November 22, 2022 • 40 mins
Four University of Idaho students are brutally murdered in their home in Moscow, Idaho on November 13th, 2022. Police suspect that the murder took place between 3am-4 and their bodies are discovered by a friend that same morning around noon. Investigators believe that the murder weapon was a knife of some sort. This case is still unfolding.
In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the gruesome nature of this case, the murder weapon, making sense of the chaos of the crime scene, what police are looking for in the surveillance footage, and more.
Show Notes:
0:00 - Intro
1:25 - Background and overview of case
2:26 - The police not knowing what they were walking into
6:20 - Side door being the point of entry
8:30 - Signs of forced entry, the window, and how it could have been pried open
10:07 - Light sources
12:30 - Two roommates who survived, who was stabbed first, the murder weapon
18:26 - The style of weapon suggests that this was a targeted attack
21:34 - How do we tell who was stabbed first and what are we going to find on the other victims?
26:38 - Making sense of the chaos
28:05 - Co-mingling of blood, actions of the perpetrator, finding the knife
31:54 - Other injuries to expect in this case
35:38 - What exactly are the police looking for in the video surveillance footage?
40:38 - Outro
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
M h Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Morgan. I don't use
(00:20):
the word carnage with great frequency, but I gotta say
what has occurred up in Moscow, Ottaho is beyond belief.
That you've got four college students that were at various
(00:43):
stages in a college career. They were living life, they
were achieving those goals, and they were about to cresh
that hill into full own adulthood. But their life, their
lives ended at the hands of what can only be
described as a monster. Today we're going to talk about
(01:09):
a quadruple homicide by sharp fource injury. I chose to
Scott Morgan and this is bodybags. I'm so glad to
have with me today, my friend Jackie Howard. Jackie, I
(01:29):
I don't know what to say. I really don't. I'm
a college professor when this happened, when when this has
been occurred, all I could do was think about my students.
I'm I've been having a hard time dealing with this
as a professor all week long, thinking about my kids
at my school. I'm thinking about my child right now.
(01:50):
One of my children's in college, and I can only
imagine the parents of these poor, poor kids what they're
going through like students right now, I'm I'm away, I'm
away from class, and I felt it so that Jackie,
you and I need to have a chat as soon
as we possibly could about this case. Well, we both
did indeed plan some time off, but you're right, this
(02:13):
is really important to address what is going on because
there's so much to discuss. So before we even get
inside and talk about the tremendous, horrendous scene that officers found,
let's talk about the outside scene. And here's why I
want to start there. There's been a lot of criticism
(02:33):
of the police because when you look at the photos
of all the police cars at the home, they are
right up on the scene. The tape is not there yet,
but there's cop cars everywhere. And I've learned from you
that you have to cordon off the scene because you
(02:53):
don't know what information that you're damaging, what evidence that
you're damaging. But the fact of the matter is, Joe,
that when these four individuals were found by a friend,
at first, the police didn't know what they were walking
into because they were responding to a call for an
(03:14):
unresponsive individual, so they had no idea that they were
looking at a crime scene. Yeah, and let's face it,
this is a small town, and I don't mean that
in a disrespecting way. That's a great thing. I love
small towns. I live in a small town, but when
the college kids aren't there, there's a very tiny population
(03:36):
there that occupies the space. And so an event like this,
who who would even anticipate that something like this would
happen in this little town. Nobody would, you know. It's
a reminder that this kind of evil can be business
on anybody's store step anywhere at any time, and right
now they're they're fully aware of it when when they
(03:57):
rolled up, when the police rolled up, they thought that
they were coming out to an individual that had been
found unresponsive or unconscious. We're still not sure at this
moment time about the exact verbiage in this case, but
we do know that when the police entered that residents,
they found something that was just just mind blowing. As
(04:20):
you go into a scene as a death investigator, it's
one thing because you kind of know how the uniform
officers there there and they're saying, Okay, this is what
we saw when we walked into the residents, So you're
kind of prepared for it as a as an investigator.
That's not who we're talking about. We're talking about the
uniform response personnel. When they show up. They're the ones
(04:42):
that are actually discovering these issues. They're the ones that
are actually discovering what's going on. They don't know what
they're walking into and this would have been a chaotic
environment because they don't understand. And I can only imagine
the traffic on the radio at that point in time,
they're saying on know, we we've got multiple people down
at the scene, and so the area is gonna be
(05:04):
flooded with cars, responding vehicles, uniform beat officers. You've got
locals that are showing up. You've probably got the Sheriff's
office that showing up. You might even have campus police
that are rolling over to this location. So that's one
of the reasons you see all of those cars there.
And you know, Jackie, you're right, I mean, you have
to you have to set things up so it is secure.
(05:26):
Remember this, and this is kind of the watch the
watch phrase that I use. You can always contract a scene.
That means you can always draw it in, but you
have to set that perimeter up out as far away
from where the actual crime or the event took place,
and set that perimeter up so that as time goes by,
(05:48):
if you need to try to draw it in and
contract it. The problem is is that if you start
off small and you set up tape immediately adjacent to
where the event happened, than all of the peripheral area
that's out there that probably should be part of the
crime scene winds up being contaminated and you can't justify
that in the courtroom. So you set it up big
(06:10):
and then you contracted, and that's not what happened. Apparently,
the supposition is that the front door was not necessarily
the entry point because there are sliding glass doors around
the side of the house, and many people believe that
that could have been the entryway. How many of us
(06:31):
that have sliding glass doors. You know, when you go
to actually a lock, that is you turn a lock
on a door knob, that's something that you physically do.
I think that we associate that with with a door
knob where you have a center turn on the door knob,
or if you have an adjacent deadlock where you take
it and you turn it and it drops into place,
(06:55):
that's something that you you kind of think about. But
with sliding glass doors, there's many times where people forget
to actually go behind a lock. And we're talking about
college kids here, not that that's necessarily a justification for it,
but there's a lot of traffic in and out of
this area. The place is known the residents is actually
known as a place where kids gather, and why not.
(07:16):
It's it's kind of a cool home. It's off campus.
You enter actually kind of the living space what I
think most people would kind of term it's kind of
a family area where there's a TV and all of
the kind of a commons area. And that is a
big open space that leads into the kitchen and so
all of this can be seen. You can see a
big bank of windows, all of that sort of thing,
(07:37):
and that is directly accessed by these sliding glass doors.
The area that actually the people keep talking about with
a keypad that's down below. Okay, that's down below. It's
in the parking area, which is really some people call
it the front, some people have called it the back,
but it's it's right where cars can pull up and
it has an access keypad where if you know the number,
(08:01):
you can punch it in and the door lock deactivates,
you can open the door. Some of the things that
we're hearing is that a lot of people knew what
that code was to get into that door. And that's
troubling on one level as well. Two points of entry
only that narrows down what the police investigators have to
(08:22):
look at the entry point. You're talking about this bank
of windows, What does that tell you? What opportunity does
that give a perpetrator? And have we heard anything about
any windows being jimmied or anything like that? So far?
I haven't heard anything about windows being jimmied, And a
matter of fact, I haven't heard anything about fourth century either.
(08:44):
And you know, you and I talked so much, Jackie,
that we begin to talk about these things. That's one
of things we look for. Fourth century. There's anything crushed
in broken signs that the door has been pride in
some way, or somebody tried to kick the hinges off,
if you will. There's no evidence of that to this point.
But the curious thing about this is that when you
(09:08):
look at that entrance where the big windows are, the
sliding glass doors, there's kind of a I don't want
to call it a plane, but there's kind of a lot.
The lot kind of kind of increases in elevation slightly.
It looks like as it rises to the rear of
the back of the lot and there's a woodline over
to the left. It would have been a perfect location
(09:31):
for somebody that had targeted this home to be able
to stand back there in the dead of night, because
they believe this happened under cover of darkness, and be
able to see into those windows from that perspective, and
the people inside the house they wouldn't have known. They
would not have known that anyone was out there, because
what do you do at night, Well, you're not bumping
(09:53):
around the dark. You're gonna have your interior lights on.
And guess what happens when you turn interior lights on
and house and it's dark outside, you can't see anything outside.
If you want to be able to see as best
you can in the dark, you have to turn off
your internal lights and you can generally get a better
view out the window, but it's still going to be
diminished because there's no ambient light from the sun. If
(10:18):
there's a full moon, you might be able to see
a little bit, but still even that it's compromised. And
you know, I think that probably investigators are looking at that,
they'll be looking a couple of things. What kind of
man made light sources are there where there are any
kind of flood lights on the outside of the house,
where there are any visible street lights where you could
(10:38):
see from that perspective, Was there a place adjacent in
that woodline that's going to be as you're looking out
the window in the house over to the left, is
there any place that appears to have been trampled down
where somebody had been standing there for a while, kind
of stopping down the vegetation around there. Maybe they had
left something behind as they were watching in the middle
(10:59):
of seeing through the windows. And so once that light
goes off inside the house and it's you know, in
the early morning hours, they know they're free and clear.
They can walk on through that that sliding glass door.
Maybe the door was left unlocked, who knows. I'm thinking
(11:35):
back to my career right now, and there's a moment
time when you're walking up to a house where just
total mayhem as ensued and you've been told that it is,
and you're outside of that home and you're looking at
the exterior of it, and nothing seems in disarray. Nothing
(11:55):
seems in disorder, but when you finally walk through that door,
it's like you're walking through a portal to hell. And
I think that that's probably based upon what I've heard,
I think that's probably what the investigators saw. I think
a lot of people are also interested in what the
(12:17):
two surviving roommates saw, and a lot of people are
asking questions about the two roommates who survived. We know
they came in around one o'clock, and uh, the other
victims also came in around One of the victims was
on the phone with her boyfriend or talking making calls
(12:39):
rather to her boyfriend between two thirty and three to
thirty and like to fifty two and two of the
victims were seen at a bar earlier. Two of the
victims went to a fraternity party. A couple of them
also went to the food truck. The victims were distributed
among the second and third floor there sir viving roommates
(13:01):
were on the first floor. This appears to be a
split level, so it's possible that whoever came in to
do this did not know that the other victims were
in the lower level. So when the perpetrator comes in,
we don't know yet who was stabbed first, and stabbed
(13:25):
as the prerogative word, because that is what we are
learning from the corner and from the police. We heard
early on that this was an edged weapon. We've heard
a couple of things about this weapon. Let's kind of
start with that it had put forth that the investigators
the authorities were looking for what they termed as a
(13:49):
military style knife. I even heard somebody say that they
were looking for a Rambo style knife. Well, Rambo style
all knife is is what's referred to as a survival knife.
It's generally got a very long blade on it. There's
a saw generally on the on the spine of the blade,
(14:10):
that is the blunted side of the blade, single edge blade.
With a survival knife, you've got a cap on the
on the handle of it. That's generally got a compass
on it. There's stuff that you can store in there,
like waterproof matches and all that, and it has a hilt.
But then something new came to light. I started here
in the term cabar. Cabar is a knife that our
(14:35):
marines have used since World War Two. Essentially, I might
be wrong. I think it came about in word two,
or just prior to War two. It's got a handle
on it that was originally textured with leather that is
really roughed up. And this thing is very durable and
kind of like what's referred to as a survival knife.
(14:58):
The Marines care this night because the blade is very robust,
it's single edged, and on the back side of it
there is there are rather salt teeth so that you
can flip it over and use it to saw down
small sapplings with to use out in the bush and
that sort of thing, and it's it's perfect at least
(15:18):
for the Marines for hand to hand combat using edged weapons.
You can buy them pretty much nowadays anywhere. You can
go online and buy k bars all this sort of thing.
But I found it interesting they were saying, cabar, the
dimensions of it are very specific and when the investigators
would have been looking at these injuries if they could
see them, because many times, when you got two scenes
(15:40):
and you have stab wounds, you can't make heather tails
of what you have. You just know you have a
lot of blood and by the time the investigators would
have made it to the scene, the blood would have
begun to dry, so it's going to be kind of
obscuring any of these injuries that may occurred, So that
term cabar may have a is and after the bodies
(16:01):
had been cleaned and examined, It's hard to say at
this point, but what I do know is that a
cabar has what's called a hilt on it, which is
the guard that separates the handle from the blade. And
I'll be very interested to try to find this out, Jackie.
When you take a knife that has this hilt guard
(16:23):
on it and you drive it in to a subject,
you can sustain what are referred to as hilt injuries.
And just imagine the blade kind of passing through the
tissue down into the tissue and then the hilt itself.
This guard creates a contusion. It will be almost rectangular
in shape, and it's associated with the stab one, so
(16:45):
you'll have the same kind of stamped and superimposed on
top of the stab one. It's kind of a complex
injury when you begin to think about it, and that
would give them an idea of what kind of blade
they were looking for, because there are knives out there.
If you pick up a like butcher knife in the kitchen,
it doesn't have a hilt guard on it. Okay, something
that's blunted like that that can create a contusion. It's
(17:07):
just the blade essentially disappears into the handle, all right.
But with this it's something totally different. So I'd have
to ask that question. Why are they saying that this
is a military style knife? They say Rambo style knife,
they say k bar, So that's very specific, very specific information.
(17:27):
That's the first thing that we would think about relative
to these injuries, and it would be a specific type
of person I think that would own one of these,
a person that obviously would feel comfortable with a knife
such as this, a military style knife. Maybe they know
how to use it. They certainly knew how to use
it on this night because they robbed these four young
(17:48):
people of their lives with it. Assuming that they use
this weapon over and over and over and over again.
What I find interesting is the fact that in using
this style of weapon, it tells me that it probably
was a targeted attack because somebody had to bring that
weapon with them. You are absolutely spot on the money.
(18:13):
This is not something though they could have. This is
not something that I would expect these college kids to
have laying around the house. You know the mail that
was there was there visiting. He was not a permanent resident. Okay.
So someone telling me that these college women that lived
(18:33):
in this house possessed a military style and I, you're
gonna have to sell that to me. I'm not buying it.
I think that whoever showed up showed up prepared. Again,
like we talked about, this goes to this element of premeditation.
You're prepared to your worst when you show up, you're
prepared to take somebody's life. That means that you brought
(18:53):
a deadly weapon into the home of these college women.
Wine world, you would show up to their home with
the military style knife, I have no idea other than
to do great harm. And of course the wound up
doing that and brought it with them. Many times, when
you work domestic cases, in particular, when you have individuals
(19:14):
that are having disagreements in a familiar setting, that's sort
of thing you'll I've walked into kitchens before where you'll
see the drawers all pulled out right and you can
tell that someone was in a fever looking for something
to do harm to somebody with. And you'll see I've
seen drawers of silverware just dumped out on the floor.
(19:36):
I've seen people use butter knives and cheap steak knives.
I've seen people use pile at knives. I've seen people
use butchering knives, a variety of different things whatever, And
those are what we refer to in forensics and in
investigations as weapons of convenience. That means that they're within
arms reach. Okay, that's not what we're talking about here.
(19:57):
We're talking about a weapon that if it is a
military style weapon that is created for the express purpose
of killing. That's what this weapon is for, make no
bones about it, all right. And so it was used
by the individual I think that I felt very comfortable
(20:20):
with it, may have had some skill with it, has
probably been carrying it around. And I've heard somebody mentioned
this along the way, and I find this quite interesting,
the fact that I don't believe that this is a
weapon that they would have thrown away after they used
(20:40):
it because they feel comfortable with it. Carpenter uses a
particular type of hammer to do their job with. Musician
uses a guitar they like, Well, this person is a
vicious homicidal maniac. This is something, this instrumentality of death
that they have that they have chosen that they like
(21:02):
to use and they're not going to separate themselves from it.
What would you find given that we have four victims stabbed.
Somebody had to be the first, how do we tell
and what are we going to find on the other victims?
Sequencing is something that's going to be I think very
(21:23):
important here as this case continues to be investigated and
and examined and processed. Okay, and that's a question that
a lot of people want to know because they're in
if you if you have one of the four victims
in this case that was the target, it would be
(21:44):
very important to try to understand who sustained the most injuries,
because you would think that the targeted individual would be
that individual that would have possibly sustained the most trauma,
other than maybe somebody that fought back. Now, how do
you sequence this event? And when we're talking about sequence,
we're talking about the order of death. I'm not talking
(22:06):
about like the sequencing of the injuries on an individual,
because contrary to what people think, that's not something that
we can do. Even the most highly skilled forensic pathologists
that gets on the stand and testifies, they will always
have this disclosure they'll say, like, if I've got twelve
(22:26):
injuries on a body in their report, they'll say, please
note the number of these injuries is merely a number.
It's an identifier. It does not in any way imply
the sequence in which these injuries were administered. Now we
can tell postmortum and anti mortalm many times something will
(22:46):
have hemorrhage and something won't. But here what we're talking
about with the sequencing of the deaths of these young
people is we're trying to determine who will stabbed first her.
The d A actually make a statement as they're interviewing
this gentleman as he's walking away from seeing he actually
went on this on this and I'm paraphrasing here, but
(23:09):
he was like, I don't know that I could you
really begin to describe what's what happened in there. It's horrible,
absolutely horrible. There's gonna be a lot of blood, a
tremendous amount of blood at this scene. Whoever did this,
it's going to be would have been covered in blood.
It will be from four separate people. And that's the
(23:31):
key to try and to figure this out. From a
scientific standpoint, we talk a lot about DNA and we
talk a lot about blood typing this sort of thing
on body bags. But this is very important in this
case because in my estimation, at least whoever was attacked
first in this case will have possibly none of the
(23:54):
other victims d n A on them or their their
blood will not be come ingold with the other victims.
And this is just it's we're merely applying logic here.
So as the progression takes place, that you have victim A,
and we don't know who Victim A is, they're attacked,
they're killed. Well, going back to the knife, we assume
(24:19):
that that same knife is the same instrument that is
being used in all of these deaths. Once that knife
is withdrawn from this first victim, the next victim is attacked. Now,
the DNA, the blood sample, if you will, from the
first victim, will be introduced into the space of the
second victim, and for lack of a better term, that
(24:43):
second victim will literally be inoculated with the blood of
the other person. And this progresses so that you get
this kind of increasing event of co mingling of biological
material where you'll have victim a's DNA on Victim B,
(25:04):
and then with victim C you'll find A and B.
Perhaps on C and then on D you'll find all
of the three. Depended upon how well this trace evidence
is collected and how detailed the testing is, how thorough
the testing is, and it it will take some time.
(25:24):
People want quick answers when it comes to DNA, and
they can turn it around pretty quickly. However, when you
have this commingling of the d N A, it's a
bit more of a technical undertaking. You have to have
the right skill set in order to facilitate this, to
try to separate out these various types, these various blood types,
(25:46):
and try to harvest DNA from these locations. Yeah, there
(26:09):
are many times on scenes when you you walk into
this environment and it is total chaos. But as an investigator,
as forensic scientists, that's where you get paid that it's
your job to make sense of the chaos. It has
to be dug out from either those that you're interviewing,
(26:30):
those observations that you're making, or even scientific tests that
you're running. It takes time. This is not an instant
cake mix. This is something that takes time. It takes dedication,
and it takes precision. Well, making sense out of chaos
is exactly what you're doing, because I am trying to
(26:52):
imagine as a crime scene investigator coming in and having
a body that has I don't know, let's just say
four establish and this would be let's say it's our
third victim. And you're talking about you mentioned a minute
ago about the co mingling of blood, But how does
that work if the two upper stab wounds were first,
(27:14):
are you still going to get somebody else's DNA or
blood in the third wound? And how much blood does
it take to be able to prove that there was
co mingling? I mean, is it doesn't automatically? If you
have I don't know, four tablespoons blood and you have
one drop, is it gonna show up in all four
table spoons? Do you understand what I'm asking? Yeah? It
(27:36):
is mind boggling, And listen, there's no guarantee with it.
I'm being hopeful when I say that, I mean I
truly am being hopeful because it is such a mess.
It's one thing to find com mingled blood stains, okay,
or or blood sample. Is it going to be so
cross contaminated though, that it'll be ruined where they're not
(27:58):
able to separate it out sufficiently in order to well
certainly do DNA on it. With the commingling of the blood,
we've got our our a BO groups, and then we
have to determine relative to the antigen if it's positive
or negative. So if you have a B pause or
a B nag or O pause or non eg B
(28:19):
negg be pause, oh neg o pause, you're going to
have all of these blood samples that could potentially be mixed.
But when you're talking about a stabbing, multiple stabbing with
multiple victims, it's such a dynamic environment. We don't know
what the actions of the perpetrator were either. For all
(28:42):
we know, this individual may have taken a knife blade
and run it across the area of his pants along
the thigh to try to wipe away the blood before
he went to the next person and stabbed. For all
we know, the knife from one victim was dripping blood.
They went over in a really started attacking the other
one and brought about their death. They are going to
(29:04):
have a hercue lean task to be able to try
to separate this out, and it's going to take time
in order to do it, just to get the groupings right,
I think, and to be able to establish d NA
is is. Then that's another part of the task as well.
Will it be so cross contaminated that they might have difficulty? However,
(29:24):
the saving grace here, I think from just a demonstrative standpoint,
is that they will be able to perhaps say that
there are these grouping or blood groupings present on each
of the bodies, and so you can tie that back
to one individual perhaps it did this, particularly if they
(29:47):
can come across that subject close, which are going to
be very important in this case, because they'll have, like
I said, have been a bloody mess. Did they keep
those closed, did they burn those clothes, do they have
them hidden back somewhere, or did they just discard them
as they were going down the road? You know, that
was another issue. Remember that came up about the garbage.
(30:08):
Remember that they were talking about how there's a chance
that they didn't look through the garbage effectively, or that
it wasn't sought out route that the trucks may take.
And that's key here, because you know, trash trucks have
a specific location that they kind of make stops at,
pick up the dumpsters, dump them, and then that garbage
(30:29):
is taken to a specific location in a landfill. Well,
did they miss their target with that? Was that not
something that they thought about, because for all we know,
that individual may have dumped their clothes into a dumpster
immediately adjacent to that. Hopefully the knife hasn't gone because
I still think this person probably held onto it. If
that knife is still available, then it's going to have
(30:51):
trace amounts and you can try to clean this thing
as best you want to, but they always miss something.
And wouldn't that be interesting if you find on that
knife and this individual still has it with them, and
you can find evidence from all four of the victims
on that knife, maybe isolated patches of DNA on the
handle or maybe on that hilt guard that we mentioned,
(31:13):
Because there's all kinds of little nooks and crannies that
a lot of people don't think about. That the DNA
and the trace evidence, people can go in and sample
those areas and retrieve that evidence from there. Besides the
stab wounds, what other kind of injuries could you expect?
The information released by the corner in the case says
(31:36):
that some of the victims, while most were thought to
be sleep when they stabbings began, some of the victims
had defensive wounds. So we're looking at bruising, we're looking
at what when you have a defensive event. First off,
(31:57):
that goes to awareness, doesn't it. We're not talking about
an individual that was merely stabbed and they died. We're
talking about a person who was stabbed and then oh
my gosh, there's an awareness I'm being injured. They awake
and they raise their arms, they lift their arms, and
(32:17):
with these defensive injuries, and of course knife injuries are
some of the most horrific things you can see when
it comes to eventsive events. Most of the time, we
have a natural inclination with our arms to block, will
raise our forearm. Generally our fist will be bawled up,
will raise our forearm in order to block or maybe
sweep sweep with our hands. Well, lots of times what
(32:40):
can happen is that the knife blade. I've had knife
blades that have passed through the hands of victims held
their hand up, they were staffed through the hand. I've
had glancing blows that almost looked like a shaving of tissue,
where you'll have these really nasty kind of gashes that
take place. And you said something interesting, Jackie, just second ago,
when you said bruises, So you can get associated contusions
(33:03):
as well, because I understand that when a person is
wielding a knife, not only can they bring about sharp
force injuries, but they can bring about blunt force injuries
as well, which are associated with contusions. Many times because
their fist is bawled up around this metal object and
they'll punch with that in their hands sometimes, which makes
(33:26):
a very devastating injury. And you'll see that, particularly if
an individual is trying to fend them off, they'll punch
with a knife in their hand. You can get bruising
on an individual. Of course, if the victim is bruised,
you'll know that this was an anti warmar prior to
death event that occurred while they're in the throes of
these fatal events that are going down at that moment.
(33:48):
So you'll have all of those kinds of events that
will happen. I've seen people that have had broken bones
as a result of defensive injuries abrasions. You can get
those which are scrapes where they're fending off and this
is very frenetic. You know, a lot of movement with hands,
a lot of twisting and turning because let's all think
about it. Most people don't want to sit back and
(34:10):
receive any kind of pain. You want to try to
try to shield your body away from it, and so
you can get defensive injuries. For instance, if they roll over,
you can see a defensive injury on the shoulder, and
it's kind of a guard position where you go in
and you you you tuck essentially into almost a fetal
position many times, and you'll see these stab winds that
(34:32):
present maybe more on the lateral chest, on the side
of the chest. And then if they roll over, of
course they'll be anteriorly as well, so you'll have this distribution.
One interesting thing though, is I believe that the corner
was asked specifically about these injuries, and if I remember,
the reporter had actually asked, was there any slashing the
(34:54):
neck or the face, and the corner said no, that
these were essentially concentrate in the chest of these individuals
and that some are one of them not really sure,
did in fact have defensive injuries. As the police continue
this investigation looking for the perpetrator, they're asking for people
to look at their cameras, any surveillance, So what are
(35:20):
I mean? Obviously they would love if the guy just
walked mind and was like, oh big sign that says
I did it not gonna happen, of course, But what
exactly are they looking for? Someone who followed the girls
when they went to the food truck, someone who might
have been outside the home, I mean, ring door bell.
What what other kind of surveillance is there? I heard
(35:43):
somebody actually mentioned Tesla's, which I don't know a lot
about Tesla's, but apparently Tesla's are filming or have cameras
on them. I found that kind of interesting. One of
the spokespeople had gotten up at one of the pressers.
But aside from that, there's something else that we need
to mention from a physical coal standpoint here the folks
need to think about at autopsy. Let me tell you
(36:05):
what they did with these victims. They did nail scrapings
and nail clippings on all of these victims. And remember
we were talking about defensive injuries just a moment ago.
One of the things that happened many times with these
perpetrators that this is very up close and personal. It's
very intimate, and as they're attacking an individual and the
victim is trying to fend them off, the victim will
(36:29):
scratch these individuals just trying or pinch them or grab
hold of their hair, and the perpetrator will actually have
injuries to them. And one of the things that people,
I think from my perspective as a forensic science guy,
that they people need to be on the lookout for
is if you see somebody walking around that has scrapes
(36:52):
and scratches along their neck, their jawline, across their face.
We're not that many days down age still, we're just
over a week from when this occurred, those injuries would
still be there. So if there's someone in the community
that's presenting with those kinds of injuries, I'm not suggesting
anybody approached this person, but it's something that should be
(37:13):
made note of. If they've seen anybody that came into
a drug store or went to a local box store
to pick up medicine or bandages or anything like that,
maybe that's what they were doing. They're trying to self
treat themselves to try to prevent this. They might attempt
to apply makeup to an area. We've seen serial perpetrators
do that before, so that's something that has to be considered.
(37:37):
Now as far as the visual side of things go,
the documentation with CCTV. It all depends on what's at
their disposal. Many people in these neighborhoods do, in fact
have rain camps that are positioned on their front stoop.
I think that people would need to if they are
in proximity to where this event happened, they need to
(37:58):
contact police. Hopefully during the canvassing process, that's where the
investigators go through the neighborhood on foot. They go door
to door to door to door. Nowadays, one of the
first questions they asked, do you have video surveillance technology
here present at your home? Whereas the position, may we
please see those recordings And they'll go through and canvas
(38:19):
that whole area to see if they can pick something up.
If they have, for instance, stop like cams in there
with plate readers and all that sort of stuff, they're
going to be reviewing that. And that kind of goes
back to something we saw imaged the other day on television.
There were uh photographs that have been taken up crime
scene text out on the side at Jason Road and
(38:42):
there's a if you're facing the rear of the home,
there's a little street that runs alongside this house over
to the left. I think as you're looking at the
at the parking parking pad in the back of the house,
they saw what appeared to be and there were measuring
skid marks on the road where and they look fresh.
(39:04):
You can see they're kind of dark, dark black, fresh
appearing where maybe someone skidded or they burned rubber in
that particular area and they were taking measurements of that.
So if the person was not on foot, but they
were in a vehicle and they left that area in
a rush, might be looking for a specific vehicle and
with the skid marks there were side by side. So
(39:28):
as far as an indicator goes, there's a couple of
things they can do with any rubber that was left behind.
They can do a sample of that rubber out of
the road and perhaps tie that back chemically to whoever
manufactured the tires. And they can also get an idea
of the wheel base of a vehicle. You know, if
you're driving a big truck, you know the wheel base
will be wider a right, if you're driving a small car,
(39:49):
it's going to be more narrow. So you can get
the dimensions of a car. It doesn't mean that those
marks and road are necessarily associated with this event. However,
because it's immediately adjacent to the house, all of that
has to be taken into consideration. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
(40:11):
and this is Body Backs M
M h Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Morgan. I don't use
(00:20):
the word carnage with great frequency, but I gotta say
what has occurred up in Moscow, Ottaho is beyond belief.
That you've got four college students that were at various
(00:43):
stages in a college career. They were living life, they
were achieving those goals, and they were about to cresh
that hill into full own adulthood. But their life, their
lives ended at the hands of what can only be
described as a monster. Today we're going to talk about
(01:09):
a quadruple homicide by sharp fource injury. I chose to
Scott Morgan and this is bodybags. I'm so glad to
have with me today, my friend Jackie Howard. Jackie, I
(01:29):
I don't know what to say. I really don't. I'm
a college professor when this happened, when when this has
been occurred, all I could do was think about my students.
I'm I've been having a hard time dealing with this
as a professor all week long, thinking about my kids
at my school. I'm thinking about my child right now.
(01:50):
One of my children's in college, and I can only
imagine the parents of these poor, poor kids what they're
going through like students right now, I'm I'm away, I'm
away from class, and I felt it so that Jackie,
you and I need to have a chat as soon
as we possibly could about this case. Well, we both
did indeed plan some time off, but you're right, this
(02:13):
is really important to address what is going on because
there's so much to discuss. So before we even get
inside and talk about the tremendous, horrendous scene that officers found,
let's talk about the outside scene. And here's why I
want to start there. There's been a lot of criticism
(02:33):
of the police because when you look at the photos
of all the police cars at the home, they are
right up on the scene. The tape is not there yet,
but there's cop cars everywhere. And I've learned from you
that you have to cordon off the scene because you
(02:53):
don't know what information that you're damaging, what evidence that
you're damaging. But the fact of the matter is, Joe,
that when these four individuals were found by a friend,
at first, the police didn't know what they were walking
into because they were responding to a call for an
(03:14):
unresponsive individual, so they had no idea that they were
looking at a crime scene. Yeah, and let's face it,
this is a small town, and I don't mean that
in a disrespecting way. That's a great thing. I love
small towns. I live in a small town, but when
the college kids aren't there, there's a very tiny population
(03:36):
there that occupies the space. And so an event like this,
who who would even anticipate that something like this would
happen in this little town. Nobody would, you know. It's
a reminder that this kind of evil can be business
on anybody's store step anywhere at any time, and right
now they're they're fully aware of it when when they
(03:57):
rolled up, when the police rolled up, they thought that
they were coming out to an individual that had been
found unresponsive or unconscious. We're still not sure at this
moment time about the exact verbiage in this case, but
we do know that when the police entered that residents,
they found something that was just just mind blowing. As
(04:20):
you go into a scene as a death investigator, it's
one thing because you kind of know how the uniform
officers there there and they're saying, Okay, this is what
we saw when we walked into the residents, So you're
kind of prepared for it as a as an investigator.
That's not who we're talking about. We're talking about the
uniform response personnel. When they show up. They're the ones
(04:42):
that are actually discovering these issues. They're the ones that
are actually discovering what's going on. They don't know what
they're walking into and this would have been a chaotic
environment because they don't understand. And I can only imagine
the traffic on the radio at that point in time,
they're saying on know, we we've got multiple people down
at the scene, and so the area is gonna be
(05:04):
flooded with cars, responding vehicles, uniform beat officers. You've got
locals that are showing up. You've probably got the Sheriff's
office that showing up. You might even have campus police
that are rolling over to this location. So that's one
of the reasons you see all of those cars there.
And you know, Jackie, you're right, I mean, you have
to you have to set things up so it is secure.
(05:26):
Remember this, and this is kind of the watch the
watch phrase that I use. You can always contract a scene.
That means you can always draw it in, but you
have to set that perimeter up out as far away
from where the actual crime or the event took place,
and set that perimeter up so that as time goes by,
(05:48):
if you need to try to draw it in and
contract it. The problem is is that if you start
off small and you set up tape immediately adjacent to
where the event happened, than all of the peripheral area
that's out there that probably should be part of the
crime scene winds up being contaminated and you can't justify
that in the courtroom. So you set it up big
(06:10):
and then you contracted, and that's not what happened. Apparently,
the supposition is that the front door was not necessarily
the entry point because there are sliding glass doors around
the side of the house, and many people believe that
that could have been the entryway. How many of us
(06:31):
that have sliding glass doors. You know, when you go
to actually a lock, that is you turn a lock
on a door knob, that's something that you physically do.
I think that we associate that with with a door
knob where you have a center turn on the door knob,
or if you have an adjacent deadlock where you take
it and you turn it and it drops into place,
(06:55):
that's something that you you kind of think about. But
with sliding glass doors, there's many times where people forget
to actually go behind a lock. And we're talking about
college kids here, not that that's necessarily a justification for it,
but there's a lot of traffic in and out of
this area. The place is known the residents is actually
known as a place where kids gather, and why not.
(07:16):
It's it's kind of a cool home. It's off campus.
You enter actually kind of the living space what I
think most people would kind of term it's kind of
a family area where there's a TV and all of
the kind of a commons area. And that is a
big open space that leads into the kitchen and so
all of this can be seen. You can see a
big bank of windows, all of that sort of thing,
(07:37):
and that is directly accessed by these sliding glass doors.
The area that actually the people keep talking about with
a keypad that's down below. Okay, that's down below. It's
in the parking area, which is really some people call
it the front, some people have called it the back,
but it's it's right where cars can pull up and
it has an access keypad where if you know the number,
(08:01):
you can punch it in and the door lock deactivates,
you can open the door. Some of the things that
we're hearing is that a lot of people knew what
that code was to get into that door. And that's
troubling on one level as well. Two points of entry
only that narrows down what the police investigators have to
(08:22):
look at the entry point. You're talking about this bank
of windows, What does that tell you? What opportunity does
that give a perpetrator? And have we heard anything about
any windows being jimmied or anything like that? So far?
I haven't heard anything about windows being jimmied, And a
matter of fact, I haven't heard anything about fourth century either.
(08:44):
And you know, you and I talked so much, Jackie,
that we begin to talk about these things. That's one
of things we look for. Fourth century. There's anything crushed
in broken signs that the door has been pride in
some way, or somebody tried to kick the hinges off,
if you will. There's no evidence of that to this point.
But the curious thing about this is that when you
(09:08):
look at that entrance where the big windows are, the
sliding glass doors, there's kind of a I don't want
to call it a plane, but there's kind of a lot.
The lot kind of kind of increases in elevation slightly.
It looks like as it rises to the rear of
the back of the lot and there's a woodline over
to the left. It would have been a perfect location
(09:31):
for somebody that had targeted this home to be able
to stand back there in the dead of night, because
they believe this happened under cover of darkness, and be
able to see into those windows from that perspective, and
the people inside the house they wouldn't have known. They
would not have known that anyone was out there, because
what do you do at night, Well, you're not bumping
(09:53):
around the dark. You're gonna have your interior lights on.
And guess what happens when you turn interior lights on
and house and it's dark outside, you can't see anything outside.
If you want to be able to see as best
you can in the dark, you have to turn off
your internal lights and you can generally get a better
view out the window, but it's still going to be
diminished because there's no ambient light from the sun. If
(10:18):
there's a full moon, you might be able to see
a little bit, but still even that it's compromised. And
you know, I think that probably investigators are looking at that,
they'll be looking a couple of things. What kind of
man made light sources are there where there are any
kind of flood lights on the outside of the house,
where there are any visible street lights where you could
(10:38):
see from that perspective, Was there a place adjacent in
that woodline that's going to be as you're looking out
the window in the house over to the left, is
there any place that appears to have been trampled down
where somebody had been standing there for a while, kind
of stopping down the vegetation around there. Maybe they had
left something behind as they were watching in the middle
(10:59):
of seeing through the windows. And so once that light
goes off inside the house and it's you know, in
the early morning hours, they know they're free and clear.
They can walk on through that that sliding glass door.
Maybe the door was left unlocked, who knows. I'm thinking
(11:35):
back to my career right now, and there's a moment
time when you're walking up to a house where just
total mayhem as ensued and you've been told that it is,
and you're outside of that home and you're looking at
the exterior of it, and nothing seems in disarray. Nothing
(11:55):
seems in disorder, but when you finally walk through that door,
it's like you're walking through a portal to hell. And
I think that that's probably based upon what I've heard,
I think that's probably what the investigators saw. I think
a lot of people are also interested in what the
(12:17):
two surviving roommates saw, and a lot of people are
asking questions about the two roommates who survived. We know
they came in around one o'clock, and uh, the other
victims also came in around One of the victims was
on the phone with her boyfriend or talking making calls
(12:39):
rather to her boyfriend between two thirty and three to
thirty and like to fifty two and two of the
victims were seen at a bar earlier. Two of the
victims went to a fraternity party. A couple of them
also went to the food truck. The victims were distributed
among the second and third floor there sir viving roommates
(13:01):
were on the first floor. This appears to be a
split level, so it's possible that whoever came in to
do this did not know that the other victims were
in the lower level. So when the perpetrator comes in,
we don't know yet who was stabbed first, and stabbed
(13:25):
as the prerogative word, because that is what we are
learning from the corner and from the police. We heard
early on that this was an edged weapon. We've heard
a couple of things about this weapon. Let's kind of
start with that it had put forth that the investigators
the authorities were looking for what they termed as a
(13:49):
military style knife. I even heard somebody say that they
were looking for a Rambo style knife. Well, Rambo style
all knife is is what's referred to as a survival knife.
It's generally got a very long blade on it. There's
a saw generally on the on the spine of the blade,
(14:10):
that is the blunted side of the blade, single edge blade.
With a survival knife, you've got a cap on the
on the handle of it. That's generally got a compass
on it. There's stuff that you can store in there,
like waterproof matches and all that, and it has a hilt.
But then something new came to light. I started here
in the term cabar. Cabar is a knife that our
(14:35):
marines have used since World War Two. Essentially, I might
be wrong. I think it came about in word two,
or just prior to War two. It's got a handle
on it that was originally textured with leather that is
really roughed up. And this thing is very durable and
kind of like what's referred to as a survival knife.
(14:58):
The Marines care this night because the blade is very robust,
it's single edged, and on the back side of it
there is there are rather salt teeth so that you
can flip it over and use it to saw down
small sapplings with to use out in the bush and
that sort of thing, and it's it's perfect at least
(15:18):
for the Marines for hand to hand combat using edged weapons.
You can buy them pretty much nowadays anywhere. You can
go online and buy k bars all this sort of thing.
But I found it interesting they were saying, cabar, the
dimensions of it are very specific and when the investigators
would have been looking at these injuries if they could
see them, because many times, when you got two scenes
(15:40):
and you have stab wounds, you can't make heather tails
of what you have. You just know you have a
lot of blood and by the time the investigators would
have made it to the scene, the blood would have
begun to dry, so it's going to be kind of
obscuring any of these injuries that may occurred, So that
term cabar may have a is and after the bodies
(16:01):
had been cleaned and examined, It's hard to say at
this point, but what I do know is that a
cabar has what's called a hilt on it, which is
the guard that separates the handle from the blade. And
I'll be very interested to try to find this out, Jackie.
When you take a knife that has this hilt guard
(16:23):
on it and you drive it in to a subject,
you can sustain what are referred to as hilt injuries.
And just imagine the blade kind of passing through the
tissue down into the tissue and then the hilt itself.
This guard creates a contusion. It will be almost rectangular
in shape, and it's associated with the stab one, so
(16:45):
you'll have the same kind of stamped and superimposed on
top of the stab one. It's kind of a complex
injury when you begin to think about it, and that
would give them an idea of what kind of blade
they were looking for, because there are knives out there.
If you pick up a like butcher knife in the kitchen,
it doesn't have a hilt guard on it. Okay, something
that's blunted like that that can create a contusion. It's
(17:07):
just the blade essentially disappears into the handle, all right.
But with this it's something totally different. So I'd have
to ask that question. Why are they saying that this
is a military style knife? They say Rambo style knife,
they say k bar, So that's very specific, very specific information.
(17:27):
That's the first thing that we would think about relative
to these injuries, and it would be a specific type
of person I think that would own one of these,
a person that obviously would feel comfortable with a knife
such as this, a military style knife. Maybe they know
how to use it. They certainly knew how to use
it on this night because they robbed these four young
(17:48):
people of their lives with it. Assuming that they use
this weapon over and over and over and over again.
What I find interesting is the fact that in using
this style of weapon, it tells me that it probably
was a targeted attack because somebody had to bring that
weapon with them. You are absolutely spot on the money.
(18:13):
This is not something though they could have. This is
not something that I would expect these college kids to
have laying around the house. You know the mail that
was there was there visiting. He was not a permanent resident. Okay.
So someone telling me that these college women that lived
(18:33):
in this house possessed a military style and I, you're
gonna have to sell that to me. I'm not buying it.
I think that whoever showed up showed up prepared. Again,
like we talked about, this goes to this element of premeditation.
You're prepared to your worst when you show up, you're
prepared to take somebody's life. That means that you brought
(18:53):
a deadly weapon into the home of these college women.
Wine world, you would show up to their home with
the military style knife, I have no idea other than
to do great harm. And of course the wound up
doing that and brought it with them. Many times, when
you work domestic cases, in particular, when you have individuals
(19:14):
that are having disagreements in a familiar setting, that's sort
of thing you'll I've walked into kitchens before where you'll
see the drawers all pulled out right and you can
tell that someone was in a fever looking for something
to do harm to somebody with. And you'll see I've
seen drawers of silverware just dumped out on the floor.
(19:36):
I've seen people use butter knives and cheap steak knives.
I've seen people use pile at knives. I've seen people
use butchering knives, a variety of different things whatever, And
those are what we refer to in forensics and in
investigations as weapons of convenience. That means that they're within
arms reach. Okay, that's not what we're talking about here.
(19:57):
We're talking about a weapon that if it is a
military style weapon that is created for the express purpose
of killing. That's what this weapon is for, make no
bones about it, all right. And so it was used
by the individual I think that I felt very comfortable
(20:20):
with it, may have had some skill with it, has
probably been carrying it around. And I've heard somebody mentioned
this along the way, and I find this quite interesting,
the fact that I don't believe that this is a
weapon that they would have thrown away after they used
(20:40):
it because they feel comfortable with it. Carpenter uses a
particular type of hammer to do their job with. Musician
uses a guitar they like, Well, this person is a
vicious homicidal maniac. This is something, this instrumentality of death
that they have that they have chosen that they like
(21:02):
to use and they're not going to separate themselves from it.
What would you find given that we have four victims stabbed.
Somebody had to be the first, how do we tell
and what are we going to find on the other victims?
Sequencing is something that's going to be I think very
(21:23):
important here as this case continues to be investigated and
and examined and processed. Okay, and that's a question that
a lot of people want to know because they're in
if you if you have one of the four victims
in this case that was the target, it would be
(21:44):
very important to try to understand who sustained the most injuries,
because you would think that the targeted individual would be
that individual that would have possibly sustained the most trauma,
other than maybe somebody that fought back. Now, how do
you sequence this event? And when we're talking about sequence,
we're talking about the order of death. I'm not talking
(22:06):
about like the sequencing of the injuries on an individual,
because contrary to what people think, that's not something that
we can do. Even the most highly skilled forensic pathologists
that gets on the stand and testifies, they will always
have this disclosure they'll say, like, if I've got twelve
(22:26):
injuries on a body in their report, they'll say, please
note the number of these injuries is merely a number.
It's an identifier. It does not in any way imply
the sequence in which these injuries were administered. Now we
can tell postmortum and anti mortalm many times something will
(22:46):
have hemorrhage and something won't. But here what we're talking
about with the sequencing of the deaths of these young
people is we're trying to determine who will stabbed first her.
The d A actually make a statement as they're interviewing
this gentleman as he's walking away from seeing he actually
went on this on this and I'm paraphrasing here, but
(23:09):
he was like, I don't know that I could you
really begin to describe what's what happened in there. It's horrible,
absolutely horrible. There's gonna be a lot of blood, a
tremendous amount of blood at this scene. Whoever did this,
it's going to be would have been covered in blood.
It will be from four separate people. And that's the
(23:31):
key to try and to figure this out. From a
scientific standpoint, we talk a lot about DNA and we
talk a lot about blood typing this sort of thing
on body bags. But this is very important in this
case because in my estimation, at least whoever was attacked
first in this case will have possibly none of the
(23:54):
other victims d n A on them or their their
blood will not be come ingold with the other victims.
And this is just it's we're merely applying logic here.
So as the progression takes place, that you have victim A,
and we don't know who Victim A is, they're attacked,
they're killed. Well, going back to the knife, we assume
(24:19):
that that same knife is the same instrument that is
being used in all of these deaths. Once that knife
is withdrawn from this first victim, the next victim is attacked. Now,
the DNA, the blood sample, if you will, from the
first victim, will be introduced into the space of the
second victim, and for lack of a better term, that
(24:43):
second victim will literally be inoculated with the blood of
the other person. And this progresses so that you get
this kind of increasing event of co mingling of biological
material where you'll have victim a's DNA on Victim B,
(25:04):
and then with victim C you'll find A and B.
Perhaps on C and then on D you'll find all
of the three. Depended upon how well this trace evidence
is collected and how detailed the testing is, how thorough
the testing is, and it it will take some time.
(25:24):
People want quick answers when it comes to DNA, and
they can turn it around pretty quickly. However, when you
have this commingling of the d N A, it's a
bit more of a technical undertaking. You have to have
the right skill set in order to facilitate this, to
try to separate out these various types, these various blood types,
(25:46):
and try to harvest DNA from these locations. Yeah, there
(26:09):
are many times on scenes when you you walk into
this environment and it is total chaos. But as an investigator,
as forensic scientists, that's where you get paid that it's
your job to make sense of the chaos. It has
to be dug out from either those that you're interviewing,
(26:30):
those observations that you're making, or even scientific tests that
you're running. It takes time. This is not an instant
cake mix. This is something that takes time. It takes dedication,
and it takes precision. Well, making sense out of chaos
is exactly what you're doing, because I am trying to
(26:52):
imagine as a crime scene investigator coming in and having
a body that has I don't know, let's just say
four establish and this would be let's say it's our
third victim. And you're talking about you mentioned a minute
ago about the co mingling of blood, But how does
that work if the two upper stab wounds were first,
(27:14):
are you still going to get somebody else's DNA or
blood in the third wound? And how much blood does
it take to be able to prove that there was
co mingling? I mean, is it doesn't automatically? If you
have I don't know, four tablespoons blood and you have
one drop, is it gonna show up in all four
table spoons? Do you understand what I'm asking? Yeah? It
(27:36):
is mind boggling, And listen, there's no guarantee with it.
I'm being hopeful when I say that, I mean I
truly am being hopeful because it is such a mess.
It's one thing to find com mingled blood stains, okay,
or or blood sample. Is it going to be so
cross contaminated though, that it'll be ruined where they're not
(27:58):
able to separate it out sufficiently in order to well
certainly do DNA on it. With the commingling of the blood,
we've got our our a BO groups, and then we
have to determine relative to the antigen if it's positive
or negative. So if you have a B pause or
a B nag or O pause or non eg B
(28:19):
negg be pause, oh neg o pause, you're going to
have all of these blood samples that could potentially be mixed.
But when you're talking about a stabbing, multiple stabbing with
multiple victims, it's such a dynamic environment. We don't know
what the actions of the perpetrator were either. For all
(28:42):
we know, this individual may have taken a knife blade
and run it across the area of his pants along
the thigh to try to wipe away the blood before
he went to the next person and stabbed. For all
we know, the knife from one victim was dripping blood.
They went over in a really started attacking the other
one and brought about their death. They are going to
(29:04):
have a hercue lean task to be able to try
to separate this out, and it's going to take time
in order to do it, just to get the groupings right,
I think, and to be able to establish d NA
is is. Then that's another part of the task as well.
Will it be so cross contaminated that they might have difficulty? However,
(29:24):
the saving grace here, I think from just a demonstrative standpoint,
is that they will be able to perhaps say that
there are these grouping or blood groupings present on each
of the bodies, and so you can tie that back
to one individual perhaps it did this, particularly if they
(29:47):
can come across that subject close, which are going to
be very important in this case, because they'll have, like
I said, have been a bloody mess. Did they keep
those closed, did they burn those clothes, do they have
them hidden back somewhere, or did they just discard them
as they were going down the road? You know, that
was another issue. Remember that came up about the garbage.
(30:08):
Remember that they were talking about how there's a chance
that they didn't look through the garbage effectively, or that
it wasn't sought out route that the trucks may take.
And that's key here, because you know, trash trucks have
a specific location that they kind of make stops at,
pick up the dumpsters, dump them, and then that garbage
(30:29):
is taken to a specific location in a landfill. Well,
did they miss their target with that? Was that not
something that they thought about, because for all we know,
that individual may have dumped their clothes into a dumpster
immediately adjacent to that. Hopefully the knife hasn't gone because
I still think this person probably held onto it. If
that knife is still available, then it's going to have
(30:51):
trace amounts and you can try to clean this thing
as best you want to, but they always miss something.
And wouldn't that be interesting if you find on that
knife and this individual still has it with them, and
you can find evidence from all four of the victims
on that knife, maybe isolated patches of DNA on the
handle or maybe on that hilt guard that we mentioned,
(31:13):
Because there's all kinds of little nooks and crannies that
a lot of people don't think about. That the DNA
and the trace evidence, people can go in and sample
those areas and retrieve that evidence from there. Besides the
stab wounds, what other kind of injuries could you expect?
The information released by the corner in the case says
(31:36):
that some of the victims, while most were thought to
be sleep when they stabbings began, some of the victims
had defensive wounds. So we're looking at bruising, we're looking
at what when you have a defensive event. First off,
(31:57):
that goes to awareness, doesn't it. We're not talking about
an individual that was merely stabbed and they died. We're
talking about a person who was stabbed and then oh
my gosh, there's an awareness I'm being injured. They awake
and they raise their arms, they lift their arms, and
(32:17):
with these defensive injuries, and of course knife injuries are
some of the most horrific things you can see when
it comes to eventsive events. Most of the time, we
have a natural inclination with our arms to block, will
raise our forearm. Generally our fist will be bawled up,
will raise our forearm in order to block or maybe
sweep sweep with our hands. Well, lots of times what
(32:40):
can happen is that the knife blade. I've had knife
blades that have passed through the hands of victims held
their hand up, they were staffed through the hand. I've
had glancing blows that almost looked like a shaving of tissue,
where you'll have these really nasty kind of gashes that
take place. And you said something interesting, Jackie, just second ago,
when you said bruises, So you can get associated contusions
(33:03):
as well, because I understand that when a person is
wielding a knife, not only can they bring about sharp
force injuries, but they can bring about blunt force injuries
as well, which are associated with contusions. Many times because
their fist is bawled up around this metal object and
they'll punch with that in their hands sometimes, which makes
(33:26):
a very devastating injury. And you'll see that, particularly if
an individual is trying to fend them off, they'll punch
with a knife in their hand. You can get bruising
on an individual. Of course, if the victim is bruised,
you'll know that this was an anti warmar prior to
death event that occurred while they're in the throes of
these fatal events that are going down at that moment.
(33:48):
So you'll have all of those kinds of events that
will happen. I've seen people that have had broken bones
as a result of defensive injuries abrasions. You can get
those which are scrapes where they're fending off and this
is very frenetic. You know, a lot of movement with hands,
a lot of twisting and turning because let's all think
about it. Most people don't want to sit back and
(34:10):
receive any kind of pain. You want to try to
try to shield your body away from it, and so
you can get defensive injuries. For instance, if they roll over,
you can see a defensive injury on the shoulder, and
it's kind of a guard position where you go in
and you you you tuck essentially into almost a fetal
position many times, and you'll see these stab winds that
(34:32):
present maybe more on the lateral chest, on the side
of the chest. And then if they roll over, of
course they'll be anteriorly as well, so you'll have this distribution.
One interesting thing though, is I believe that the corner
was asked specifically about these injuries, and if I remember,
the reporter had actually asked, was there any slashing the
(34:54):
neck or the face, and the corner said no, that
these were essentially concentrate in the chest of these individuals
and that some are one of them not really sure,
did in fact have defensive injuries. As the police continue
this investigation looking for the perpetrator, they're asking for people
to look at their cameras, any surveillance, So what are
(35:20):
I mean? Obviously they would love if the guy just
walked mind and was like, oh big sign that says
I did it not gonna happen, of course, But what
exactly are they looking for? Someone who followed the girls
when they went to the food truck, someone who might
have been outside the home, I mean, ring door bell.
What what other kind of surveillance is there? I heard
(35:43):
somebody actually mentioned Tesla's, which I don't know a lot
about Tesla's, but apparently Tesla's are filming or have cameras
on them. I found that kind of interesting. One of
the spokespeople had gotten up at one of the pressers.
But aside from that, there's something else that we need
to mention from a physical coal standpoint here the folks
need to think about at autopsy. Let me tell you
(36:05):
what they did with these victims. They did nail scrapings
and nail clippings on all of these victims. And remember
we were talking about defensive injuries just a moment ago.
One of the things that happened many times with these
perpetrators that this is very up close and personal. It's
very intimate, and as they're attacking an individual and the
victim is trying to fend them off, the victim will
(36:29):
scratch these individuals just trying or pinch them or grab
hold of their hair, and the perpetrator will actually have
injuries to them. And one of the things that people,
I think from my perspective as a forensic science guy,
that they people need to be on the lookout for
is if you see somebody walking around that has scrapes
(36:52):
and scratches along their neck, their jawline, across their face.
We're not that many days down age still, we're just
over a week from when this occurred, those injuries would
still be there. So if there's someone in the community
that's presenting with those kinds of injuries, I'm not suggesting
anybody approached this person, but it's something that should be
(37:13):
made note of. If they've seen anybody that came into
a drug store or went to a local box store
to pick up medicine or bandages or anything like that,
maybe that's what they were doing. They're trying to self
treat themselves to try to prevent this. They might attempt
to apply makeup to an area. We've seen serial perpetrators
do that before, so that's something that has to be considered.
(37:37):
Now as far as the visual side of things go,
the documentation with CCTV. It all depends on what's at
their disposal. Many people in these neighborhoods do, in fact
have rain camps that are positioned on their front stoop.
I think that people would need to if they are
in proximity to where this event happened, they need to
(37:58):
contact police. Hopefully during the canvassing process, that's where the
investigators go through the neighborhood on foot. They go door
to door to door to door. Nowadays, one of the
first questions they asked, do you have video surveillance technology
here present at your home? Whereas the position, may we
please see those recordings And they'll go through and canvas
(38:19):
that whole area to see if they can pick something up.
If they have, for instance, stop like cams in there
with plate readers and all that sort of stuff, they're
going to be reviewing that. And that kind of goes
back to something we saw imaged the other day on television.
There were uh photographs that have been taken up crime
scene text out on the side at Jason Road and
(38:42):
there's a if you're facing the rear of the home,
there's a little street that runs alongside this house over
to the left. I think as you're looking at the
at the parking parking pad in the back of the house,
they saw what appeared to be and there were measuring
skid marks on the road where and they look fresh.
(39:04):
You can see they're kind of dark, dark black, fresh
appearing where maybe someone skidded or they burned rubber in
that particular area and they were taking measurements of that.
So if the person was not on foot, but they
were in a vehicle and they left that area in
a rush, might be looking for a specific vehicle and
with the skid marks there were side by side. So
(39:28):
as far as an indicator goes, there's a couple of
things they can do with any rubber that was left behind.
They can do a sample of that rubber out of
the road and perhaps tie that back chemically to whoever
manufactured the tires. And they can also get an idea
of the wheel base of a vehicle. You know, if
you're driving a big truck, you know the wheel base
will be wider a right, if you're driving a small car,
(39:49):
it's going to be more narrow. So you can get
the dimensions of a car. It doesn't mean that those
marks and road are necessarily associated with this event. However,
because it's immediately adjacent to the house, all of that
has to be taken into consideration. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan
(40:11):
and this is Body Backs M
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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