: and they wouldn't even know how it's sat in the
Speaker 2: body because you just get this organ with a giant
Speaker 2: tumor in it that's like plopped on a cutting board
Speaker 2: in front of you, and it's hard to make the
Speaker 2: of how it's sat in the body, which way is antier,
Speaker 2: which ways post here, things like that, So I definitely
Speaker 2: think that that is something that all medical students should
Speaker 2: be heavily involved in for sure.
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Speaker 3: There's a reason it's grotesque again, as this is. There's
Speaker 3: a reason that people would risk prison relative to grave robbing.
Speaker 3: You know, our predecessors understood the value of having as
Speaker 3: fresh as specimens as they could. Great story. If somebody
Speaker 3: gets a chance to check this out, and I can't remember,
Speaker 3: I can tell you where it happened, but this is
Speaker 3: this would be right up your alley. There was a
Speaker 3: case a few years ago that took place actually in Georgia,
Speaker 3: and it was then the Medical College of Georgia, which
Speaker 3: is a pretty highly esteemed one of the oldest medical
Speaker 3: colleges medical schools in the US, and there were this
Speaker 3: is in the ante bellum South, and so there were
Speaker 3: these two freemen. These are African Americans that are not slaves,
Speaker 3: that made their living from robbing graves for the medical school. Well,
Speaker 3: there are no there were no even crappy fluorescent lights
Speaker 3: back then. You know, they did everything by whale lamps
Speaker 3: and those sorts of things. Candles. These guys would be
Speaker 3: paid right to go out dig up the fresh dead,
Speaker 3: bring them into medical students would pay them. Some people
Speaker 3: think that it was actually some of the instructors that
Speaker 3: were paying these guys to rob the graves because it
Speaker 3: was kind of a traditional thing that had gone on.
Speaker 3: They'd have to do it in the dark of the
Speaker 3: night because it was illegal, you know, you were not
Speaker 3: It was considered to be very inappropriate to do those
Speaker 3: back then. I think people are surprised at that. Anyway,
Speaker 3: after the students were through with bodies and after they
Speaker 3: had completely dissected them, they would take them and push
Speaker 3: them off into an aushwary that was underneath the buildings.
Speaker 3: So they're doing renovations on this building in the late
Speaker 3: eighties or early nineties, and there's there have been entire
Speaker 3: papers written about this event. They found human remains, and
Speaker 3: remains should be emphasized here for the plural nature of
Speaker 3: that war, because they got into there and there were
Speaker 3: co mingled sculptal remains that were just piled under there.
Speaker 4: And this was in Georgia.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was Georgia Medical College. I urge anybody, please
Speaker 3: don't believe what I'm saying, go and look it up.
Speaker 3: And I think I can't remember the lady's name. She's
Speaker 3: pretty well known back then, pretty well known. Forensic anthropologists
Speaker 3: had to go in and try to try to make
Speaker 3: sense of what was going on, because you know, we
Speaker 3: get will handle mass graves, particularly my friends that are overseas.
Speaker 3: I've made the acquaintances aside. I just recently took a
Speaker 3: trip to Great Britain and I made the acquaintance of
Speaker 3: a lave's forensic archaeologist and she's doing exhamations in Spain
Speaker 3: that are in uh part of the research they're doing
Speaker 3: on Spanish civil wars. And they had mass killings back
Speaker 3: then with big open graves that were dumping bodies in
Speaker 3: and she's exhuming those remains right now. Some nightmare because
Speaker 3: everything's stratified and commingled. They've belt they've it's in a graveyard,
Speaker 3: so they had buried newer bodies on top of these bodies.
Speaker 3: So they have to remove those bodies and then go
Speaker 3: down to substrata. So anyway, I'm sorry I digress, but
Speaker 3: that story is fat. It was always fascinating to me
Speaker 3: the links that people would go to because you know,
Speaker 3: they understood that if they were going to be treating
Speaker 3: people that they needed they they needed to be able
Speaker 3: to understand form and function and all the clinical stuff
Speaker 3: is great, you know where you're making diagnoses of the living,
Speaker 3: but if you don't understand our status as the dead first,
Speaker 3: it's it's a much more difficult proposition you had before
Speaker 3: you being a future clinician.
Speaker 2: I think, did you hear about this recent case where
Speaker 2: a surgeon took the wrong organ out of someone?
Speaker 3: It just no, I've heard, I've heard, I've heard of
Speaker 3: other cases. I don't, uh, and I can't remember how
Speaker 3: recently the most recent one. So no, i'd have to say, no.
Speaker 2: Oh, this guy took out someone's liver instead of their spleen,
Speaker 2: didn't realize it at the time of surgery, send it
Speaker 2: to surgical pathology, labeled spleen, and in surgical pathology they
Speaker 2: were like, it's his liver and that's why he's dead.
Speaker 2: How could it It's so outrageous.
Speaker 3: How could a surgeon do that?
Speaker 2: I mean he said it migrated to the other side
Speaker 2: of the body. And I don't know, I just I
Speaker 2: can't It happened in Florida. It was a couple of
Speaker 2: months ago. I'll send you.
Speaker 3: Is this a potential Florida man story? I don't know,
Speaker 3: that's what that's what this sounds like. Everything's different in Florida. Wow,
Speaker 3: how much more so? I thought? I really thought you
Speaker 3: were going to say he took out the wrong kidney. No,
Speaker 3: you know, that's fly. I mean, I can see that happening,
Speaker 3: you know, but the liver and it was supposed to
Speaker 3: be a splentactomy. Yes, that's outrageous. Absolutely it is.
Speaker 2: And the fact that he's trying to say, oh, it migrated,
Speaker 2: and it's like, yeah, of course if you have hippatomegla
Speaker 2: or splinting OMEGLEI, they get bigger and they move to
Speaker 2: the site, but the attachment points are on completely opposite sides.
Speaker 4: Of the body.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I don't understand how one goes about doing. And
Speaker 3: it was not just part of the liver, it was
Speaker 3: the entire liver.
Speaker 4: The entire liver.
Speaker 3: Holy, I beg you please if you have any links
Speaker 3: relative to that. I had got to read this. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3: I wrote up there, and I have to know the
Speaker 3: status of this man. I would assume that the patient is, yeah.
Speaker 4: He's daddy bled out.
Speaker 3: And that he did. And the fact that you would
Speaker 3: if you're hang on, I'm trying to do the calculus here.
Speaker 3: If you're so, if you're going to remove a liver there,
Speaker 3: unless you're doing it for harvestation and the person is,
Speaker 3: you know, essentially brain dead, there should be another liver
Speaker 3: standing by that you're going to uplook this person in
Speaker 3: the fact, and how I don't see how things could
Speaker 3: have gone that bad? Amazing. Yeah, I've got to read this.
Speaker 3: I can't wait for.
Speaker 2: I just don't understand, like, when you remove the spleen,
Speaker 2: you're only cutting it off of a spleen islanic artery
Speaker 2: in vain, right, It's just like a little clippy. You
Speaker 2: could kind of take it out with your hand, honestly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you can't. You can blunt lead us.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Like a.
Speaker 2: Liver is multiple attachments portal system.
Speaker 3: It is. And I spent many hours, particularly with rather
Speaker 3: rotund alcoholics that had cirrhosis fatty liver and would have
Speaker 3: these livers that were just absolutely gigantic probably just trying
Speaker 3: to remember the largest liver I've ever taken out. Numbers
Speaker 3: don't come to mind right now, but it was like
Speaker 3: the size of the Volkswagen Bus, you know. I mean,
Speaker 3: it was so big. But I spent a lot of
Speaker 3: time wrestling with the dead over their livers because it's
Speaker 3: oddly positioned, and as you said, there are multiple attachments
Speaker 3: that are there that have to be cut through. It's
Speaker 3: a very robust organ, and so when you get in
Speaker 3: there and you're trying to trim this out and dissect
Speaker 3: it out so that you can get it up onto
Speaker 3: the board intact without it being ripped, which is something
Speaker 3: I always tried to avoid doing, try to keep the
Speaker 3: capsule intact. It's a daunting task many times, particularly if
Speaker 3: you're tired and you've done a lot of cases and
Speaker 3: this is, you know, the fifth or the sixth one
Speaker 3: that you get to. I always think that it's better
Speaker 3: to start off with the largest person first, if possible.
Speaker 3: Everything else seems everything seems a bit easier after that.
Speaker 3: But yeah, yeah, liver is, by far from me, probably
Speaker 3: the most difficult organ to get out of the body.
Speaker 3: I have a long It took me a long time also,
Speaker 3: I would always do it by feel removal of the adrenals.
Speaker 3: That took a while to locate them, but I got
Speaker 3: I got pretty good at it towards the end where
Speaker 3: I could do I didn't have to like actualize it.
Speaker 3: I could just feel and trim it out, put it
Speaker 3: on the board. Then next go to the kidney, the
Speaker 3: adjacent kidney, so forth and so on. I've been in
Speaker 3: environments before where you know, we were doing on block
Speaker 3: dissections where you know, we refer to it as tongue
Speaker 3: to nuts, you know in the you know, forgive me again,
Speaker 3: that's very crass, but you know, starting dissecting out the
Speaker 3: tongue and just shaving right down the spinal column all
Speaker 3: the way down, cut away the diaphragm, all the way
Speaker 3: down to the rectum, remove it. Males, you know, you're
Speaker 3: you're taking out the testicles. And I think probably the
Speaker 3: quickest one of those I've ever done was right about
Speaker 3: two minutes.
Speaker 2: Oh. I believe it's for the person dissecting the organs
Speaker 2: off of that block.
Speaker 4: That you hand them with.
Speaker 3: Some doctors that you work with preferred to be on block,
Speaker 3: and generally that's not it's not desirable and forensics generally
Speaker 3: it's an organ by organ dissection. The Roguetansky thing is
Speaker 3: like I always felt like it was more clinical. There
Speaker 3: are certain circumstances where they do want it, and lots
Speaker 3: of times it has to do with not gunshot wounds,
Speaker 3: but accidents, particularly impacts, posterior impacts, blunt for strawm of
Speaker 3: the rear. They want to see. They want to see
Speaker 3: little focal areas of hemorrhage in their natural anatomical orientation
Speaker 3: and stuff that that cannot appreciate. If you're doing an
Speaker 3: organ by organ, they won't see it posterially. So you know,
Speaker 3: that was that was daunting. I think probably the most
Speaker 3: daunting thing that I ever had to do in the
Speaker 3: more is try to remove you know, to take out
Speaker 3: the brain and spinal cord intact.
Speaker 4: Oh I know from the back.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, it's it's hours and hours and hours tedious,
Speaker 3: the most tedious cases by farther that we would do.
Speaker 3: And you have to do these on a regular basis
Speaker 3: or in custody desks, and a lot of people don't
Speaker 3: realize this, but even if it's someone that dies in
Speaker 3: police custody of a heart attack, you're going to get
Speaker 3: what we used for too, is a prison autopsy, and
Speaker 3: a prison autopsy is first off, there's no area of
Speaker 3: the body that is not touched by scalpel blade. So like,
Speaker 3: for instance, the back is completely dissected out, completely opened,
Speaker 3: you take photographs exterior. Then after you open the back,
Speaker 3: you're taking pictures, detailed pictures of all the musculature all
Speaker 3: the way up to the occyput. You know, we would
Speaker 3: just kind of peel back this way. And then the
Speaker 3: reason is we'd cut down the buttocks, down the poster,
Speaker 3: your legs, open those up, the calves, the soles of
Speaker 3: the feet, if you can imagine this, and people say,
Speaker 3: my god, this is horrible. Why would you do that, Well,
Speaker 3: they're in custody, and so one of the things that
Speaker 3: you have to do with in custody deaths is you're
Speaker 3: checking for any focal areas of hemorrhage where they could
Speaker 3: have been abused. And again it goes back to the adage,
Speaker 3: if you don't get it right, then you'll never get it.
Speaker 3: And so we would do palms of the hands, backs
Speaker 3: of the hands, up and down the arms. Funeral homes
Speaker 3: hated it because it was an extra level they had
Speaker 3: to go to if they if if the body was
Speaker 3: going to be viewable. A lot of hats involved wearing
Speaker 3: hats and you know, trying to make the body presentable
Speaker 3: after we did it. But that standard I've done. I've
Speaker 3: assisted in autopsies of three execution victims. I did one
Speaker 3: of the last electric electrocutions in Georgia I think when
Speaker 3: I was assigned to the GBI, and two of the
Speaker 3: early lethal injection cases. And here's an interesting little bit
Speaker 3: of trivia because a lot of people will look at
Speaker 3: that and they'll say, well, why do you do an
Speaker 3: autopsy on that? Well, it's a homicide, and people, that's
Speaker 3: not a homicide. What else would you call it? There's
Speaker 3: only five manners of death. It's literally the death of
Speaker 3: someone but the hand of another. And so the corner
Speaker 3: can make the decision as to whether or not they
Speaker 3: want an autopsy. But is the public is going to
Speaker 3: be best served if all of these autopsies are done
Speaker 3: to completion where they are as thorough as they possibly
Speaker 3: can be. And isn't that interesting, you know, because you've
Speaker 3: got somebody who's been sitting on death row. Everything they
Speaker 3: do is monitored, everything they do is watched. You have
Speaker 3: detailed information about their medical history, if anything they're suffering from.
Speaker 3: But yet the state still requires that there'll be an
Speaker 3: autopsy performed. I had a chance for one to go
Speaker 3: and observe the execution. But you know, I got to.
Speaker 4: Tell you, man, you draw the line there.
Speaker 3: Well, my brain is so loaded with from all of
Speaker 3: those years of dealing with death, and I never as
Speaker 3: a practitioner working in two really big areas, you never
Speaker 3: get to say no to death very often. If you're
Speaker 3: on duty, you have to do its bidding, you know,
Speaker 3: because death never stops that. There were actually two invitations
Speaker 3: I had because the state medical Examiner would be present
Speaker 3: for the execution. It's something I just didn't want to
Speaker 3: load my brain up with. I didn't I didn't need
Speaker 3: to go in there and bear witness to it and
Speaker 3: be around. You know, you're around enough sadness. As a
Speaker 3: medical legal death investigator, I spent a lot of time.
Speaker 3: I think I've done close to two thousand in person
Speaker 3: death notifications over the course of my career, and it's
Speaker 3: soul crushing. The last one was just as bad as
Speaker 3: the first one that I did when I think I
Speaker 3: was twenty one years old. Never got easier, and so
Speaker 3: he you look at something like that, and and a
Speaker 3: lot of people out there would say, how would give
Speaker 3: youthing to be able to go see an execution? Be
Speaker 3: very careful what you wish for. There's just certain things
Speaker 3: that there's enough horror and ugliness in this world that
Speaker 3: you don't want to have to subject yourself to that
Speaker 3: one other thing. So it's just something I chose never
Speaker 3: to do. Now was there for the examination, And I
Speaker 3: think clinically you can kind of switch that, switch that off,
Speaker 3: but you almost feel like if you're there watching it,
Speaker 3: you almost feel like you're a party to it exactly,
Speaker 3: you know what I'm saying. Yeah, And it's just kind
Speaker 3: of a you know, and I know a lot of
Speaker 3: people get bloodlust going on, you know, they see these
Speaker 3: horrible cases in the news, and I'm chief among sinners
Speaker 3: because I cover them. And you say, well, if that
Speaker 3: was my relative, I'd throw the switch, or I push
Speaker 3: the needle or do this and do that, and that's
Speaker 3: all fine and good, But you know it wasn't my relative.
Speaker 3: You know, I don't, you know, I don't. I'm not
Speaker 3: invested in this. I'm not invested in this emotionally. I
Speaker 3: don't want to be invested in emotionally. I'm not invested
Speaker 3: in it clinically to watch the process because I know
Speaker 3: how it ends. I'll be glad to be there to
Speaker 3: document it, even though it's rather tedious. But it's one
Speaker 3: of those moments in Tom you know that I'm glad
Speaker 3: it's it's one of those turns in the road that
Speaker 3: I'm glad that you don't regret. Yeah, I didn't.
Speaker 2: I didn't go to I'm curious about this actually, So
Speaker 2: do you do document Obviously you do normal documentation of autopsy,
Speaker 2: but do they use that information for anything? For example,
Speaker 2: I'm of the of the mindset that a shooting squad
Speaker 2: is probably the most humane way to kill a person.
Speaker 3: Is Yeah, I thought that too. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, So, like when they see this pulmonary of demon
Speaker 2: seeing signs that a person was developing reaction to whatever
Speaker 2: lethal injection they were given, do they take that into
Speaker 2: consideration as far.
Speaker 3: As I would hope so. And I'm glad you mentioned
Speaker 3: that because I did an episode. We can get it
Speaker 3: wrong a couple I'll just say a couple of months back,
Speaker 3: we had I live here in Alabama. My university, Jacksonville
Speaker 3: State University, is here in Alabama. Love this place. The
Speaker 3: whole population of the state is smaller than the entire
Speaker 3: population of Atlanta, so we're sparsely populated here. I love.
Speaker 3: It is beautiful. I'm up in the Appalachian Mountains. Y'all
Speaker 3: didn't hear that. Don't come here.
Speaker 5: I know.
Speaker 4: I'm like, I'm going to go buy a house there
Speaker 4: right now.
Speaker 3: It's so peaceful. But anyway, our state did the first
Speaker 3: nitrogen execution a couple of months ago, and it had
Speaker 3: only been used in veterinary medicine for youth in Asia.
Speaker 3: The only animal that I could find that it had
Speaker 3: been a six eccess with had were hogs. They did
Speaker 3: it with dogs, and dogs presented with market anxiety as
Speaker 3: a result of And I think that a lot of
Speaker 3: it had to do with being masked up because if
Speaker 3: you the contraption that they use, and I urge anybody
Speaker 3: to go look it's just like I tell my students,
Speaker 3: don't believe anything I say. To look it up for yourself.
Speaker 3: That's generally how you're going to learn. But the mask
Speaker 3: is that they utilize is like, well, your your husband,
Speaker 3: who by the way, is an absolute hero. You is firefighters,
Speaker 3: So they have to use those all encompassing face mask right,
Speaker 3: you know where they can take oxygen directly in it
Speaker 3: protects their face. That's the type of masks they're using
Speaker 3: on this dude. And and he's he is morbidly obese.
Speaker 3: As a matter of fact, they they had attempted it
Speaker 3: was either one or two lethal injections on him already.
Speaker 3: They couldn't hit a vein because he was so obese,
Speaker 3: and it didn't it didn't work well. It was allegedly
Speaker 3: a struggle because it's it's an oxygen I don't know
Speaker 3: if you can call it like an oxygen deprivant, but
Speaker 3: it's an oxygen replacement. It's not like halon with halon
Speaker 3: fire extinguishers, where it's you know, it's sucking all the
Speaker 3: oxygen out of the air and fire dies. It doesn't
Speaker 3: quite work like that, but it's oxygen replacement and you're
Speaker 3: replacement with nitrogen. And there have been a few, and
Speaker 3: I've worked these cases. If people in the audience are
Speaker 3: not familiar with what are referred to as final exit cases,
Speaker 3: there's a book that was written many years ago called
Speaker 3: Final Exit by a guy named Derek Humphrey. Not Freeze,
Speaker 3: but Humphrey. I think that's correct, and he had started
Speaker 3: out years ago. His wife had really aggressive bone cancer
Speaker 3: and she was as, you know, that disease is really insidious,
Speaker 3: and she was just you know, there's no position she
Speaker 3: could get in and not be miserable. And there's not
Speaker 3: enough drugs you can give someone to make them comfortable.
Speaker 3: It's a horrible way to dine. They decided a mutual
Speaker 3: agreement that he would make tea for her. He would
Speaker 3: make tea for her, and he used I think some
Speaker 3: kind of barbituate combination. I can't remember what it was,
Speaker 3: and she died and he witnessed it well. He went
Speaker 3: on from there and wrote a book about it called
Speaker 3: Final Exit. In Final Exit, he goes through in detailed
Speaker 3: information describing how you can go about peacefully and they
Speaker 3: don't call it suicide. They call it self deliverance. So
Speaker 3: the reason I tell you that story is that going
Speaker 3: back to the execution with nitrogen, one of the things
Speaker 3: that they would recommend, and for a while on YouTube
Speaker 3: there was actually there was a video that was up
Speaker 3: of him demonstrating this, utilizing a kid's helium tank like
Speaker 3: he would rent to blow up helium points and how
Speaker 3: to change the hardware out on it. Uh, you know,
Speaker 3: plastic back putting, using plastic bags. It was. It was horrible,
Speaker 3: I mean just absolutely horrible. And uh, this method of
Speaker 3: self deliverance, you would take on board drugs and then
Speaker 3: you know, use the gas as an adjunct and either
Speaker 3: way it's going to bring about your peaceful death. I
Speaker 3: worked a number of those over the years, and I
Speaker 3: didn't see I didn't see struggling with those like was
Speaker 3: described relative to the nitrogen execution. However, he was not
Speaker 3: given meds prior to it either. So he's placed in
Speaker 3: this so you know that he's going to have elevated pulse,
Speaker 3: blood pressure, is probably gonna be up through the roof,
Speaker 3: terrible anxiety, crushing chest pain, probably already as a result
Speaker 3: of that shallow breathing. And then you add the nitrogen
Speaker 3: into it. And I'm not saying that the guy didn't
Speaker 3: deserve to die, you know, it's capital punishments. Not my thing.
Speaker 3: But I have objections based on, you know, my Catholic beliefs.
Speaker 3: But I the state says he has to die, and
Speaker 3: this is the methodology. The problem is is that with
Speaker 3: this particular methodology, I didn't see any evidence that it
Speaker 3: had been tested other than on hogs, and that's a
Speaker 3: big leap to go free, to go from hogs to
Speaker 3: humans at that point in Tom and my understanding is
Speaker 3: I think that within the last month they've just done
Speaker 3: another one with nitrogen, and I haven't heard the outcomes
Speaker 3: on it yet.
Speaker 4: So interesting.
Speaker 2: We just talked about this on the podcast a few
Speaker 2: weeks ago, that there's these new nitrogen pods for countries
Speaker 2: that have it. The legal physician assistant so as I
Speaker 2: although I don't even think it's physician assistant. The person
Speaker 2: goes in and they push the button themselves and yeah,
Speaker 2: it's it sounds like a horrible death, like asphyxiate to death.
Speaker 2: Sounds terrible to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, these pods look like something out of the television
Speaker 3: series Westworld or something. You know. It's you know, kind
Speaker 3: of the sleep. It looks like a sleeping pod like
Speaker 3: you would see on some John Carpenter, you know, Alien
Speaker 3: movie where he lay down they put you into deep sleep. Right.
Speaker 3: Interestingly enough, this is about as deep as it can go.
Speaker 3: I think that the case, I think it was two
Speaker 3: or three weeks ago this up in the I've never
Speaker 3: been to Switzerland, always wanted to go, but the northernmost
Speaker 3: portion of Switzerland. There's like this little peninsula that kind
Speaker 3: of juts out into northern France and over in Germany. Anyway.
Speaker 3: That's this thing was out in the woods. They had
Speaker 3: set this pod up and this person goes out there
Speaker 3: and I don't even know what their diagnosis was there.
Speaker 3: I guess they had a thermal diagnoses. I don't even
Speaker 3: know if that's required anymore. But they went in and
Speaker 3: took their life, ended their life in this thing, and
Speaker 3: the authorities were investigating it. I think there was The
Speaker 3: thing was the way the Swiss had described I think
Speaker 3: they said it was, this is so crazy. It was
Speaker 3: not approved. It was it was not government approved, so
Speaker 3: it didn't have the stamp on it or whatever, and
Speaker 3: they got all that.
Speaker 2: Imagine if you got called to that scene some death investigator,
Speaker 2: how to go, Yeah, no.
Speaker 3: I don't know, you know. I mean, it's not like
Speaker 3: with final exit cases, which we and it wasn't just
Speaker 3: me and it's not just my too often these cases,
Speaker 3: trust me, they were everywhere all over the country. There
Speaker 3: was like a it was almost like a fad, you know,
Speaker 3: that that took hold for a period of time and
Speaker 3: it kind of ran parallel to the same time that
Speaker 3: could work in Yeah, was doing his thing. And interestingly,
Speaker 3: interestingly enough, the book itself this call Final Exit, but
Speaker 3: it was published by the Hemlock Society, which, of course
Speaker 3: Hemlock is the tea that was a Socrates drink where
Speaker 3: he was forced to take his own life, and is
Speaker 3: published by the Hemlock Society, which they are a society.
Speaker 3: I guess they're still in existence. I have no idea
Speaker 3: that was dedicated to this idea of self deliverance. So, yeah,
Speaker 3: the world of medical legal death investigation, you can get
Speaker 3: off into all of these interesting areas that and be
Speaker 3: exposed to things that most even cops never see, you know,
Speaker 3: because we're doing investigations that. Yeah, some of them run parallel.
Speaker 3: But cops are really only interested in homicides. That's the
Speaker 3: only thing that's prosecutable, so everything else, and we work
Speaker 3: homicides obviously we have to. We're interested in suicides and
Speaker 3: accidents and natural deaths, which I love working because it's
Speaker 3: so intellectually stimulating. I'd always learn something about digging into
Speaker 3: medical records or certainly undetermined us you know that are
Speaker 3: out there where you just have no raw or reason
Speaker 3: why this person died and so that would pop up
Speaker 3: on your radar.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's why we started this podcast because
Speaker 2: I feel like there's this heavy there's this heavy field
Speaker 2: of true crime podcasts, and there's this whole other world
Speaker 2: of accidents and suicides and just other things surrounded around
Speaker 2: death that people don't really talk about that are actually
Speaker 2: I mean, accidents and natural death are more common than
Speaker 2: homicides for sure, and most people could relate to those
Speaker 2: more if you think about it, yeah.
Speaker 3: They can. And I'd say less than a lot of
Speaker 3: this is going to be geographically dependent, but probably right
Speaker 3: at about one percent of all of the desks the
Speaker 3: corners of medical examiners investigator homicides. Uh, most locations, suicides
Speaker 3: outpaced homicides two or three to one. So you spend
Speaker 3: a lot more time working suicides than you ever do homicides.
Speaker 3: And there's enough home. You know, if you watch the news,
Speaker 3: you think that there's people walking around with machetes, you know,
Speaker 3: cutting people's heads off all over the place, And yeah,
Speaker 3: there are really violent crimes that are out there, but
Speaker 3: you're seeing what the media chooses for you to see.
Speaker 3: You know, it's it's these really over and there's a
Speaker 3: lot of homicides that never make it through the news cycle.
Speaker 3: That's like one of my big problems with like the
Speaker 3: jan Benet case.
Speaker 2: That was driving me not storing COVID with the ticker
Speaker 2: that was on the news, because I'm just like, come on,
Speaker 2: like we had so many people die at the hospital
Speaker 2: every day, you just don't even think about it, you
Speaker 2: know what I mean, you don't.
Speaker 3: And that's the sad thing about it, and that, you know,
Speaker 3: going to those cases inarticular, I still waiting for a
Speaker 3: lot of the data, the post wartem data. My suspicion
Speaker 3: is that probably there were not a lot of those
Speaker 3: cases that were autopsied, and I'd really like to know.
Speaker 3: I'd like to see that data relative to those cases
Speaker 3: because it's certainly a unique time in human history, and
Speaker 3: I'm hoping that from the theology standpoint, it has been
Speaker 3: very well documented. But you know, there are a lot
Speaker 3: of things that never make it into the news, and
Speaker 3: one of the biggest examples, I think is Jean Benet.
Speaker 3: She fit a certain demographic. There's been over I don't know,
Speaker 3: I'm speaking out of school now, but at one time
Speaker 3: there were like twenty six books that have been written
Speaker 3: about the case. I'm sure there's probably more by now,
Speaker 3: not to mention any number of treatises that are out
Speaker 3: there floating around, but you know, I worked. I worked
Speaker 3: a lot of cases involving little girls that died and
Speaker 3: they never made it through two news cycles and those
Speaker 3: cases are unsolved. So it's all. You know, the media
Speaker 3: sets the table for what we're going to be exposed
Speaker 3: to and what we hear about that. Going back to
Speaker 3: true crime, that's one of the interesting things that we
Speaker 3: do now because we're unfettered I think by standard newspapers
Speaker 3: and certainly the nightly national news. I find cases for
Speaker 3: body bags, which I try to stick within the lane,
Speaker 3: you know, my lanes. I don't get off into relationship stuff.
Speaker 3: I'm not putting on makeup while I'm telling ghastly stories
Speaker 3: and all that sort of stuff. I'm not sitting around
Speaker 3: smoking cigars and drinking whiskey while I'm talking about it,
Speaker 3: though I do like a nice whiskey and a cigar.
Speaker 4: I was like, you probably could get away with that.
Speaker 3: I might could, But you know, I like to talk
Speaker 3: about those cases where my friends, I don't like to
Speaker 3: call them fans. I like friends because I view them
Speaker 3: as students too, because you know, I've been very blessed.
Speaker 3: I've got a great education. I got it all in
Speaker 3: my own hand. I mean, I didn't have anybody, but
Speaker 3: I do have an education. There are a lot of
Speaker 3: people that are sitting at home right now and they
Speaker 3: watch true crime television. They don't have same opportunities I've had.
Speaker 3: They haven't spent time in the morgue. They've never been
Speaker 3: to a death scene. They've never been around some of
Speaker 3: the brilliant people that I've been exposed to over the
Speaker 3: course of my career, and they never will because their
Speaker 3: pastor not going to cross. They're people that keep everything
Speaker 3: running and do the hard work that you know that
Speaker 3: I don't have to do because I'm a college professor.
Speaker 3: I really don't have a real job. I'm a college professor.
Speaker 3: I used to have a real job, but you know,
Speaker 3: so it's my opportunity. I despise it when people speak
Speaker 3: down to folks. I really hate that, and I've had
Speaker 3: that done to me. But you know, I had a
Speaker 3: few really kind people mentors along the way that were
Speaker 3: forensic pathologists that didn't treat me like I was there,
Speaker 3: you know, their servant, like a deanery. They treated me
Speaker 3: as though I were their student, and they wanted to
Speaker 3: invest in me. And so I try to pass that
Speaker 3: along to the general public and try to take these
Speaker 3: you know, pretty high end complex scientific constructs and try
Speaker 3: to break it down so that they understand it a
Speaker 3: little bit better. And and still, you know, we have
Speaker 3: a good tale along with it, and they come away
Speaker 3: understanding some of the stuff that can be very confusing
Speaker 3: in the news, you know, if you just kind of
Speaker 3: slip over the top of it, just kind of, you know,
Speaker 3: pay pay a passing glance to Perhaps these people have
Speaker 3: never been in an autopsy suite. Most of them never have.
Speaker 3: They don't know what the sounds and the smells are,
Speaker 3: like what it sounds like when you drop a scalpel
Speaker 3: on a tile floor and it rings off the cabinets
Speaker 3: and off the thing will steal fixtures. They don't know
Speaker 3: what that's like in there. I do. That sounds so
Speaker 3: resonates in my ear. They don't know what it's like
Speaker 3: to have flies coming off of a body and lighting
Speaker 3: on you. They don't know what screams of families are like.
Speaker 3: I know what that's like, And so I try to
Speaker 3: do my best to translate that those experiences and also
Speaker 3: the joy of it of actually discovering something scientifically among
Speaker 3: all the sorrow and among all the horror, that there's
Speaker 3: something that you can you know, that you can take
Speaker 3: away from it that people will be invested in. And
Speaker 3: so I'm very grateful for the opportunity I've had, you know,
Speaker 3: to do body bags. It's just every time I do
Speaker 3: an episode, I just I'm thrilled with it. It might
Speaker 3: not be everybody's cup of tea, but you know, I
Speaker 3: just I enjoy talking about the mechanisms of death and
Speaker 3: how you work a case like this in the field
Speaker 3: and then bringing it back to the morgue. And probably
Speaker 3: one of the coolest things that I've covered that will
Speaker 3: thrill one of my greatest joys is we did Julius
Speaker 3: Caesar's autopsy. It's the first documented autopsy that was ever conducted,
Speaker 3: and how his personal physician actually created a three D
Speaker 3: wax model to demonstrate to the crowd of what had
Speaker 3: been done to their king, to Caesar. And when he
Speaker 3: demonstrated this thing in the forum, which is where we
Speaker 3: get forensics from, he had it on a pedestal. They
Speaker 3: describe it as an unknown mechanism that would cause this
Speaker 3: thing to turn, and so he could display it to
Speaker 3: the gathered crowd and they said that you could hear
Speaker 3: gasp go it from the crowd, and they wanted blood
Speaker 3: at this point, you know, they wanted blood. It had
Speaker 3: been a witnessed homicide with these senators. But when the
Speaker 3: people saw what had happened to and that was the
Speaker 3: first time not only was it the first documented autopsy,
Speaker 3: but what's old is new again. You know, we used
Speaker 3: really modeling now, you know, in court, and that was
Speaker 3: that was the first Tom And that was a couple
Speaker 3: of thousand years ago that he thought about that at
Speaker 3: that moment, Tom, that scientist, that physician, that clinician thought
Speaker 3: about this time, how am I going to convey this
Speaker 3: message to these people that don't have my understanding necessarily
Speaker 3: because they haven't spent their time treating patients. How are
Speaker 3: they going to appreciate this? I got it, he has
Speaker 3: this Eureka moment And.
Speaker 2: I get that from your when I listened to because
Speaker 2: I I you know, I trained interned at the Medical
Speaker 2: Examiner's office for a couple of months, but nowhere near
Speaker 2: have any kind of experience like you do. So and
Speaker 2: I don't really feel like I know it all that great.
Speaker 2: But when I listened to you on your podcast, or
Speaker 2: when I listened to you on Nancy Grace or any
Speaker 2: interviews you do, I'm always like, yeah, this guy is
Speaker 2: like explaining it to people on a normal level so
Speaker 2: they could understand it. I always like to say, it's
Speaker 2: like a third grade level.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 3: Well, I get I Look, I don't have comments, you know,
Speaker 3: and I don't go around reading my reviews I did
Speaker 3: early on. I understand that's a that's a slippery stock
Speaker 3: to go. Doyn't do it. But you know, I have
Speaker 3: somebody say you don't have to. We're not stupid. You
Speaker 3: don't have to dumb it down for us as much. Well,
Speaker 3: I'm glad you're so brilliant.
Speaker 4: Yeah, some people don't.
Speaker 3: Have the same advantages that you that maybe you have
Speaker 3: in your life. If you don't like the way I
Speaker 3: do it, I'm sure you can go find somebody else
Speaker 3: that'll do it. But this is the way I'm going
Speaker 3: to do it because you know, look, you never know
Speaker 3: that little quaranteed that you plant in somebody's brain they
Speaker 3: may have for years. And this way I look at
Speaker 3: my students too. For years and years, they may have
Speaker 3: been told that they're no good at math, that science
Speaker 3: is hard, and yeah, math is difficult. Science is hard,
Speaker 3: but the reward is almost immeasurable, you know, the knowledge
Speaker 3: that you gain and if you can plant that little
Speaker 3: seed in their brain to help them understand, okay, forum
Speaker 3: in function. This is how this works. It's kind of
Speaker 3: like when you're you know, that's why our forensics program
Speaker 3: is an applied forensics program, because we're trying to train, teach,
Speaker 3: and train people. Academics hate it when you say the
Speaker 3: word train. When you're trying to educate people so that
Speaker 3: they can go out and be practitioners, that's the beauty
Speaker 3: of it. It's not theoretical forensic science. It's applied forensic science.
Speaker 3: And so those kids that I have walked through the door,
Speaker 3: many of them have been told that they're no good
Speaker 3: in math, or that they're no good in science, and
Speaker 3: all it takes is just a little shove sometimes and
Speaker 3: a little encouragement. I mean, I think all of us
Speaker 3: can identify the first time that we ever walked into
Speaker 3: a chemistry class, perhaps in high school, and thought they
Speaker 3: might as well be speaking in ancient Greek. I don't
Speaker 3: understand this. Oh they let me put together models of molecules.
Speaker 3: How you know how revealing is that? But then you
Speaker 3: start to talk about quantitative findings relative to suspect a coke,
Speaker 3: suspected cocaine, you know that's recovered at crossing. Suddenly suddenly
Speaker 3: you understand the application of chemistry. Yeah, and you know
Speaker 3: the lights go go on at that point time. Sometimes
Speaker 3: that's all it takes. That's why the STEM stuff that
Speaker 3: they do in college is now is so very important,
Speaker 3: and in high school as well.
Speaker 2: I know exactly what you're saying. I mean, I went
Speaker 2: through this when when I was a teenager. You know,
Speaker 2: I got pregnant with my daughter and I dropped out
Speaker 2: of high school when I was sixteen, and it was
Speaker 2: I was kind of deemed like, oh, you're not really smart,
Speaker 2: you don't know anything, Like why don't you just kind
Speaker 2: of you know, and it just it's you just have
Speaker 2: to find somebody that talks to you and doesn't treat
Speaker 2: you like you're an idiot, to really find that light
Speaker 2: inside of you to help you know what I mean,
Speaker 2: to help get you on your way. And I think
Speaker 2: it's it's cool because one of the things I noticed
Speaker 2: when we went to crime con. Actually, one of the
Speaker 2: things my husband noticed first. He was just like, there's
Speaker 2: all women here. It's all women.
Speaker 4: He's like, this is so crazy.
Speaker 2: And I think, just being a mom and a wife myself,
Speaker 2: that a lot of times like Nicole's third and fourth
Speaker 2: on the list of who gets the attention, you know
Speaker 2: what I mean. I'm running a house, I'm making sure
Speaker 2: his career is going well. I'm making sure my kids
Speaker 2: are all in school and doing well, and sometimes I'm
Speaker 2: on the back burner. But there's some certain situations where women,
Speaker 2: you know, they get married and they have kids when
Speaker 2: they're in their twenties and they never get to go
Speaker 2: to college when but they probably would be really good
Speaker 2: forensic scientists, right, but they just don't have the opportunity,
Speaker 2: like you were saying, And the next best thing is
Speaker 2: for them to listen to podcasts like yours to kind
Speaker 2: of feel like they're doing.
Speaker 4: The job a little bit.
Speaker 3: It's vicarious, it is, it is. There is this vicarious
Speaker 3: element to it where you know you can brush up
Speaker 3: against it just enough and you're not going to have
Speaker 3: to come home, you know, kill my wife who you met,
Speaker 3: I love her so that she thinks the world of y'all.
Speaker 3: She goes on and on about y'all in the time
Speaker 3: that we had there. And you know, my wife, my
Speaker 3: wife is she's retired now. She's a school teacher, taught school.
Speaker 3: God bless her for some mean, we were so happy
Speaker 3: when she retired. God bless all school teachers out there
Speaker 3: right now. I don't I don't know how they do it.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't. You couldn't chase me fast enough, anyone could
Speaker 3: give me the job. But to give you an idea
Speaker 3: of kind of the world that that I inhabited as
Speaker 3: a practitioner, I compare myself and my colleagues to the
Speaker 3: great apes, where if you've seen stuff that that the
Speaker 3: researchers have done, where you they've got the videography in
Speaker 3: there that the apes will go about picking knits out
Speaker 3: of one another's scalps, you know to you know they're
Speaker 3: eating them, you know they're looking to. When you work
Speaker 3: at a medical examiner or corner's office, you live in
Speaker 3: such a alternative world.
Speaker 2: You.
Speaker 3: For instance, one of the things that we do for
Speaker 3: one another is we sniff one another. And people don't
Speaker 3: understand that because just because we've gotten in from a
Speaker 3: case doesn't mean our day is over with. We might
Speaker 3: have to go to court, we might have to go
Speaker 3: out and grab lunch, we might have a meeting we
Speaker 3: have to attend. And so we would walk by one
Speaker 3: another and they would say, and it's very common for
Speaker 3: somebody to say, well, how do you smell? How do
Speaker 3: I smell? And that question is not like, smell this
Speaker 3: lovely perfume or cologne that I have on. It's I
Speaker 3: don't smell anything. I think you're good. And what we're
Speaker 3: smelling for is that we had to deal with so
Speaker 3: many decomps that when you go into that environment, the
Speaker 3: elements of the and this is kind of a I
Speaker 3: think it's kind of a metaphor as well, but the
Speaker 3: elements that they're attached to death they attached to you.
Speaker 3: Now that happens physically. Yeah, facial hair hair.
Speaker 2: I was going to say, we had a guy one
Speaker 2: of the Medical Examiner's office when I interned. He always
Speaker 2: smelled like dcomp because of his beard.
Speaker 3: Always. Yeah, and it's one of those things. I was
Speaker 3: in a pickly wiggly refrigerated truck with bodies from a
Speaker 3: capsized oil service vessel. They were coming in day by
Speaker 3: day they were trying to outrun a hurricane or a
Speaker 3: tropical storm and think capsized. They all died and we
Speaker 3: didn't get them all on the same day. We're trying
Speaker 3: to get them identified. They were all in their underwear
Speaker 3: for some reason, nobody had any id on them. Had
Speaker 3: to cut the jaws out of every one of those bodies.
Speaker 3: These bodies are coming out of Gulf of Mexico, so
Speaker 3: they're swollen and bloated. And no matter how many baths,
Speaker 3: how many showers I took, I love a shower. I
Speaker 3: love a good shower. And back then my hair was
Speaker 3: really dark. I had this great tompsilic like mustache that's
Speaker 3: big brown.
Speaker 4: To post some pictures of the.
Speaker 3: Old school days, I do everything, and I wrote about
Speaker 3: this in my memoir, I look like a cancer patient.
Speaker 3: I wound up having too. I was so weary after
Speaker 3: that event, and there were other things that were happening
Speaker 3: to I wound up having to shave all of my
Speaker 3: hair off, shave my mustache off, even shaved my eyebrows off.
Speaker 3: And that seems nutty, but it had affected me to
Speaker 3: the point where you become neurotic about it. Plucking those
Speaker 3: hairs out all these sorts of things, and it sounds
Speaker 3: so absurd, I know, but that's that's the nature of
Speaker 3: what you do when you work at a medical examiner.
Speaker 3: When I would get home in the evenings, I would
Speaker 3: always have to come in through the rear entrance of
Speaker 3: our home through we had a mud room on the
Speaker 3: back of the house where the laundry is and all
Speaker 3: that stuff. And Kim, yes, she'd meet me at the
Speaker 3: back door and she would ask me not hey, babe,
Speaker 3: I love you so good, to seek say did you
Speaker 3: have a decomp today? And that's an interesting when you
Speaker 3: think about the position that you put your spouse in.
Speaker 3: You know, you you're there and you're you're leaving this
Speaker 3: world to death, which is what you always do. It's
Speaker 3: not like being a homicide detective. It's not what it's
Speaker 3: like at all. Your death day in, day out, twenty
Speaker 3: four to seven. You are seeking out to diad you're
Speaker 3: trying to understand what happened to them, no matter the circumstances, homicide, suicide, whatever,
Speaker 3: and you bring that, you literally bring that home with you.
Speaker 3: And so you know, my wife would I had a
Speaker 3: spot in the in the mudroom, I'd have to strip
Speaker 3: all my clothes off. She's a saint. She's a saint,
Speaker 3: she'd bag them all away.
Speaker 2: You don't want that smell in your house. You don't
Speaker 2: you want to come home and not have any association
Speaker 2: with what you just did. It's a very hard line,
Speaker 2: it is.
Speaker 3: It's very hard, and it had gotten so bad at
Speaker 3: the end of my career where I wound up working
Speaker 3: for twenty years as a medical legal death investigator, and
Speaker 3: then I transitioned into academia. And I've been doing it
Speaker 3: now for twenty years, so I'm really old. But I
Speaker 3: look back now at that very young man who had
Speaker 3: no business doing what he was doing. Somebody was willing
Speaker 3: to take a chance on this uneducated kid. I had
Speaker 3: no education. I just had tenacity. I kept coming to
Speaker 3: the more volunteering in the morgue, who does that mopping up,
Speaker 3: the more rocking, mopping up maggots, you know, And then
Speaker 3: finally the first day I'll never forget one of the
Speaker 3: most exciting moments in my life is one of the
Speaker 3: theologists looked at me and said, and I'd been scribing
Speaker 3: for him for a while. I'd sit over on the stool.
Speaker 3: I had my own scrubtsuit, I'd sit on the stool
Speaker 3: and I would sit there and I had actually a
Speaker 3: scriptsuit and what they used for as a sectioning gown,
Speaker 3: which is like a it's a green gown that ties
Speaker 3: on the side over here, and it was it looks
Speaker 3: just like a scrubtsy. And I would faithfully wash it,
Speaker 3: you know, and I would describe for him. And then
Speaker 3: one day he looks over at me and says, do
Speaker 3: you want to close? And I thought that he meant,
Speaker 3: go get my mop and mop up everything here, you know,
Speaker 3: which is what I was doing. It's not what he meant.
Speaker 4: He was like, you could say, do.
Speaker 3: You want to close? That is exciting, and it really was.
Speaker 3: And I knew I knew how to hold the needle.
Speaker 3: I've been watching, but until you put it in your hands,
Speaker 3: until you feel that tension on the skin down near
Speaker 3: the pubis for the first time, and what how much
Speaker 3: force it takes to push through.
Speaker 1: It's kind of unbelievable, right it is, and tying it
Speaker 1: off and then start with a baseball stitch and you're
Speaker 1: going up and you're I remember being terrified I was
Speaker 1: going to stick myself, which I did.
Speaker 3: Multiple times over the years and cut myself and injected
Speaker 3: myself and did everything else, you know. But you know,
Speaker 3: I look back at that time and it was invaluable
Speaker 3: because it's something now that you know, I can pass
Speaker 3: on to my students, I can pass on to my
Speaker 3: friends that listen to Bodybags, and my wife and I now,
Speaker 3: you know, we think about the tears that were shed,
Speaker 3: all the dead kids that never had a voice, the
Speaker 3: stories I would come home and tell her. It would
Speaker 3: make us hug our babies even tighter. Appreciate those moments,
Speaker 3: and many times I would fail to appreciate them because
Speaker 3: I'm so obsessed and worried about having to go back
Speaker 3: to work. I'd work four days on ten hour shifts.
Speaker 3: Of course, ten hour shifts always turned into thirteen hour shifts,
Speaker 3: and it had gotten so bad at the end where
Speaker 3: I would pick up my keys at the end of
Speaker 3: my last watch that I was on a call, that
Speaker 3: I walked out of the door of the m's office.
Speaker 3: I was thinking about having to come back here in
Speaker 3: three days. I wasn't thinking about, Gee, I'm going to
Speaker 3: go home be with my family. I was thinking I've
Speaker 3: got to come back here in three days. A snow
Speaker 3: way for anybody to live.
Speaker 4: When I interned there. It was nice.
Speaker 2: I was there for three months and I learned a
Speaker 2: lot and I got to cut my first body on
Speaker 2: a dcomp and all this stuff. But like I was,
Speaker 2: I thought to myself, I can never work here full time.
Speaker 2: It would It's just not for me. Seeing people that
Speaker 2: didn't know that they were going to die that day,
Speaker 2: and I can't deal with I don't know. I did
Speaker 2: a lot of autopsies on fetus and uh infants and
Speaker 2: even children when I rotated at the children's hospital and
Speaker 2: they had they all medical diseases. You know that, you're
Speaker 2: just like they were. They had this and they couldn't
Speaker 2: do anything to save them. But when you see kids
Speaker 2: dying in accidents and just abuse and stuff, I just
Speaker 2: was like, I can't do.
Speaker 4: This every day.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and we're seeing after you know, the kids in particular,
Speaker 3: and I don't want to put words in your mouth,
Speaker 3: but it's like, Okay, you look at it on balance,
Speaker 3: and you think, what good is just coming out of this. Well,
Speaker 3: from a clinical standpoint, if I identify some kind of genetic
Speaker 3: anomalies that I can pass on to the family and say, Okay,
Speaker 3: you guys really need to be aware of this. This
Speaker 3: is what we found. I mean, what a what a
Speaker 3: redemptive moment that is. And amongst all of that sadness.
Speaker 3: But who am I going to interdict with somebody that
Speaker 3: starved their kid to death? I mean yeah, I mean
Speaker 3: they'll hook them up on charges. Maybe. Are they going
Speaker 3: to stay in prison? No? Are people going to stop
Speaker 3: starving their kids to death or you know, beating them
Speaker 3: to death? No, they're not. It's still it's going on
Speaker 3: right now as you and I speak. You know, somewhere
Speaker 3: out there, there's kid being abused, There's kids going to
Speaker 3: wind up dying. It happens all the time. There's nothing
Speaker 3: that we do it's going to stop that. And that's
Speaker 3: why I think there's a certain time where you have
Speaker 3: to be an adult enough to realize and you have
Speaker 3: to swallow your pride and so that can't do this anymore.
Speaker 3: It's going to kill me. It's gonna kill me, it's
Speaker 3: gonna kill my family. Uh. And it's a it's a
Speaker 3: it's a baton death march, you know, where every single
Speaker 3: day that's all your your bearing witness to and the
Speaker 3: human human spirit's not intended to do that. It's not
Speaker 3: like working on a funeral home you know where you know,
Speaker 3: they'll say, well, we're here to serve families and provide
Speaker 3: you're there at selic casket and you're there to dress
Speaker 3: things up and make it that way, and that's all
Speaker 3: find and good people need that. People think they need that.
Speaker 3: God bless them, God speed. But you know, when you're
Speaker 3: in the field and you're working as as a death investigator,
Speaker 3: it's it's hard. Uh. But when when you can no fine,
Speaker 3: no longer find redemption in it, that's the time you
Speaker 3: need to walk away from it. And I'm that I'm
Speaker 3: glad I didn't completely go over the cliff, you know.
Speaker 3: I'm glad that I was rained back in and my
Speaker 3: wife supported me in that, you know, because she went
Speaker 3: through it, you know, with me, she saw it all
Speaker 3: and smelled it all. And you know, would hear about
Speaker 3: these stories that if I you know, it's like I
Speaker 3: often tell people a lot of stuff that that I
Speaker 3: saw and that I did. If you and I wrote
Speaker 3: a script together, n Cole, and we walked into some
Speaker 3: producer's office in Hollywood, they say this is too outlandish.
Speaker 3: I'd never knew it, and we're not going to sell it.
Speaker 3: There's no way anybody would believe the story, you know.
Speaker 3: But yeah, and there's a million of the stories out
Speaker 3: there like that. It's not just me. I'm very small,
Speaker 3: little guy. I just happened to be in the field
Speaker 3: at these particular times. Right now, there's somebody out there
Speaker 3: right now as I speak, that's climbing under a house
Speaker 3: with a mag and infested body. They're laying next to
Speaker 3: the body as they examined the body in the dark,
Speaker 3: you know, damp area that no one has been in
Speaker 3: years and years. And there's people that are observing things
Speaker 3: right now that we can't even begin to fathom out
Speaker 3: here in America. Right now as we speak, they're out
Speaker 3: there doing this job day in and day out, and
Speaker 3: nobody ever, nobody ever thinks about it. You know. My
Speaker 3: first date that I read with my wife, we'd gone
Speaker 3: to a Braves game and we went out.
Speaker 2: This is the only thing we're gonna we're going to
Speaker 2: disagree on, Joseph.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm not a baseball'ser. I mean, I'll watch it.
Speaker 3: It's not right. Really. We went to a place called
Speaker 3: Fellini's Pizza, which is everything's named Peachtree in Atlanta. I
Speaker 3: was working for them by this time. I left my
Speaker 3: job in New Orleans, which is my hometown, and then
Speaker 3: wound up taking the job in Atlanta. And she's a
Speaker 3: school she was a school teacher. And we were sitting there,
Speaker 3: we had a pitcher of beer and we were eating pizza,
Speaker 3: and and she looked at me and said, uh, now,
Speaker 3: what is it that you do for a living? I said, well,
Speaker 3: I said, I'm a death investigator. She said, you mean
Speaker 3: like a cop. I was like no, I said, I'm
Speaker 3: the eyes and the ears of forensic pathologists out on
Speaker 3: the field. She said, I thought they'd go out there.
Speaker 3: I was like, no, forensic pathologists don't go into the field.
Speaker 3: That's a Hollywood fiction. And they might go, but rarely,
Speaker 3: and you don't want them out there because they don't
Speaker 3: they don't know how to process crime scenes. They don't
Speaker 3: have you know, they're good in the morgue. And so
Speaker 3: i'm their eyes and ears, and my colleagues are too.
Speaker 3: So that's what we go out and do, and we
Speaker 3: notify families of deaths, and then I'll work in the
Speaker 3: morgue and you know, all these sorts of things. And
Speaker 3: profoundly enough, and that she didn't she didn't really think
Speaker 3: about what she was saying. When she said this is
Speaker 3: a first date. She looks at me and says, until
Speaker 3: I met you, I never thought about death. It's like, wow,
Speaker 3: I'm not I'm not going to have second chance. Here
Speaker 3: got to make She's beautiful, you know, She's sitting there
Speaker 3: and uh and I was thinking, you know, I'm uh, well,
Speaker 3: I lost this one. I'm not gonna have a chance.
Speaker 3: You know she's saying, she's making quotes like that, I
Speaker 3: never thought about death until I've met you here. I've
Speaker 3: told that story is a number of time, but it's
Speaker 3: it's a little slice of life for me that because
Speaker 3: you know, death had become my norm. It was my norm,
Speaker 3: and that's that's no way to live. You know, that's
Speaker 3: where death is your norm. And you're right. I'm so
Speaker 3: glad you didn't go to work for the Emmy's office.
Speaker 3: I can't tell you how happy I am that you
Speaker 3: didn't make that decision. I'm glad that you took your
Speaker 3: skills and applied it to truly helping people. I mean,
Speaker 3: like helping people with the diagnoses, the sturgical diagnoses that
Speaker 3: you can make. You know, these specimens that are coming
Speaker 3: out and you're taking a look at and what you're
Speaker 3: doing is like literally, I don't think I don't know
Speaker 3: that people fully understand, you know, how valuable an asset
Speaker 3: you are, you know, when you're talking about looking at
Speaker 3: some tumor, uh and trying to make an assessment of
Speaker 3: this thing that has been excised from somebody's you know, body,
Speaker 3: and they're trying to understand what's the course of action here,
Speaker 3: your decision, your diagnosis as you're sitting at that scope
Speaker 3: is so valuable. And that I always wanted to be
Speaker 3: in that environment. I think that I secretly, uh you know,
Speaker 3: Harbard thoughts that I would eventually go to what was it,
Speaker 3: It was either Duke or I can't remember you, And
Speaker 3: I think, yeah, And I thought about doing the PA
Speaker 3: program there for a while. I used hope that memory
Speaker 3: would get one. I would have loved to have gone
Speaker 3: through that program and just do nothing but autopsies, not
Speaker 3: have to deal with families or just sit in sit
Speaker 3: in a lab, you know. And and it's not I
Speaker 3: don't mean to be dismissive by saying that, but the
Speaker 3: peace of that and you know, we I heard off
Speaker 3: the conversation and it was so beautiful the way you
Speaker 3: put it about and people other than you and I
Speaker 3: and people in our field are not going to understand that.
Speaker 3: But you talked about that piece that you have in
Speaker 3: the morgue with a body. Oh yeah, and that's a
Speaker 3: true moment of discovery in there. There's nothing that there's
Speaker 3: no cross talk, there's no phone, it's just you one
Speaker 3: on one with the body, grossly examining the body and
Speaker 3: trying to understand what happened to this person and trying
Speaker 3: to assess it in that moment, and and know that
Speaker 3: whatever you come up with is going to be invaluable.
Speaker 3: And there is a real piece in that, you know,
Speaker 3: And you kind of leave that that morg area after
Speaker 3: you've done what you've done, you've cleaned up, and your
Speaker 3: head back upstairs, and all of a sudden the noise
Speaker 3: begins to invade again, and all the static that's around
Speaker 3: you and everything, and there's there is truly a certain
Speaker 3: piece that that happened. Most people want to stay away
Speaker 3: from the more there are people that want to be there.
Speaker 3: But for the line's share of people's you know, they'll
Speaker 3: take the loop around the long way in the basement
Speaker 3: if they've got to go to the work cafeterias in
Speaker 3: the in hospitals, always next to the mor give or
Speaker 3: notice it, I don't.
Speaker 2: Know, but we had patients all the time, like accidentally
Speaker 2: one time we had the door, yes, and I'm just like,
Speaker 2: oh my god. They would have been traumatized if they
Speaker 2: saw anything that was going on.
Speaker 4: In that room.
Speaker 3: They walk in and they're where we used to call
Speaker 3: it a johnny coat, you know, the hospital gown, the
Speaker 3: johnny coat, and they're pushing an ivy pole and they put, hey,
Speaker 3: what's this door? And they open it up, and you're
Speaker 3: always had that, you know, there was an internal lock
Speaker 3: that we could use, but and it would always seem
Speaker 3: I worked in some really old old hospitals and the
Speaker 3: way they used to be designed it You would come
Speaker 3: walking out of the moar at these hospitals and right
Speaker 3: down the hallway is the dining area, you know, and
Speaker 3: it's where everybody went to eat for some reason, and
Speaker 3: the food was always tremendous, and nobody in there other
Speaker 3: than you know, maybe the nursing staff and people like that.
Speaker 3: They know that that's the more because that's where they
Speaker 3: take the bodies, you know, when or the transport service
Speaker 3: I take the bodies in there and you know, place
Speaker 3: them in the train and leave them and leave if
Speaker 3: But they don't know what's going on down there, you know,
Speaker 3: in that little room. You know they have no idea.
Speaker 3: But yet the cafeteria is right there. And I have
Speaker 3: to say, I'm not as a patient, but as a
Speaker 3: person who walks into a hospital cafeteria. Some of the
Speaker 3: best meals I've ever had in my life were in
Speaker 3: cafeterias and hospitals. But yeah, it's it's kind of a
Speaker 3: Hospitals in and of themselves are weird places. They're like
Speaker 3: little cities, little islands, and there's a pecking order. A
Speaker 3: lot of people don't understand that. And uh, pathology is
Speaker 3: generally out there, you know, on a little island by itself.
Speaker 3: You have people that come in and out not always
Speaker 3: wanted to be a part of that. I could, I would,
Speaker 3: I would just scrape the surface of it. And you know,
Speaker 3: going into hospitals and assisting with private cases and doing
Speaker 3: temporary That's how I got started. The corner's office was
Speaker 3: being renovated and we're using a brand new hospital to
Speaker 3: our autopsies, bringing in decomposed bodies into a hospital autopsy suite.
Speaker 3: I remember those days. That would never happen now. But yeah,
Speaker 3: we brought.
Speaker 2: In an exhumed body once. That was pretty interesting, but
Speaker 2: it was it was supposed to be in a hospital
Speaker 2: autopsy and the person got buried by accident, and then
Speaker 2: they had to get dug off like a year later
Speaker 2: because when they finally realized that the person didn't have
Speaker 2: an autopsy, the ground was too frozen to dig them up.
Speaker 4: So it just took it took a while.
Speaker 3: Very unusual case, but they are in exhubmations in and
Speaker 3: of themselves or fascinating. I'm a history guy, so anytime
Speaker 3: I'm there to see a grave cracked open and you
Speaker 3: never know, you learn a lot. You learn a lot
Speaker 3: about first off, you learn a lot about the skill
Speaker 3: of the funeral.
Speaker 4: Director, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3: Because if they don't do an effective job, you're going
Speaker 3: to wind up with a real mess literally on your hand.
Speaker 2: And this guy was underground for a year and he
Speaker 2: just I couldn't believe it because I was really obviously,
Speaker 2: I was really scared to have a person that has
Speaker 2: been has been dead for a year in the hospital
Speaker 2: because I thought, if that smells really bad, that's going
Speaker 2: to permeate and people are going to smell it, and
Speaker 2: you don't want people in a hospital to smell that smell.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: But he was he looked, he slid makeup on his face.
Speaker 4: It was insane.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I had a guy that was had been on
Speaker 3: the ground for sixteen years. He was an African American
Speaker 3: gentleman that was a pastor, and it came to light
Speaker 3: that his wife, It is true, his wife may have
Speaker 3: poisoned him. And they thought that it may have been
Speaker 3: heavy metals, and so we did an exhamation. I'll never
Speaker 3: forget this. It's one of these moments in tom He
Speaker 3: was dressed all in white, had a white suit, white shirt,
Speaker 3: white tie. He had red socks and they put shoes
Speaker 3: on him and had red patent leather shoes on. And
Speaker 3: I'll never forget this guy. And he had a what
Speaker 3: had been in his lapel, a red carnation and the
Speaker 3: flower was completely wither, but it had stained his lapel.
Speaker 3: And the only sign of change that had occurred with
Speaker 3: him was he had a large focal area of mold
Speaker 3: that had grown on his face. Other than that, he
Speaker 3: was completely intact, so cool, no foul smell. There was
Speaker 3: no water intrusion because lots of times with the vaults,
Speaker 3: you'll get People won't realize this, but because you're subterranean,
Speaker 3: you don't know what's going on beneath the ground. And
Speaker 3: I think people think that bodies are perfectly sealed and
Speaker 3: they're dry, and they're not. It's a nightmare scenario. And
Speaker 3: so many times detened upon the wa water table if
Speaker 3: it rises, if you've got like flash flooding that occurs
Speaker 3: in an area, you'll get water intrusion in these things
Speaker 3: in the caskets will literally float like this and then
Speaker 3: drain back out, and so you have to contend with
Speaker 3: that and talk about the smell there generally with a
Speaker 3: truly well embalmed body. I learned this from a forensic
Speaker 3: pathologist because I for some reason, it really gave me
Speaker 3: the creeps. First time I did an exhimation to be
Speaker 3: involved in it, and I'd done a lot of other
Speaker 3: cases freshly down, I mean, people that had just been
Speaker 3: killed in the most awful ways. But for some reason
Speaker 3: I was really put off by an exhumation. The very
Speaker 3: first one, I'll never forget. It was a lady and
Speaker 3: he said, come here, I want you to smell something.
Speaker 3: If I okay, it's not your finger or something else. No,
Speaker 3: he says, come over here, lean over next to her
Speaker 3: mouth and her nose and inhale and he said. I said, okay.
Speaker 3: I pulled down my mask and like that. He said,
Speaker 3: did you smell it? I said, I smelled something. He said,
Speaker 3: it's got almost a sickly rose like scent to it.
Speaker 3: I smelled it again. How do you tan if it
Speaker 3: didn't and it was it had the body? You know,
Speaker 3: with these embalmed bodies, if they're done well, first off,
Speaker 3: the texture is almost I describe it to people sometimes
Speaker 3: it feels almost like the surface of an overinflated basketball.
Speaker 3: That's kind of how it feels. The tissues very very
Speaker 3: from and I have yet to have worked on an
Speaker 3: exhamation where it was like a dcomp you know, where
Speaker 3: we've taken it out of a river or a swamp
Speaker 3: or out of a home. I'd not had had that
Speaker 3: experience before. Every exhumed body that I'd ever worked, the
Speaker 3: bodies were fantastically intact. I've had a few where I
Speaker 3: questioned how well they've been actually embalmed.
Speaker 2: But you know so well, Joseph, I could talk to
Speaker 2: you for the next fifteen hours today. It's been so
Speaker 2: nice talking to you, and I really hope that you
Speaker 2: come back and we could share more stories like this.
Speaker 3: Oh, I'd welcome it. I want to offer you a
Speaker 3: personal invitation to come over to body Bags. We would
Speaker 3: love to host you sometime.
Speaker 4: Awesome.
Speaker 3: Bring Maria with you. We would love to chat with
Speaker 3: her as well. The door is open. We would love
Speaker 3: to have you come over and let's have a chat.
Speaker 3: We can continue the discussion and maybe dig in some
Speaker 3: cases that are out there and things that are you know,
Speaker 3: some fascinating cases that have got some medical intrigue to them.
Speaker 2: Perhaps, Okay, awesome. I have a couple in mind that
Speaker 2: I will let you.
Speaker 4: Know that I'd like to know about.
Speaker 2: Could you tell everyone where they could find you, obviously
Speaker 2: your podcast body Bags?
Speaker 3: Yeah. Sure. First off, I welcome the opportunity just to
Speaker 3: tell people to introduce Introduce everybody to my university. It's
Speaker 3: Jacksonville State University in Alabama, not Jacksonville, Florida. It's JSU
Speaker 3: dot E Edu, JSU dot e Edu. And then Bodybags Podcast.
Speaker 3: I'm on iHeart as well as Apple and Spotify, and
Speaker 3: there are a few other platforms you can find me
Speaker 3: on out there. And then I up here on any
Speaker 3: number of you know, Core TV and Low and crime
Speaker 3: and NewsNation. I'm on News Nation a lot, but primarily
Speaker 3: I do a lot of stuff obviously with Nancy Grace,
Speaker 3: I'm on her program, which appears on Merit Merritt Street Media,
Speaker 3: which is doctor Phil's new imprint. I do a lot
Speaker 3: of work with everybody's friend of Vinnie Politan, who has
Speaker 3: a nighttime show in Court TV. He and I go
Speaker 3: back years and years and he's a dear soul, so
Speaker 3: I like working with Vinnie as well. So, uh, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm out here, you know, knocking around most of tom
Speaker 3: and you know, I enjoy just talking about the science
Speaker 3: of death and the science of of investigation. So welcome
Speaker 3: all comers, So come on over and we'll have fun.
Speaker 4: That's so awesome. Thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 3: You bet Nicole, my pleasure.
Speaker 2: Thank you for listening to Mother Knows Death. As a reminder,
Speaker 2: my training is as a pathologist's assistant. I have a
Speaker 2: master's level education and specialize in anatomy and pathology education.
Speaker 2: I am not a doctor, and I have not diagnosed
Speaker 2: or treated anyone dead or alive without the assistance of
Speaker 2: a licensed medical doctor. This show, my website, and social
Speaker 2: media accounts are designed to educate and inform people based
Speaker 2: on my experience working in pathology, so they can make
Speaker 2: healthier decisions regarding their life and well being. Always remember
Speaker 2: that science is changing every day and the opinions expressed
Speaker 2: in this episode are based on my knowledge of those
Speaker 2: subjects at the time of publication. If you are having
Speaker 2: a medical problem, have a medical question, or having a
Speaker 2: medical emergency, please contact your physician or visit an urgent
Speaker 2: care center, emergency room, or hospital. Please rate, review, and
Speaker 2: subscribe to Mother Knows Death on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or
Speaker 2: anywhere you get podcasts. Thanks