February 8, 2024 • 38 mins
Jeff and Kat West are a typical American couple living just south of Birmingham Alabama. They have a 12-year-old daughter, Jeff works in security, Kat is a stay at home mom, but she has developed a very successful online business, in adult entertainment. She posts sexy photos on multiple sites and has her own pay site that provides even more adult photos. Jeff often takes the photos for his wife, and she is becoming quite popular online. Everything seems fine when Jeff and Kat go out for date night, photos of the couple in a store that evening show them lovingly touching one another. How is it possible that the next morning as the sun comes up, Kat West's lifeless body is found laying out in the front yard of her house with a bottle of absinthe placed on her broken phone right next to her posed body. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack take you through the last night in the life of Kat West.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00:05 Origin of things
00:01:46 Talk about a different kind of fairy
00:02:29 Discussion of life
00:03:16 Talk about very special drink
00:05:59 Discussion setting up a scene
00:10:54 Talk about date night
00:12:50 Discussion strong alcohol
00:16:48 Talk about Jeff and Kat playful at store
00:19:42 Discussion of intimate photos, sharing
00:22:32 Talk theory Jeff West beat his wife
00:25:32 Discussion of Stalkers
00:29:37 Talk tiny details in investigation
00:34:02 Discussion of two primary spots of blood
00:38:58 Talk about holding bottle as weapon
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. I love word origins
and one of the things I found out about my
surname Morgan is that it derives from some people say
(00:34):
a Welsh word that actually means water, sprite or one.
It can be translated to one that dwells by the sea.
But the term sprite always was interesting to me because
I didn't really know what a sprite was, And apparently,
(00:56):
apparently a sprite is like a fairy, is what it is.
It's a mythological creature, right. Well, today we're going to
talk about another type of fairy, a bit more notorious fairy,
(01:18):
a fairy that many people have referred to over the
years as the Green Fairy. I'm going to talk about
a case that befuddled many people for a number of weeks.
They couldn't really figure it out, but it's something I
wanted to discuss for some time. It involves a beautiful wife,
(01:43):
her veteran army husband, and the Green Fairy of absence.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Backs. David.
I don't think I want to Is it from the
Green Ferry? I gotta tell you, I got I was
(02:05):
telling you this before the show. Actually, we were talking
about things yesterday and I'd mentioned to you that in
New Orleans, literally right on Bourbon Street, there is a
bar in this bar. Like many some things come and
go in the French Quarter, all right, but there's certain
(02:26):
places in the French Quarter that you can just you
know that they're there, they've always been there and they're
not going anywhere. And there's a couple of places like that.
Lafitte's blacksmith Shop is amazing because Jean Lafitte actually went
in this place to plan his piracy and all this stuff.
But there's another place there that's called the Old Absinth Bar,
(02:50):
and it's ever since my childhood, I remember that place
being there, and it goes back years and years and years,
and a lot of it has to do with the
French culture and the European culture. They specialize in a
particular drink that is made from absinthe. And if for
(03:13):
those of you that don't know about Absinth, it has
a very unique history, kind of a notorious history actually
going back many many years to the point where many
people in Europe and in America viewed it as something
(03:38):
that the loss should regulate. Can you imagine that. And
it's rooted in an event, if I remember correctly, involving
a Swiss farmer who allegedly drank absent and then went
about murdering his entire family. And that was kind of
(04:01):
ground zero for them beginning to outlaw this liquor in
a variety of locations throughout Europe and eventually and of course,
all of this happened in the middle of the of
the abolition movement relative to alcohol. So many times you
don't know what's truth and what isn't right, you know,
(04:23):
and they can take something and kind of twist it
around for their own you know. We've never heard politicians
do there, so you never know.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Well, you know, the reason we're even talking about it,
the little Green barrier, whatever it is, absentth is because
of an event that took place in Alabama. In Kolera, Alabama,
Jeff West and his wife Cat West had date night
and when date night was over, Cat west body nude
(04:54):
body was found I guess you had a brawl, but
was found in front of their house early in the morning,
found by a young girl who was on her way
to her fast food restaurant to work her early shift
and sees the beautiful Cat West laid out, obviously not moving,
but she was dead. So date night, dinner, drinks, Mom
(05:19):
and dad have our daughter, and then within twelve hours,
Cat West is dead. For me, Joe, I had a
radio partner in Birmingham, Alabama, in the late nineties doing
a country morning show and it was the Cat and
Mac Show. My partner was in cat West, not the
cat West we're talking about, but if you can imagine,
(05:43):
because Klara is just south of Birmingham, Alabama, it's a
you know, it's a commuter city for a lot of folks,
and there were conservatively thousands that reached out when this
happened in the area. Is that your cat? And I said, no,
this is a different one. But it was two things.
(06:03):
One people were deeply concerned about how a woman could
end up after date night, dead naked in front of
her house. And the other was my old radio partner.
I thought, where were y'all? We needed ratings. But anyway,
the story of Absinth was brought into this because Cat
west body was found in front of her house. She's dead,
(06:25):
her cell phone is cracked in there and laying on
top of it, standing on top of it, is a
bottle of absinthe. That's those are your clues, dead woman,
bottle of absent on top of the phone.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
To tell you what happened. From my perspective as a
as a death investigator, you know, this is not the
only tom where I have encountered a story. Actually I
worked I worked a case involving the placement of a
wine bottle. And you know, you go out on these
scenes many times, in particularly where there's total chaos, and
(07:03):
you can go into a home where there's a lot
of drinking going on, and I've walked in and and
you know, you've got all kinds of empty alcohol containers
lying about. And that doesn't go to what I think
probably people that are in the profiling business would say
an organized mindset. It's very disorganized. You walk into an
(07:25):
environment it's very chaotic. Actually had a guy that drank
three if you can imagine this, he was chronic alcoholic,
but he drank three bottles of red wine, wrote a
note and placed the note on top of the bottles
that were upright, and then had a gigantic wine glass
(07:48):
that he sat on top of the note which was
underpinned by these bottles. Now, can you imagine having to
do that being that drunk, but his tolerance was so high,
and then he proceeded to take his life. And those
bottles were that bottle meant something, those bottles, that collection
meant something. It was like an indication that he had
(08:12):
determined that he was going to take his life in
this case, and he was able to ingest this wine.
His blood alcohol was through the roof, as you can imagine,
but he was still functional. And you have a lot
of blood sugar. Oh yeah, yeah, that wine on the
level and yeah, you're absolutely right. And interestingly enough, this
(08:35):
handwritten note that he left behind had beautiful clarity, you know,
his his his, uh, his handwriting was impeccable, which to me,
even if I had half a bottle of wine, I'd
be passed out on the floor of sleep snoring heavily.
So yeah, what what does it mean? You know, when
you go out to a scene and you see objects,
(08:59):
objects tell you a lot. At a scene. You begin
to think about objects that are placed in a particular way.
So what can we ascertain from you know, where you
have a cell phone and then you have a bottle
that is positioned on top of it like it has
(09:19):
been put there, and then you've got arguably this very
attractive woman who.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Is By the way, let me clarify why we say that. Yeah,
The reason we say is she was an online model.
She had an online presence, She had an online business
that dealt with her in various stages of undressed pictures
that her husband took oftentimes, and I just I don't
want to go overboard thinking she's beautiful, but she was.
She was a beautiful woman. And that's I think one
(09:51):
of the things that we tend to look at, yeah
when we say beautiful, because physically she was a beautiful
woman and she had the pictures to prove it. And
that actually is why there was so much to this
story that because was it one of the guys online
you know, But we'll get into that in a minute.
(10:12):
I just wanted to clarify, It's not like you and
I just saw a picture everyone went wow. This has
been a part of this story since the very beginning.
And to be honest with you, even her friends, people
who knew both Kat and Jeff West were amazed because
they were kind of a mutton Jeff couple. Jeff West
not a whole lot to look at and they're like,
I think one of her friends actually said, you know,
(10:32):
how did that guy get this right?
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Right?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
And yeah, it was the opposite of the tract thing
that she was loud and beautiful and all that, but
apparently just an incredibly nice, wonderful woman people really loved,
including her husband, Jeff West.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Yeah, and they have child as well, and I'm and
that's one of the things relative to this particular night.
You know, they had set up a date night, you know,
which know my wife and I did when our kids
were young, you know, if you could find somebody to
watch her child.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
And that was their regular date night. Their daughter was
twelve at the time, and they did.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
And it's a treat, you know, to be able to
go out with and you know, you kind of it's
like a date. You feel young again. You know, you're
you're free from all of these responsibilities at home, you know,
and all these sorts of things and just for a
moment you can kind of escape. But the one thing
that cat could not escape was the fact that by
(11:33):
the next morning after their date night, she was dead.
(11:58):
That sinds Lorraine. It's a it's an area that is,
you know, in Switzerland, you and this is the way
I understand it is that you've kind of got and
please forgive me. To all of our Swiss listeners, I
don't mean to insult you, but this is my limited understanding.
(12:20):
The eastern portion of Switzerland is more German and in
the western portion of Switzerland leans more French. Obviously it
shares border with France. There's an area over there called
Al Saints Lorraine. And the reason that's important geographically is
(12:40):
that that's where a plant grows that's referred to and
this kind of gives your makes my skin crawl when
I hear about it is wormwood, and it is from
wormwood traditionally that absent is produced and when it's in
(13:05):
its purest form when it was first discovered by I
think a Swiss physician, and he was using it to
cure things like gout and this sort of thing, to
give people relief. But they also realized because the naturally
occurring high alcohol alcohol content after distillation, that they could
(13:27):
use it as an antiseptic. So it had multiple uses,
you know, and you go back years and years and
you think about, you know, people that they relied on
nature to provide all of the pharmaceuticals. Back then they
were looking for substance, and boy did they find one.
And this because in its purest form, the alcohol that
(13:51):
is made that is consumed absent, that is consumed by folks,
it had a very strong halution n agenic effects, so
you could have and people would get raw and drunk
off of this stuff. And then it also had this
component where you would hallucinate when you drink it, and
(14:12):
I think it really scared people, and it it didn't help.
It didn't help either that there were people that that
wasn't enough for them. There were people that would begin
to put drops of opium in this drink. So it
it really kicked it up to another level.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Didn't you tell me that's what Ernest Hemingway did.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Well, Yeah, there were a lot of these famous writers,
you know that. There were a couple of drinks, I
know Absence and then there's another drink called prenou which
is it kind of tastes like I've actually tasted Absence
before and it's got and I don't find the taste
(14:54):
pleasant to me. It's got kind of a black liquorice
taste to it, which is not something that's pleasant. I
mean a lot of people love my grand my grandparents
thought that black licorice was like the greatest thing in
the world, you know. But they like molasses too. So
when you've got limited means, you know, there's certain things
that task wonderful, I guess, but for me it's just not.
(15:15):
It wouldn't be no pun intended my cup of tea.
But but yeah, And the reason we're we're talking about
this is that that night we do have there is
CCTV of Kat and Jeff West walking into a liquor
store there in the in the Greater Metropolitan Area of Birmingham, Alabama,
(15:39):
and they're there to purchase a bottle of absence Dave.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
And this date night where they went to dinner and
had drinks while they're uh, I think it was cat
West's mom and dad watched their daughter Lola. They were
in a good mood, you know. They were on their
way home and stopped at the liquor store bought the
bottle of absinthe. And we know this because we saw
the security camera footage. It was a big deal when
(16:04):
that was released because you could not you but in general,
it looked like they were a couple uh enamored with
one another. They were having a good time. There was
no tension. They were actually physically, you know, yeah, demonstrating
their relationship.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
He playfully and I'm gonna phrase it that way, playfully
popped her on her bottom, you know, while they were
they were in an aisle and you can see this,
and it wasn't like an aggressive kind of thing. It
was like a love tap on a rear end. And
you know that that speaks a lot. So how how
(16:39):
do you go from this point where you're in this
environment and you've got, wow, sound like a school school
principle here, where you've got public displays of affection, right,
you know, in this environment, and then the next morning
to find her unclose essentially except for a top and
(17:04):
line essentially adjacent to the roadway, partially hanging off of
a curve from the way it sounds, and her body
positioned on the grass? How do you get to that point?
And I think that the authorities had to try to
understand that what else is at work here? You know?
Speaker 2 (17:25):
You know, I thought it was interesting when you said
positioned because we've got a couple of things going on
with the crime scene here. But to back up for
a minute, between the date night and the death. They
go to the liquor store and that's the last image
we have of cat West that we know of. They
go home from there and continue drinking. They'd had a
(17:46):
couple of drinks at dinner. They continue drinking at home
as the evening went on. Investigators believed they were drinking
a lot, which was not an uncommon thing for the couple.
Drink a lot. They like to drink. There is some
discussion about kat West's online activities. She had really ramped
(18:09):
up her online presence. She was making money as a
stay at home mom. She was making money online with
a couple of different websites. One is called only Fans.
You might have heard of Only Fans. It has become
fairly popular in the last couple of years for women
to make money on the side or full time. We've
(18:29):
had a number of stories about teachers not making enough
money teaching, so they get an only Fans page up
and then get fired from the school and you find out, well,
they were making more in a month on only Fans
than they got paid the entire year as a teacher.
And that was where cat West she was in the
beginning of that stage. And there is a discussion about
how often Jeff West had a problem with it. Did
(18:51):
Jeff West have no problem with his wife sharing these
intimate photos of herself online and allow men to pay
to see these videos and bigger ones? Or was he
forward or against it? Did he only have a problem
with it when he was drinking. I mean, there are
a lot of things in this and the suggestion is
(19:12):
that Jeff West was not happy about the direction his
wife was going online and that while they were both drinking,
it led to an argument. And in this argument, Jeff
West is accused of beating his wife to death, using
the absence bottle to cause her death. That is what
he was convicted of doing. Saying convicted of doing because
(19:37):
when her body was found, we have said partially nude
and mostly nude, whatever you want to say. We know
that at night, sometime during the night, Jeff took pictures
of his wife and a bra, panties and a bra.
But when she was found next to the road at
five o'clock in the morning or whenever it was, it
was very early in the morning, she did not have
(19:57):
any panties on. She did have her bra, and that
was it. Her body had been moved. Joe and I
want to get to the crime scene very quickly here
if we can, because the blood at the scene tells
a story that I don't understand, because I'm not you.
Most of us have a little trouble when we actually
get into the nuance of a crime scene. But in
(20:17):
this particular case, the police said that her body had
been moved and the bottle of absence was placed on
top of the cell phone. Oh think back up. They
said during the argument that Jeff West was so mad
at his wife that he threw her phone out the
door and that damage to the One.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Of the one of the threads that runs through this
is you know, obviously phone activity, and it has been
stated that he had grown weary of her spending so
much time on her phone and essentially ignoring him. And
I can only imagine, you know, he's he's thinking about
(20:57):
it because it's well, I don't know, I don't know
if there's a delineation or not. But if you if
you are taking photos of the person that you're you know,
married to, and you're pushing those out on the web
and selling these essentially, now you go up to another
level where you're actually doing live videography and you're because
(21:20):
with only fans, you're performing for people. And I got
to tell you, you know, when I when I first began
to look into this case, and you had mentioned this earlier,
one of the things I began to think about is stalker,
you know, because it's as you know, it's a very
dark world out there in the digital space. And you know,
how how vulnerable are you as a person when you know,
(21:46):
you strip away all of your clothing and you're displaying
to the entire world. You know this this such an intimate,
intimate I don't know a view of you in this
and people think that they own you at that point, Tom,
And it's it's terrifying from the perspective of anybody could
(22:09):
come into this environment because look, it doesn't take a
lot dave for people to find you where you live.
You might think that you have a certain amount of
anonymity out there, but that's not the case. You know it,
and I know it, Joe.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
There was a show we did on Nancy Grace last week.
It was about a stocker. It was dealing with Taylor
Swift Stoker in New York that was arrested four or
five times in a five day period. And on that show.
There is an actress who has been stocked, has a
stalker that has followed her around. And we're talking years here,
including stocking her little daughter from the time that she
(22:50):
was five years old until she became an adult. I mean,
it's crazy, but you know, one of the things she
pointed out, I'm only going to say this because y'all
need to know this. She said. One way that people
can find you is you might have everything on your
social media, you know, locked down, tight, with no addresses
or anything else. It's not you. If I'm in a
photo with Joe Scott Morgan, I'm locked up, I'm climmed down.
(23:13):
You can't find me on my stuff or you know.
But I'm in a picture with Joe Scott Morgan. Then
the stalker finds he sees that picture, sees me, and
it looks at other people in the photo. Well, there's Joe,
there's Just's wife, and then they start looking up these
other people in the photo to see if one of
them can track back to the stalker's person. And that's
(23:33):
how they find you. It's not through you, it's for
others that you associate with. Yes, And it is so
intense and the minutia that is there. I would have
never thought about it, but now that we have people
who really are I don't want to say crazy, but
(23:53):
they're not right. And so the first thought was, here
is Cat West putting these pictures and photos out hit
husband oftentimes take the pictures and the videos. Does she
have a stalker that believed that he was in a
relationship with her? And when he shows up and sees
Cat West with her husband having fun at their house,
loses his cookies and kills her.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
And that would be And then you have a sexual
element to it too, because anytime you come across a
and you know you have well anybody can be nude,
and you see it and you think that automatically there
is a sexual element. But when you consider this woman
who is in this, let's face it, a very provocative
(24:35):
position at that scene in front of her house, in
view of the neighborhood, or somebody trying to send a message,
(25:04):
it's the tiny details that will either lead to success
or will spoil your investigation because you missed them. Those
of us that are investigators and have been investigators, Lord knows,
I've missed my share of indicators that scenes over the
years and in this particular case, I think that there's
(25:29):
a lot of granular detail, Dave that could give an
indication as to the dynamics of what happened that night
and how Kat actually actually wound up in this let's
say it again, in this very very provocative position in
(25:49):
her front yard.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Essentially, I find it fascinating. I don't you know, I said,
I find it fascinating. But Kat West is dead, and
I think about her daughter growing up without her mother,
and I don't I want to. I feel like I'm
saying fascinated, and it makes it somehow diminished, and that's
not what I mean. But in this case, the prosecution
and the defense, based on the evidence they have from
(26:13):
inside the home, based on the video at the liquor store,
other than the actual end that they say, the scene
tells the story, and the scene is set so much
that we've talked about her being nearly nude on the
front yard dead, But Joe, what can you tell from
(26:37):
blood on the scene, what does it actually tell you?
We know that they were out, they had a drink,
they came home, continued drinking. He took two photos of
her in the bra she was found in, and some
multicolored panties and stilettos and put those online. We know this, No,
we don't know that you put them online. We know
that he took the pictures, they were on the phone.
But how she ended up in the front yard dead,
(27:03):
her phone cracked in a bottle of absence sitting on
the top of the phone. Does the scene tell you
what happened?
Speaker 1 (27:09):
The blood actually gives you an indication of movement and activity,
and that's what we you know, we we always look
for at at a scene, you know, trying to understand
the dynamics of an event and where an individual may
have come, for instance, to rest. And you know, in
(27:34):
in this particular case, there were two primary spots of
blood that were found out by the roadway. Uh. And
it's it's actually kind of a wow. I mean, I
saw an image and you don't really appreciate things, you
know when you kind of talk about them in the
abstract here, but you know, all it takes. And that's
that's why crime scene photography is so bold and it's
(27:58):
so useful at court because you can appreciate the deposition,
the volume of blood and when you see how much
blood is found actually in the street and an adjacent
uh to the grassy area where cat was found Cat
West was found. It gives you an indication that that
(28:23):
the the body had been moved at some point in time,
that it was initially resting in one spot and then
moved to another.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yeah, when a body is found in dirt or grassy
area and there's blood that has gone into the ground,
you investigators dig up the ground.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Yep. Yeah, good point. Yeah, you're you're absolutely right, and
you will take soil samples just to and and even
if it can't necessarily give you a lot of definitive answers,
you want to capture that bit of evidence to demonstrate, uh,
certainly that there is this blood that has seeped through
(29:03):
to this level. Now, I want people to understand this
because I think that folks think that we can go
out to a scene and measure a volume of blood
that we see, for instance, a stain on the ground
carpet for instance, when you've got a big area of blood,
(29:25):
and even in like a grassy area, all we can
say we cannot measure volumes with a disbursement like that.
There there's no way, I mean, it would, It's impossible
to come up with an accurate volume of blood. All
you can do is look at it and say, this is,
in fact blood, and this appears to be a tremendous
(29:49):
amount of blood that may and I've used this term before,
may be incompatible with life. So but again, to take
that measurement and say, okay, well yeah, right here, this
person lost four pints of blood, you can't definitively say
that from a scientific I don't know of anybody out
there that can. It's not like you, let's just say
(30:11):
it's a carpet and surface. You can't cut that piece
of carpet out and wring it out, because even if
you did that to try to measure the mouth that
that was there, there's still some that's left behind, super
saturated into this environment. But what you can determine, or
at least offer an opinion about, is that the body
(30:32):
had in fact been moved in some way. So when
you've got two primary spots, how did that happen? Are
you trying to position the body, are you trying to,
you know, to get them out of the roadway, or
did the person move themselves in this kind of perry
mortem state where they're out there maybe writhing around, they
(30:55):
begin to bleed in one spot, they still have enough
enough indwelling life left in them so that they can
migrate to another position. And I think that that's that's
something that's interesting too, because you get an idea how
long maybe how long it took for her to die
at that location. And listen, this is in a cold
(31:18):
time of the year, you know when and even when
you see the images from this crime scene, the cops
are outdoors, they're wearing jackets, the grass is all brown,
and here she is out here, exposed to the elements.
She's essentially nude, laying out there and again, laying out
there for the entire world to see. Dave.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
You know, Joe, when you mentioned that there were two
primary spots where the blood had had gathered, I guess
or had you know they could tell? And yeah, cool,
thank you. Uh, that was just one of the tips
of what they found at the crime scene. But the bottle,
the bottle of absence that was left next to the
(32:00):
body was it was placed on top of the cell phone,
and in my mind's eye, I was trying to think,
is there any way possible that I misread this and
that the bottle was laying near the phone, And because
if it's near the phone, you can't say anybody put
it there. You could have fallen. But to say that
the bottle was sitting on top of the cracked phone,
(32:24):
police say that Jeff West they were having an argument
over her online photos and videos and got mad and
Jeff West threw the phone out the door and that's
what caused it to crack. And then later on she
the defense, she fell and hit her head, and I
guess as she fell, the bottle of absence ended up
(32:47):
sitting on top of the phone. Yeah, it makes no sense. Hey,
I got to tell you something, man. You know what
that bottle reminds me of relative to that phone. It
actually reminds me of an exclamation wow. Where you've got
this cracked phone and you've got the base of the
bottle sitting on top of the phone. It's almost like
(33:09):
they're saying, Okay, here you go, you your phone and
this bottle that you know, we all believe, I believe,
and certainly the coroner believed, was weaponized. And I know
that term is used a lot, but let me just
kind of break this down to you because it's fascinating.
(33:29):
First off, Cat West had sustained what appears to have
been a single blow to the head, and you think, well,
how in the world could that actually kill somebody. Well,
she had a laceration. And just so that we can
review and go back to this and understand that lacerations
are not cuts. They lacerations arise from blunt force trauma.
(33:53):
And you know, uh, the lacerations he's kind of tearing
because what it is because when you applied direct pressure
to the skin with an object, the skin doesn't cut,
it tears, and so you're going to have these kind
of fiber strings that hang on to either side, and
(34:15):
that's called tissue bridging. It's one of the things that
we look for at autopsy to show the kind of stringy,
connective tissue that's still holding both. If it was a
blade that created an injury, you'd have these real what
they refer to as really neat margins where it's kind
of cut, you.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Know, where you've got a mild blade. But in this
particular case, this bottle was actually utilized to strike her
with And I would suggest that everybody because interestingly enough,
you remember those photos from that night they took a
picture they being Jeff and Kat of the bottle, and
(34:58):
there's a vape sitting there too. In the bottle. It's
it's actually lucid l u C I d absent and
I urge everybody. The bottle itself is green. There's a
picture of it up there that's looks like it's off
of their countertop, their island, you know, in their kitchen.
This is very, very thick class I was.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Going to say, how is it possible that it could
be used to deal a fatal blow to her head
and still be the bottle without shatting easily?
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Because these bottles when you go down the neck from
the neck of the bottle and you get down to
the base, these things many times are very robust and
the glass is very thick, and yeah, they can. It's
not like an old Western movie where they've got breakaway
bottles are real thin and you hear glass shatter. That
doesn't happen.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
What did the bottle show investigators? Joe did there? Was
there anything on the bottle?
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Yeah? Yeah, And that's that's that's really kind of the
cool aspect of this because a tip of the cap
to the corner, the local corner, because she's trying to
she's trying to measure in her mind, how is it
that this bottle was actually used to assault cat West?
(36:11):
And her conclusion was this, and you gotta you're going
to have to visualize here just for a second. When
they when they lifted latent prints off of this bottle,
they found both cat West prints and Jeff West prints
on the bottle, and you would get the fingerprints itself
(36:31):
that you could probably come up with a palm print
because glass is what we refer to as a non
porous surface. So when you leave behind a latent print,
that means unseen, those fatty lipids on the surface of
your skin leave this image. It's a negative image of
your friction ridges on your hand on the surface of
(36:53):
the bottle. And as the corner is trying to figure
out the dynamics of this one thing that that she
and the Crime Seen people came up with and the
detectives was that just everybody at home right now, imagine
that you've got a liquor bottle or a wine bottle
in front of you. Rotate your hand so that your
(37:15):
thumb is in the downward position, and you grab the
neck of the bottle. All right, The bottle itself at
that point can become a bludgeon. And so when you
rotate your hand back up the barrel of the bottle
and the bottom of the bottle becomes this object that
you can beat somebody with. And isn't it interesting that
(37:36):
when they actually raise the Prince Dave on the neck
of this bottle, you can clearly see that Jeff West
hand is there in that position. Now. I don't know
about you, but when I pour something from a bottle,
I don't take it and invert my hand and then
(37:57):
twist it around because you can't control the volume of
liquid that's coming out of the bottle. So that leads
you to this conclusion. Why in the world would he
hold that bottle that way? Well, I guess you could say,
you know, he took it out of the story, he
grabbed it that way. It's an unusual way of holding it,
and defense can argue that. But I think that the
reason that he was convicted in this particular case, and
(38:21):
Jeff West was in fact convicted in this case, was
this demonstration of how this bottle was used, how his
hand was positioned, and certainly this strike to cat West
heead that ended her life with their industry. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan, and this is bodied eyes,
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. I love word origins
and one of the things I found out about my
surname Morgan is that it derives from some people say
(00:34):
a Welsh word that actually means water, sprite or one.
It can be translated to one that dwells by the sea.
But the term sprite always was interesting to me because
I didn't really know what a sprite was, And apparently,
(00:56):
apparently a sprite is like a fairy, is what it is.
It's a mythological creature, right. Well, today we're going to
talk about another type of fairy, a bit more notorious fairy,
(01:18):
a fairy that many people have referred to over the
years as the Green Fairy. I'm going to talk about
a case that befuddled many people for a number of weeks.
They couldn't really figure it out, but it's something I
wanted to discuss for some time. It involves a beautiful wife,
(01:43):
her veteran army husband, and the Green Fairy of absence.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Backs. David.
I don't think I want to Is it from the
Green Ferry? I gotta tell you, I got I was
(02:05):
telling you this before the show. Actually, we were talking
about things yesterday and I'd mentioned to you that in
New Orleans, literally right on Bourbon Street, there is a
bar in this bar. Like many some things come and
go in the French Quarter, all right, but there's certain
(02:26):
places in the French Quarter that you can just you
know that they're there, they've always been there and they're
not going anywhere. And there's a couple of places like that.
Lafitte's blacksmith Shop is amazing because Jean Lafitte actually went
in this place to plan his piracy and all this stuff.
But there's another place there that's called the Old Absinth Bar,
(02:50):
and it's ever since my childhood, I remember that place
being there, and it goes back years and years and years,
and a lot of it has to do with the
French culture and the European culture. They specialize in a
particular drink that is made from absinthe. And if for
(03:13):
those of you that don't know about Absinth, it has
a very unique history, kind of a notorious history actually
going back many many years to the point where many
people in Europe and in America viewed it as something
(03:38):
that the loss should regulate. Can you imagine that. And
it's rooted in an event, if I remember correctly, involving
a Swiss farmer who allegedly drank absent and then went
about murdering his entire family. And that was kind of
(04:01):
ground zero for them beginning to outlaw this liquor in
a variety of locations throughout Europe and eventually and of course,
all of this happened in the middle of the of
the abolition movement relative to alcohol. So many times you
don't know what's truth and what isn't right, you know,
(04:23):
and they can take something and kind of twist it
around for their own you know. We've never heard politicians
do there, so you never know.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Well, you know, the reason we're even talking about it,
the little Green barrier, whatever it is, absentth is because
of an event that took place in Alabama. In Kolera, Alabama,
Jeff West and his wife Cat West had date night
and when date night was over, Cat west body nude
(04:54):
body was found I guess you had a brawl, but
was found in front of their house early in the morning,
found by a young girl who was on her way
to her fast food restaurant to work her early shift
and sees the beautiful Cat West laid out, obviously not moving,
but she was dead. So date night, dinner, drinks, Mom
(05:19):
and dad have our daughter, and then within twelve hours,
Cat West is dead. For me, Joe, I had a
radio partner in Birmingham, Alabama, in the late nineties doing
a country morning show and it was the Cat and
Mac Show. My partner was in cat West, not the
cat West we're talking about, but if you can imagine,
(05:43):
because Klara is just south of Birmingham, Alabama, it's a
you know, it's a commuter city for a lot of folks,
and there were conservatively thousands that reached out when this
happened in the area. Is that your cat? And I said, no,
this is a different one. But it was two things.
(06:03):
One people were deeply concerned about how a woman could
end up after date night, dead naked in front of
her house. And the other was my old radio partner.
I thought, where were y'all? We needed ratings. But anyway,
the story of Absinth was brought into this because Cat
west body was found in front of her house. She's dead,
(06:25):
her cell phone is cracked in there and laying on
top of it, standing on top of it, is a
bottle of absinthe. That's those are your clues, dead woman,
bottle of absent on top of the phone.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
To tell you what happened. From my perspective as a
as a death investigator, you know, this is not the
only tom where I have encountered a story. Actually I
worked I worked a case involving the placement of a
wine bottle. And you know, you go out on these
scenes many times, in particularly where there's total chaos, and
(07:03):
you can go into a home where there's a lot
of drinking going on, and I've walked in and and
you know, you've got all kinds of empty alcohol containers
lying about. And that doesn't go to what I think
probably people that are in the profiling business would say
an organized mindset. It's very disorganized. You walk into an
(07:25):
environment it's very chaotic. Actually had a guy that drank
three if you can imagine this, he was chronic alcoholic,
but he drank three bottles of red wine, wrote a
note and placed the note on top of the bottles
that were upright, and then had a gigantic wine glass
(07:48):
that he sat on top of the note which was
underpinned by these bottles. Now, can you imagine having to
do that being that drunk, but his tolerance was so high,
and then he proceeded to take his life. And those
bottles were that bottle meant something, those bottles, that collection
meant something. It was like an indication that he had
(08:12):
determined that he was going to take his life in
this case, and he was able to ingest this wine.
His blood alcohol was through the roof, as you can imagine,
but he was still functional. And you have a lot
of blood sugar. Oh yeah, yeah, that wine on the
level and yeah, you're absolutely right. And interestingly enough, this
(08:35):
handwritten note that he left behind had beautiful clarity, you know,
his his his, uh, his handwriting was impeccable, which to me,
even if I had half a bottle of wine, I'd
be passed out on the floor of sleep snoring heavily.
So yeah, what what does it mean? You know, when
you go out to a scene and you see objects,
(08:59):
objects tell you a lot. At a scene. You begin
to think about objects that are placed in a particular way.
So what can we ascertain from you know, where you
have a cell phone and then you have a bottle
that is positioned on top of it like it has
(09:19):
been put there, and then you've got arguably this very
attractive woman who.
Speaker 2 (09:29):
Is By the way, let me clarify why we say that. Yeah,
The reason we say is she was an online model.
She had an online presence, She had an online business
that dealt with her in various stages of undressed pictures
that her husband took oftentimes, and I just I don't
want to go overboard thinking she's beautiful, but she was.
She was a beautiful woman. And that's I think one
(09:51):
of the things that we tend to look at, yeah
when we say beautiful, because physically she was a beautiful
woman and she had the pictures to prove it. And
that actually is why there was so much to this
story that because was it one of the guys online
you know, But we'll get into that in a minute.
(10:12):
I just wanted to clarify, It's not like you and
I just saw a picture everyone went wow. This has
been a part of this story since the very beginning.
And to be honest with you, even her friends, people
who knew both Kat and Jeff West were amazed because
they were kind of a mutton Jeff couple. Jeff West
not a whole lot to look at and they're like,
I think one of her friends actually said, you know,
(10:32):
how did that guy get this right?
Speaker 1 (10:35):
Right?
Speaker 2 (10:35):
And yeah, it was the opposite of the tract thing
that she was loud and beautiful and all that, but
apparently just an incredibly nice, wonderful woman people really loved,
including her husband, Jeff West.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
Yeah, and they have child as well, and I'm and
that's one of the things relative to this particular night.
You know, they had set up a date night, you know,
which know my wife and I did when our kids
were young, you know, if you could find somebody to
watch her child.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
And that was their regular date night. Their daughter was
twelve at the time, and they did.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
And it's a treat, you know, to be able to
go out with and you know, you kind of it's
like a date. You feel young again. You know, you're
you're free from all of these responsibilities at home, you know,
and all these sorts of things and just for a
moment you can kind of escape. But the one thing
that cat could not escape was the fact that by
(11:33):
the next morning after their date night, she was dead.
(11:58):
That sinds Lorraine. It's a it's an area that is,
you know, in Switzerland, you and this is the way
I understand it is that you've kind of got and
please forgive me. To all of our Swiss listeners, I
don't mean to insult you, but this is my limited understanding.
(12:20):
The eastern portion of Switzerland is more German and in
the western portion of Switzerland leans more French. Obviously it
shares border with France. There's an area over there called
Al Saints Lorraine. And the reason that's important geographically is
(12:40):
that that's where a plant grows that's referred to and
this kind of gives your makes my skin crawl when
I hear about it is wormwood, and it is from
wormwood traditionally that absent is produced and when it's in
(13:05):
its purest form when it was first discovered by I
think a Swiss physician, and he was using it to
cure things like gout and this sort of thing, to
give people relief. But they also realized because the naturally
occurring high alcohol alcohol content after distillation, that they could
(13:27):
use it as an antiseptic. So it had multiple uses,
you know, and you go back years and years and
you think about, you know, people that they relied on
nature to provide all of the pharmaceuticals. Back then they
were looking for substance, and boy did they find one.
And this because in its purest form, the alcohol that
(13:51):
is made that is consumed absent, that is consumed by folks,
it had a very strong halution n agenic effects, so
you could have and people would get raw and drunk
off of this stuff. And then it also had this
component where you would hallucinate when you drink it, and
(14:12):
I think it really scared people, and it it didn't help.
It didn't help either that there were people that that
wasn't enough for them. There were people that would begin
to put drops of opium in this drink. So it
it really kicked it up to another level.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Didn't you tell me that's what Ernest Hemingway did.
Speaker 1 (14:34):
Well, Yeah, there were a lot of these famous writers,
you know that. There were a couple of drinks, I
know Absence and then there's another drink called prenou which
is it kind of tastes like I've actually tasted Absence
before and it's got and I don't find the taste
(14:54):
pleasant to me. It's got kind of a black liquorice
taste to it, which is not something that's pleasant. I
mean a lot of people love my grand my grandparents
thought that black licorice was like the greatest thing in
the world, you know. But they like molasses too. So
when you've got limited means, you know, there's certain things
that task wonderful, I guess, but for me it's just not.
(15:15):
It wouldn't be no pun intended my cup of tea.
But but yeah, And the reason we're we're talking about
this is that that night we do have there is
CCTV of Kat and Jeff West walking into a liquor
store there in the in the Greater Metropolitan Area of Birmingham, Alabama,
(15:39):
and they're there to purchase a bottle of absence Dave.
Speaker 2 (15:44):
And this date night where they went to dinner and
had drinks while they're uh, I think it was cat
West's mom and dad watched their daughter Lola. They were
in a good mood, you know. They were on their
way home and stopped at the liquor store bought the
bottle of absinthe. And we know this because we saw
the security camera footage. It was a big deal when
(16:04):
that was released because you could not you but in general,
it looked like they were a couple uh enamored with
one another. They were having a good time. There was
no tension. They were actually physically, you know, yeah, demonstrating
their relationship.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
He playfully and I'm gonna phrase it that way, playfully
popped her on her bottom, you know, while they were
they were in an aisle and you can see this,
and it wasn't like an aggressive kind of thing. It
was like a love tap on a rear end. And
you know that that speaks a lot. So how how
(16:39):
do you go from this point where you're in this
environment and you've got, wow, sound like a school school
principle here, where you've got public displays of affection, right,
you know, in this environment, and then the next morning
to find her unclose essentially except for a top and
(17:04):
line essentially adjacent to the roadway, partially hanging off of
a curve from the way it sounds, and her body
positioned on the grass? How do you get to that point?
And I think that the authorities had to try to
understand that what else is at work here? You know?
Speaker 2 (17:25):
You know, I thought it was interesting when you said
positioned because we've got a couple of things going on
with the crime scene here. But to back up for
a minute, between the date night and the death. They
go to the liquor store and that's the last image
we have of cat West that we know of. They
go home from there and continue drinking. They'd had a
(17:46):
couple of drinks at dinner. They continue drinking at home
as the evening went on. Investigators believed they were drinking
a lot, which was not an uncommon thing for the couple.
Drink a lot. They like to drink. There is some
discussion about kat West's online activities. She had really ramped
(18:09):
up her online presence. She was making money as a
stay at home mom. She was making money online with
a couple of different websites. One is called only Fans.
You might have heard of Only Fans. It has become
fairly popular in the last couple of years for women
to make money on the side or full time. We've
(18:29):
had a number of stories about teachers not making enough
money teaching, so they get an only Fans page up
and then get fired from the school and you find out, well,
they were making more in a month on only Fans
than they got paid the entire year as a teacher.
And that was where cat West she was in the
beginning of that stage. And there is a discussion about
how often Jeff West had a problem with it. Did
(18:51):
Jeff West have no problem with his wife sharing these
intimate photos of herself online and allow men to pay
to see these videos and bigger ones? Or was he
forward or against it? Did he only have a problem
with it when he was drinking. I mean, there are
a lot of things in this and the suggestion is
(19:12):
that Jeff West was not happy about the direction his
wife was going online and that while they were both drinking,
it led to an argument. And in this argument, Jeff
West is accused of beating his wife to death, using
the absence bottle to cause her death. That is what
he was convicted of doing. Saying convicted of doing because
(19:37):
when her body was found, we have said partially nude
and mostly nude, whatever you want to say. We know
that at night, sometime during the night, Jeff took pictures
of his wife and a bra, panties and a bra.
But when she was found next to the road at
five o'clock in the morning or whenever it was, it
was very early in the morning, she did not have
(19:57):
any panties on. She did have her bra, and that
was it. Her body had been moved. Joe and I
want to get to the crime scene very quickly here
if we can, because the blood at the scene tells
a story that I don't understand, because I'm not you.
Most of us have a little trouble when we actually
get into the nuance of a crime scene. But in
(20:17):
this particular case, the police said that her body had
been moved and the bottle of absence was placed on
top of the cell phone. Oh think back up. They
said during the argument that Jeff West was so mad
at his wife that he threw her phone out the
door and that damage to the One.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
Of the one of the threads that runs through this
is you know, obviously phone activity, and it has been
stated that he had grown weary of her spending so
much time on her phone and essentially ignoring him. And
I can only imagine, you know, he's he's thinking about
(20:57):
it because it's well, I don't know, I don't know
if there's a delineation or not. But if you if
you are taking photos of the person that you're you know,
married to, and you're pushing those out on the web
and selling these essentially, now you go up to another
level where you're actually doing live videography and you're because
(21:20):
with only fans, you're performing for people. And I got
to tell you, you know, when I when I first began
to look into this case, and you had mentioned this earlier,
one of the things I began to think about is stalker,
you know, because it's as you know, it's a very
dark world out there in the digital space. And you know,
how how vulnerable are you as a person when you know,
(21:46):
you strip away all of your clothing and you're displaying
to the entire world. You know this this such an intimate,
intimate I don't know a view of you in this
and people think that they own you at that point, Tom,
And it's it's terrifying from the perspective of anybody could
(22:09):
come into this environment because look, it doesn't take a
lot dave for people to find you where you live.
You might think that you have a certain amount of
anonymity out there, but that's not the case. You know it,
and I know it, Joe.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
There was a show we did on Nancy Grace last week.
It was about a stocker. It was dealing with Taylor
Swift Stoker in New York that was arrested four or
five times in a five day period. And on that show.
There is an actress who has been stocked, has a
stalker that has followed her around. And we're talking years here,
including stocking her little daughter from the time that she
(22:50):
was five years old until she became an adult. I mean,
it's crazy, but you know, one of the things she
pointed out, I'm only going to say this because y'all
need to know this. She said. One way that people
can find you is you might have everything on your
social media, you know, locked down, tight, with no addresses
or anything else. It's not you. If I'm in a
photo with Joe Scott Morgan, I'm locked up, I'm climmed down.
(23:13):
You can't find me on my stuff or you know.
But I'm in a picture with Joe Scott Morgan. Then
the stalker finds he sees that picture, sees me, and
it looks at other people in the photo. Well, there's Joe,
there's Just's wife, and then they start looking up these
other people in the photo to see if one of
them can track back to the stalker's person. And that's
(23:33):
how they find you. It's not through you, it's for
others that you associate with. Yes, And it is so
intense and the minutia that is there. I would have
never thought about it, but now that we have people
who really are I don't want to say crazy, but
(23:53):
they're not right. And so the first thought was, here
is Cat West putting these pictures and photos out hit
husband oftentimes take the pictures and the videos. Does she
have a stalker that believed that he was in a
relationship with her? And when he shows up and sees
Cat West with her husband having fun at their house,
loses his cookies and kills her.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
And that would be And then you have a sexual
element to it too, because anytime you come across a
and you know you have well anybody can be nude,
and you see it and you think that automatically there
is a sexual element. But when you consider this woman
who is in this, let's face it, a very provocative
(24:35):
position at that scene in front of her house, in
view of the neighborhood, or somebody trying to send a message,
(25:04):
it's the tiny details that will either lead to success
or will spoil your investigation because you missed them. Those
of us that are investigators and have been investigators, Lord knows,
I've missed my share of indicators that scenes over the
years and in this particular case, I think that there's
(25:29):
a lot of granular detail, Dave that could give an
indication as to the dynamics of what happened that night
and how Kat actually actually wound up in this let's
say it again, in this very very provocative position in
(25:49):
her front yard.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
Essentially, I find it fascinating. I don't you know, I said,
I find it fascinating. But Kat West is dead, and
I think about her daughter growing up without her mother,
and I don't I want to. I feel like I'm
saying fascinated, and it makes it somehow diminished, and that's
not what I mean. But in this case, the prosecution
and the defense, based on the evidence they have from
(26:13):
inside the home, based on the video at the liquor store,
other than the actual end that they say, the scene
tells the story, and the scene is set so much
that we've talked about her being nearly nude on the
front yard dead, But Joe, what can you tell from
(26:37):
blood on the scene, what does it actually tell you?
We know that they were out, they had a drink,
they came home, continued drinking. He took two photos of
her in the bra she was found in, and some
multicolored panties and stilettos and put those online. We know this, No,
we don't know that you put them online. We know
that he took the pictures, they were on the phone.
But how she ended up in the front yard dead,
(27:03):
her phone cracked in a bottle of absence sitting on
the top of the phone. Does the scene tell you
what happened?
Speaker 1 (27:09):
The blood actually gives you an indication of movement and activity,
and that's what we you know, we we always look
for at at a scene, you know, trying to understand
the dynamics of an event and where an individual may
have come, for instance, to rest. And you know, in
(27:34):
in this particular case, there were two primary spots of
blood that were found out by the roadway. Uh. And
it's it's actually kind of a wow. I mean, I
saw an image and you don't really appreciate things, you
know when you kind of talk about them in the
abstract here, but you know, all it takes. And that's
that's why crime scene photography is so bold and it's
(27:58):
so useful at court because you can appreciate the deposition,
the volume of blood and when you see how much
blood is found actually in the street and an adjacent
uh to the grassy area where cat was found Cat
West was found. It gives you an indication that that
(28:23):
the the body had been moved at some point in time,
that it was initially resting in one spot and then
moved to another.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yeah, when a body is found in dirt or grassy
area and there's blood that has gone into the ground,
you investigators dig up the ground.
Speaker 1 (28:38):
Yep. Yeah, good point. Yeah, you're you're absolutely right, and
you will take soil samples just to and and even
if it can't necessarily give you a lot of definitive answers,
you want to capture that bit of evidence to demonstrate, uh,
certainly that there is this blood that has seeped through
(29:03):
to this level. Now, I want people to understand this
because I think that folks think that we can go
out to a scene and measure a volume of blood
that we see, for instance, a stain on the ground
carpet for instance, when you've got a big area of blood,
(29:25):
and even in like a grassy area, all we can
say we cannot measure volumes with a disbursement like that.
There there's no way, I mean, it would, It's impossible
to come up with an accurate volume of blood. All
you can do is look at it and say, this is,
in fact blood, and this appears to be a tremendous
(29:49):
amount of blood that may and I've used this term before,
may be incompatible with life. So but again, to take
that measurement and say, okay, well yeah, right here, this
person lost four pints of blood, you can't definitively say
that from a scientific I don't know of anybody out
there that can. It's not like you, let's just say
(30:11):
it's a carpet and surface. You can't cut that piece
of carpet out and wring it out, because even if
you did that to try to measure the mouth that
that was there, there's still some that's left behind, super
saturated into this environment. But what you can determine, or
at least offer an opinion about, is that the body
(30:32):
had in fact been moved in some way. So when
you've got two primary spots, how did that happen? Are
you trying to position the body, are you trying to,
you know, to get them out of the roadway, or
did the person move themselves in this kind of perry
mortem state where they're out there maybe writhing around, they
(30:55):
begin to bleed in one spot, they still have enough
enough indwelling life left in them so that they can
migrate to another position. And I think that that's that's
something that's interesting too, because you get an idea how
long maybe how long it took for her to die
at that location. And listen, this is in a cold
(31:18):
time of the year, you know when and even when
you see the images from this crime scene, the cops
are outdoors, they're wearing jackets, the grass is all brown,
and here she is out here, exposed to the elements.
She's essentially nude, laying out there and again, laying out
there for the entire world to see. Dave.
Speaker 2 (31:39):
You know, Joe, when you mentioned that there were two
primary spots where the blood had had gathered, I guess
or had you know they could tell? And yeah, cool,
thank you. Uh, that was just one of the tips
of what they found at the crime scene. But the bottle,
the bottle of absence that was left next to the
(32:00):
body was it was placed on top of the cell phone,
and in my mind's eye, I was trying to think,
is there any way possible that I misread this and
that the bottle was laying near the phone, And because
if it's near the phone, you can't say anybody put
it there. You could have fallen. But to say that
the bottle was sitting on top of the cracked phone,
(32:24):
police say that Jeff West they were having an argument
over her online photos and videos and got mad and
Jeff West threw the phone out the door and that's
what caused it to crack. And then later on she
the defense, she fell and hit her head, and I
guess as she fell, the bottle of absence ended up
(32:47):
sitting on top of the phone. Yeah, it makes no sense. Hey,
I got to tell you something, man. You know what
that bottle reminds me of relative to that phone. It
actually reminds me of an exclamation wow. Where you've got
this cracked phone and you've got the base of the
bottle sitting on top of the phone. It's almost like
(33:09):
they're saying, Okay, here you go, you your phone and
this bottle that you know, we all believe, I believe,
and certainly the coroner believed, was weaponized. And I know
that term is used a lot, but let me just
kind of break this down to you because it's fascinating.
(33:29):
First off, Cat West had sustained what appears to have
been a single blow to the head, and you think, well,
how in the world could that actually kill somebody. Well,
she had a laceration. And just so that we can
review and go back to this and understand that lacerations
are not cuts. They lacerations arise from blunt force trauma.
(33:53):
And you know, uh, the lacerations he's kind of tearing
because what it is because when you applied direct pressure
to the skin with an object, the skin doesn't cut,
it tears, and so you're going to have these kind
of fiber strings that hang on to either side, and
(34:15):
that's called tissue bridging. It's one of the things that
we look for at autopsy to show the kind of stringy,
connective tissue that's still holding both. If it was a
blade that created an injury, you'd have these real what
they refer to as really neat margins where it's kind
of cut, you.
Speaker 1 (34:32):
Know, where you've got a mild blade. But in this
particular case, this bottle was actually utilized to strike her
with And I would suggest that everybody because interestingly enough,
you remember those photos from that night they took a
picture they being Jeff and Kat of the bottle, and
(34:58):
there's a vape sitting there too. In the bottle. It's
it's actually lucid l u C I d absent and
I urge everybody. The bottle itself is green. There's a
picture of it up there that's looks like it's off
of their countertop, their island, you know, in their kitchen.
This is very, very thick class I was.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
Going to say, how is it possible that it could
be used to deal a fatal blow to her head
and still be the bottle without shatting easily?
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Because these bottles when you go down the neck from
the neck of the bottle and you get down to
the base, these things many times are very robust and
the glass is very thick, and yeah, they can. It's
not like an old Western movie where they've got breakaway
bottles are real thin and you hear glass shatter. That
doesn't happen.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
What did the bottle show investigators? Joe did there? Was
there anything on the bottle?
Speaker 1 (35:50):
Yeah? Yeah, And that's that's that's really kind of the
cool aspect of this because a tip of the cap
to the corner, the local corner, because she's trying to
she's trying to measure in her mind, how is it
that this bottle was actually used to assault cat West?
(36:11):
And her conclusion was this, and you gotta you're going
to have to visualize here just for a second. When
they when they lifted latent prints off of this bottle,
they found both cat West prints and Jeff West prints
on the bottle, and you would get the fingerprints itself
(36:31):
that you could probably come up with a palm print
because glass is what we refer to as a non
porous surface. So when you leave behind a latent print,
that means unseen, those fatty lipids on the surface of
your skin leave this image. It's a negative image of
your friction ridges on your hand on the surface of
(36:53):
the bottle. And as the corner is trying to figure
out the dynamics of this one thing that that she
and the Crime Seen people came up with and the
detectives was that just everybody at home right now, imagine
that you've got a liquor bottle or a wine bottle
in front of you. Rotate your hand so that your
(37:15):
thumb is in the downward position, and you grab the
neck of the bottle. All right, The bottle itself at
that point can become a bludgeon. And so when you
rotate your hand back up the barrel of the bottle
and the bottom of the bottle becomes this object that
you can beat somebody with. And isn't it interesting that
(37:36):
when they actually raise the Prince Dave on the neck
of this bottle, you can clearly see that Jeff West
hand is there in that position. Now. I don't know
about you, but when I pour something from a bottle,
I don't take it and invert my hand and then
(37:57):
twist it around because you can't control the volume of
liquid that's coming out of the bottle. So that leads
you to this conclusion. Why in the world would he
hold that bottle that way? Well, I guess you could say,
you know, he took it out of the story, he
grabbed it that way. It's an unusual way of holding it,
and defense can argue that. But I think that the
reason that he was convicted in this particular case, and
(38:21):
Jeff West was in fact convicted in this case, was
this demonstration of how this bottle was used, how his
hand was positioned, and certainly this strike to cat West
heead that ended her life with their industry. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan, and this is bodied eyes,
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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