October 12, 2023 • 34 mins
Struck on the head with an iron skillet and stabbed multiple times, Brenda Powell’s life comes to a shocking and tragic end at the hands of her daughter.
Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack delve into the perplexing aspects of this chilling homicide that has captivated public interest. They explore the unique role an 'ear witness' plays in the investigation and scrutinize the difficult transition Sydney experienced from high school to college, as well as the financial and emotional challenges involved.
Armed with Morgan's forensic expertise and Mack's keen investigative insights, the duo crafts an episode filled with emotional depth, compelling narrative, and sharp analysis. As they walk you through key moments, witness testimonies, and the complicated criminal landscape, they raise important questions about family dynamics, criminal psychology, and the advancements in forensic science.
Time-coded Highlights:
00:00:20—Joe Scott Morgan sets the tone by reflecting on the impact of sounds and memories on a murder investigation. He introduces Brenda Powell's brutal homicide case.
02:20:00—Dave Mack shares a unique description related to the case.
04:00:00—The emotional toll of working in oncology is illuminated.
05:20:00—The concept of an earwitness is introduced, offering an innovative twist to the narrative.
06:40:00—Sydney Powell's academic struggles are revealed.
07:35:00—Joe Scott explores the emotional and financial challenges of transitioning from high school to college.
09:23:00—The boiling point leading to violent crimes is dissected.
10:00:00—A critical phone call from Brenda to her university is detailed, becoming a key moment in the investigation.
12:20:00—The chilling moment when Brenda Powell is struck on the head by an iron skillet.
15:40:00—Morgan reflects on the cultural portrayal of frying pans as weapons compared to their real-world lethal potential.
23:05:00—The absence of premeditation in the crime is suggested, considering the presence of ‘ear witnesses’.
27:16:00—The immediate reaction of university administrators on the phone during the attack and their subsequent 911 calls are narrated.
34:00:00—Concluding the episode, Joe Scott Morgan explains that the multitude of injuries led to Brenda Powell's death.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. There are many things
in my life where I can reflect back and I
remember the first time I heard them. I remember the
first time I heard my child laugh in that giggle
(00:33):
that kind of bubbles up in them. I remember the
first time my wife told me that she loved me.
Those sounds, those remembrances that you have that are precious
and you kind of lock them away and you can
reflect back to them years in my case, decades now,
and it's something that's certainly precious. And when you think
about investigations, we rely heavily on Eyewooden's statements. We talk
(00:57):
about it all the time. You talk about it in
the New talk about in the courts. I talk about
it to my students that I teach at Jacksonville State.
But there's a different kind of witness that you don't
pardon the pun, hear much about. And those are ear witnesses. Today,
we're going to discuss a case that actually begins with
an ear witness. Today we're going to chat about the
(01:21):
brutal homicide of Brenda Powell. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is Body Backs. Dave, do you remember precious sounds.
Do you remember those things in your life that you
can reflect upon, Just kind of close your eyes and
for a moment you kind of drift back and you
(01:42):
can in dwell that moment because it's this thing that
it just really anchors in your soul for whatever reason,
part of who we are as humans. And they're joyful.
Of course, there's a lot of bad things we hear too, right.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
As you were talking about those joyful noises that children
in particular. You know, we all remember our kids, and
we have memories, we picture them, but we also we
hear them. It's one of the things that does leave
us sometimes when a loved one passes is the sound
of their voice. Why recordings are so helpful having that
recording of a loved one's voice. But in this particular
(02:17):
case with Sidney Powell, Joseph Scott Morgan, there was a
description given in this case that I had actually never
heard before, and it was describing something that you and
I and everybody else have We've talked about and probably
have said it. If you've ever played a game and
you got out of breath or whatever you said, I
had the win knocked out of me. That actually comes
(02:38):
into play today. And the shocking part of it, Joe
is I'd never actually thought about it until we were
researching this case and that phrase actually came out. It's
a huge part of what we're going to be talking
about today with regard to Sidney Powell at the time
nineteen years old college student and her fifty year old
(03:01):
mother who was an angel. When you talk about trying
to find about a person and you think, even when
they're the victim, maybe they have some bad stuff in
their life, this is a person that when you look
up her background and people talk about her, nobody says
anything bad. Brenda Powell worked as a child life specialist
(03:22):
in the Hematology on Cology unit at Akron Children's Hospital
for twenty eight years. She worked with children with cancer.
That's a special person. Joe Scott Morgan.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Yeah, it truly is, Dave. There are parents, there are
stories out there about her. You know, once her case
kind of bubbled up in the media and people began
to make comment about it. And one of the things
that really strikes a chord is the fact that there
were parents who had remembrances of her. One in particular
comes to mind where the parents said she was there
(03:57):
at the last moment, my child took that last breath
and kind of drifted off. And you know, think about
people that work in oncology in particular, if you've never
been around an oncology unit or those individuals that occupy
this space, it takes a special breed of person. You know.
They say that about medical legal death investigation and people
(04:18):
that work in the emme's office and corners offices. But
with on ecology, your goal is a therapeutic environment. You're
hoping for great outcomes. But if you're a professional work
in that environment, you have to understand what the realities
are and sometimes the families are not prepared for that.
You have to shoulder that burden many times, I think
as a worker in that environment, and because you see
(04:39):
it played out in front of you all the time. Right,
you have patients that succeed with their treatment, and you
have others that succumb to these horrible diseases, and the
families are not fully aware that that might happen. But
Brenda Powell was. She was a true caregiver in that
sense that she would take time to be with these
families and be with these patients as well.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
And That's why as we were putting this together and
talking about her, she was that person. She was that
special person. You mentioned the sounds hearing things, and today
we're actually going to be talking about what an ear
witness is because one of the most powerful parts of
the testimony of what actually happened to Brenda Powell was
(05:25):
not actually seen, It was heard by people on the phone,
and that ear witness was able to describe something that
we've all used that getting the wind knocked out of you,
and the description she gives on the stand was just remarkable.
Never have I heard that before. But to get down
to the nitty gritty here, Joe. As a professor in college,
(05:49):
I imagine you've had a student or two who did
not keep up with their academics the way they needed to.
They're actually when you apply to college, people don't realize
that there's more than just board scores that go into
determining whether or not a student will be successful academically.
But they have a pretty good idea based on the
grades they got in high school and the board scores
(06:12):
they did get, whether it's the SAT or the ACT, whatever,
they have a way of determining this person. They're going
to be borderline successful. That's a tough thing to choose,
because we all want our children to be brilliant college
graduates and all that. Not everybody's a college student capable.
And that's what happened to Sidney Powell. When she got
to school. She pretty much was on academic probation almost
(06:34):
from her first semester, actually what I think it was
from her first semester, from her first weeks in college,
Sidney Powell was not academically keeping up. She hid this
information from her parents, and in doing so, the parents
did not know how bad things were for her academically,
to the point where as a matter of fact, her
dad is trying to look up information through the portal
(06:58):
online to find out when his next payment is due
for the school and he can't get in. He's like,
it's not letting me in, said, what's going on? And
she goes, AHw it's just a mess up. I'll take
care of it. Don't worry about it, dad, And that
was the first inkling, Wait a minute, I can't log
into your portal. I can't find out what I owe.
Sidney covered for a while, but not long enough. She
actually had been not just academic Lisas put on suspension.
(07:22):
She actually had been booted g had been kicked out
because of academics, so she was not a student anymore,
and she hadn't told her parents that.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Now.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
I don't know about you, Joe, but that's going to
be a pretty bad conversation.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. It's one thing if your
child is failing, because people fail, and they fail in
the collegiate environment. And you know when kids are at
home and the parent is standing over the shoulder, or
you have those parents that are the first people that
are going to run down to the central office or
the principal's office and complain about something that disappears at
(07:57):
the university level that no longer exists. So then it
becomes totally the responsibility of the student to attend to
what has to be attended to. Some people are prepared
and others are not. And just hey, look, just because
you do well on a test does not I don't
think that it's a perfect indicator of how you're going
(08:18):
to do once you get within that environment academically, because
all the social stuff comes into play there. Because you
can be you know, you can be an outstanding student.
I think in a very controlled environment maybe at high school,
but once you walk through through those doors at a university,
if you're not prepared emotionally, you can train wreck anything
(08:40):
that's on the horizon for you. And so, yeah, people
want answers. And this is no community college she's going to.
This is Mount Union and Mount Union is a private college.
And so even if you're aided through scholarship money and anything,
you're still going to come out of pocket for things.
And that was the case with the father here. He
wants to know where his money's going and why can't
(09:02):
he get access to it, why can't he make payments,
you know, and what's going on? And for a time
you can kind of patch it up if you're a student. Ah,
you know, they're always having I don't know, computer problems
or whatever it's on them. But sooner or later you're
going to try to figure things out and it gets
to a boiling point and you have this happen with
any kind of violent crime. There will be a boiling
(09:25):
point that occurs in some type of interpersonal relationship where
too much stuff has gone on unattended to, or the
perception of somebody where all of a sudden, the world
the environment just kind of explodes and you have these
really bad outcomes. And that's certainly the case here with Powell.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Very bad outcome. Yeah, I think you're understating it, just
a tad Joe.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
It's I mildly understated that. Yes, I have to say,
and yeah, And it's many times they're reactive events. In
this case, I think this is an indication when you
begin to take into account everything that happened in this event,
it was reactive. And that's why this phone call that
(10:11):
was made by Brenda Powell to the registrar's office, perhaps
to the university, to try to get information. That's why
this phone call plays into this case so critically.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
And it was actually kind of a conference called that.
You had the dean of students, you had the registrar,
you had everybody involved. They're all on the phone because
the Poles want answers what's going on. They've been told
something by Sydney that they now are finding out might
not be exactly true. And that's when and this is
the part that I'm kind of I'm still trying to
(10:45):
wrap my hands around this. Sydney Powell somehow had convinced
herself that she could walk on eggshells and get away
with this. But she had to know her parents were
going to find out at some point in time. Mom
and dad are going to find out, and I don't
have an answer. And that's where the powells. They're no idiots,
you know, her mom and dad are not stupid. And
when they when mom gets on the phone with the school,
(11:07):
they're telling her, well, your daughter's not enrolled anymore. That's
why you can't get in through the portal. She's not
actually a student here anymore. She was suspended and when
her grades didn't improve, we had to kick her out.
And Sidney knows what's going on. She knows Mom is
on the phone with the school. She knows her mom
is finding out. Now the school people, they're on the
(11:29):
phone hearing what happens, and that is they hear a
loud thud, a loud thud, and then screaming or screaming
an alloud thud. Because of what is taking place, there's
a little confusion. Did I hear the scream? Where the
thud or the thud or the scream? But it was
a bunch of both. And that's where our story begins,
(11:51):
is with the registrar and Dean of students at Mount
Union on the phone with Brenda Powell and them here
sounds they haven't heard before.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Yeah, it's one thing for me in a collegiate environment
as college professor, but as former death investigator, to be
faced with this. But can you imagine you live in
this We call it the ivy covered walls these in
this academic environment because let's face it, it's a bubble.
This is the last thing you expect to hear. But
what they were hearing, Dave, was the sound of an
(12:27):
iron skillet striking the head of Brenda Powell, and it
was at that moment in time she began to die
at the hands of her daughter. There are organized and
(12:57):
disorganized crimes. We know that for a This is something
that has been studied over and over again when it
comes to criminal behavior, particularly as it applause to homicides.
And part of disorganization is that you show up and
you really don't have a plan. It's more of a
reaction as opposed to being proactive about something. And it's
(13:23):
a horrible thing to say, but you have planners. You
have people that are going to perpetrate crimes where they
lay everything out before them, including the tools, the horrible
tools they are going to utilize. But Dave, in this
particular case, it would seem that Sidney Powell used what
was at her disposal, and it includes both a rusty
frying pan and also a steak knife.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Dave kind of tells you where they were standing. We
used to have a phone like hanging in the kitchen
or whatever, and I'm wondering if they were on that
kind of a house phone or not because of the
fact of the frying pan and the knife. Now dealing
with like a heavy duty frying pan.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, no, I've seen images of it and it was
presented and there's actually oxidation.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
On it, like an iron skillet.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Yeah, it is an iron skillet, and you can see
rust that has built up on it. And you can't
judge the cleanliness of a pan by that, because cast
iron skillets in particular will rust, particularly if you don't
use them. And the thing about it is, I'll give
you for an instance, my wife and I both have
cast iron pans in our kitchen. And guess what the
(14:30):
origin of those pans were, Dave. They actually came down
from our grandmother's I have one from my grandmother, My
wife has one from her grandmother. That doesn't necessarily mean
that we use them, but we hold on to these
things because there's something from our past and they're kind
of buried back there, and after a period of time
they'll begin to oxidize. And in this particular case, you
can actually see some of the rust within the interior
(14:53):
of the pan itself, so it gives you an idea
that this is something that's been possessed. It's in that
kitchen and it belongs to this family. It's not like
someone went out and purchased this for this specific attack.
It's something It is a weapon of opportunity, and we
see this played out all the time, Dave.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
A frying pan, like a teflon pan, is just one
step above ten boil in a lot of cases, pretty lightweight,
but an iron skillet, they're heavy. There's something you better
be prepared to hold on to. And as a weapon,
I'm thinking it's pretty good in terms of it's because
of its size and it's not going to bend. It's
going to attack.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
No, it's not. And you have to be a rather
robust person in order to wield this thing. I don't know,
it's kind of interesting that over the years, frying pans
have been portrayed as something that's utilized in order to
attack someone with. It's almost a comical kind of turn.
I even think that in the original Raiders of the
Lost Arc movie, the young lady in there actually hit
(15:50):
someone with a frying pan, and it's almost a comic turn.
But people don't understand how heavy these things are. That
goes to another point here, and to prosecute Sidney Powell.
During her trial, the prosecution actually brought this out the
fact that she transitioned weapons. And when we hear transitioning
of weapons, that's something most of the time that you
(16:11):
think about with like military operators. You know, I transitioned
from my M four carbing rifle to my side arm. Well,
in this particular case, you have Sidney Powell who transitions
from an iron skillet to actually a stake knife dave
to further her attack against her mother, Brenda. Wow.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Now to go back on this, I was pulling up
the actual testimony from Michelle Gaffney. She actually testified that
she said talking about the phone call that they were
on the phone with Brenda, and she said Dean Fraser
was speaking and simply said Brenda. This is Dean Fraser.
I'm sitting here with Michelle Gaffney, our associated in his students.
We're returning your call, and then she says, that's about
(16:53):
as far as we got. She said, it was at
that moment when we're returning your call, and she said, quote,
there was a very large, loud thud, sound like a
pounding or a thud, accompanying by a pretty loud scream.
The scream might have actually been first and then the thud,
as I think about it, there was sort of an explosion.
(17:15):
Another sound that I heard about that same time or
right after was sort of like an explosion of air.
The air was knocked out of somebody. Now we've heard
the phrase I had the wind knocked out of me,
something along those lines. But she said another sound that
I heard about the same time or right after that
(17:36):
was sort of like an explosion of air was knocked
out of somebody. Joe, what would that sound like to
have the air knocked out and what would the impact
be on the victim who has the wind knocked out
of them?
Speaker 1 (17:52):
It's hard to know. And I found that testimony quite
interesting because it's hard to know if what they were
hearing was almost a reactive gasp to being struck, because
even though an individual is being bludgeoned with something in
this case, this skillet, even though they're being bludgeoned with
something like this, a heavy object, it doesn't necessarily mean
(18:14):
they are literally having you know, they're being struck in
their core and the wind is being knocked out. You know,
a lot of us have been fallen to the ground
or been hit playing some kind of sport and you
have your wind literally knocked out and you kind of
exhale or you're trying to gasp for breath. If an
individual were to be struck, for instance, in the back
(18:35):
of the head, that could actually disrupt their ability to
breathe for a moment where it's almost you know, of
course you would hear potentially, depend upon the quality of
the call, you would actually hear a thud preceding that
kind of gasp for air. It would be something that
would be partly shock. It would be a physiological reaction
(18:57):
to it. But here's the thing. Even with the initial strike,
you're not going to be able to escape the fact
that this individual would not have gone down immediately. Unfortunately,
I think many people that watch any number of television
shows from over the years. It's weird. An actor will
take a heavy object and will strike somebody in the
(19:18):
head and immediately that person collapses. That doesn't happen. If
it does happen, the attacker would have to strike the
person in the precise location to render them unconscious immediately.
It doesn't happen like this. This again, is a randomized attack.
And you've got a young lady wielding an iron skillet
(19:41):
attacking her mother. Now, even though this thing is heavy,
it's not going to that first blow is not going
to First off, it's not going to kill her, and secondly,
it's less likely that it is going to create unconscious state.
At that point in time, she's going to be aware
that she is a attacked. And the reason I know
(20:01):
this is that when an assessment was done on Sidney
Powell following this, the fact is she had injuries on
her that would be consistent with trying to fend off
an attack by someone else. So what that means is
there's a probability that Brenda may have attempted to fight
(20:25):
back as her daughter is attacking her, not just with
the skillet, but also this knife that comes into play
as well.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
What does that mean to you investigating a depth when
somebody actually changes their equipment, they change their tools.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
I think that's a fantastic point. We talked about transitioning
of weapons a moment ago. I think the weight of
something like an iron skillet, if you've never held one
and you're curious about it, next time you go to
the store, particularly if you go to a place that
has camping equipment, they actually sell cast iron there where
you can go pick just pick one of these things
up and feel and you can get the weight of
(21:01):
it in your hand and imagine attempting to swing this
thing over and over again. Now, when you do that,
you'll see that it is cumbersome because it's not made
for this purpose. It's different if you're wielding something like
a baseball bat. It's got to handle. It's got the
barrel of the bat. That's what it's referred to. And
I know you know that because you're a baseball player day.
(21:22):
But it's made for clubbing right with a frying pan
an iron skillet, if you will. It's got a short handle.
You can't leverage the thing really well, and then it's
unwieldy because you have the pan portion of it that's
deep and cast iron is very very heavy, and it's
hard to balance. And if you're diminutive in any way,
(21:44):
you don't have good upper body strength. And Sidney Powell
does not look like she's the fittest of the fit here.
After maybe two or three blows, I would think you
would begin to weaken greatly. Adrenaline will only carry you
so far. And trust me, there's adrenaline at work here.
So if you go from this heavy blunt object, you're
(22:06):
looking around, well, what's the most convenient thing that I
can do? And it's registering in your mind as the attacker,
what has the highest probability of lethality and the default position,
particularly in this case Dave, is a knife. There's a
(22:43):
theme that runs through these events where you have people
that are injured multiple times. It goes to things like
facial disfiguration. You're not just savagely attacking them for the
purpose of killing them, but you're going to the point
where you're trying to maim them to disfigure them. Because
there's so much anger that's involved in this. This goes
(23:05):
to the idea that this event, this homicide, was not
a planned event, who in their right mind and I
got to be real careful about using that term because
that comes into play in the trial. But who in
the right mind would sit there and say, Okay, I
think it's a good idea to have witnesses, though they
be ear witnesses to this event of me attacking my mother.
(23:29):
But on the flip side, this goes to kind of
an idea of thinking beyond whatever kind of psychopathology that
you might be dealing with. I got to make this
look like something else, so we're not just talking about
this bludgeoning. And then we've got multiple sharp force injuries.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
She actually stabs your mom what thirty times in the
neck region. I'm going to say that because thirty times
in the neck seems to be a bit of overkill.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Thirty stab winds approximately because it's real hard, and we
can get into the nature of those injuries. But now
you've got Sidney Powell who goes over and didn't she
knock in a window, Dave in order to make it
look like I don't know, what was she trying to
make it look like, well.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
You know what, we mentioned that on the phone, you
have the administration from Mount Union. They're on the phone
still and after Sidney has used the frying pan and
beat her mother head and everything else and then stabs her. Well,
they're still on the phone, and Sydney actually picks up
the phone and she hears one of the saying Brenda,
(24:31):
and Sydney actually answers, yes, this is Brenda. And the
administrator he knows it's not her. He knows it's Sydney.
She sounds different than her mother, she's nineteen. And he said, Sidney,
I know this is you. I know this is not Brenda.
And that's when Sydney hung up the phone. They called
the police, they being the Mountain Union University. They called
(24:51):
nine one one and say, hey man, something bad's going on.
We were on the phone herd a fight break out.
We hear screaming, we hear thudding, and that's when Sydney
she hangs up the phone. She starts thinking what do
I do now? Well, her first thought is stage it
to look like a home invasion, and so she breaks
the glass in a window to try to make it
look like somebody had come inside that house and grabbed
(25:15):
a frying pan and a knife and just started doing damage. Now,
Sidney did have a couple of wounds on her that
required treatment. Now I don't know what type of wounds
they were, but I know that usually when there's a
knife being used by somebody, oftentimes they cut themselves their
hands slips from the blood. So Sidney did have some wounds,
but she did try to stage the scene as if
(25:37):
there had been a home invasion.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Yeah, here's something that's kind of fascinating about this, going
back to these college administrators that are on the phone.
They're in Alliance, Ohio. The pals didn't live in Alliance, Ohio.
They lived in Summit County, Ohio. And so the fact
that and this is always fascinating because I've been involved
in a couple of cases like this where people have
(26:00):
been on the phone and an event has occurred and
they're like a distance away from the people that were
on the phone. You have to get off the phone
and then call another jurisdiction or call You're nine one
one and say, look, we were just talking to this
mom and her daughter, and we think that something bad
has happened. Can you imagine being on the other end
(26:22):
of that line as these administrators and they're thinking, what
did we just hear? What happened, and they obviously think
that it's something horrible because now they're calling nine to
one one to send somebody out there. And when you know,
when the police arrived out there at the scene, it's
a horror show. You know, when they show up. You
got broken glass, You've got this young person, this woman,
(26:47):
Sidney Powell, who's saying that someone actually came into the
house and attacked her mother. Now, why in the world,
in the family's neighborhood would some random person knock out
this glass an attempt to break in and then all
of a sudden attack the mother. You know, we've already
established that the mother is like she's regarded by many
(27:08):
as like an angel on earth, the way she's treated
people over the years in the hospital. Who could have
any kind of animosity toward this woman.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
That's the shocking thing is that a neighbor actually saw
Sydney come running out of the house and in the
front yard. It was just as crazy because you Brenda
is in the house and Sydney, in her whatever state
of mind, in trying to make it look like there
had been a home invasion, she goes out in the
front yard and as this happens, a neighbor hears sirens,
(27:38):
they hear all the sirens showing up and everything else.
So Sydney did not have an incredibly long period of
time to stage this as a scene that would look
like it was a home invasion. And again you're talking
about daytime neighbors are home. In her mind's actually staging
it to look like a Robert just decided to pick
(27:58):
their house and break in and attack for no reason,
you know, this angel on earth. And that's that was
her thought process. Apparently, Yeah, and she understands. And here's
the thing. This goes to one of the things that
you try to understand relative to the law and how
these cases are evaluated. And certainly I think that insanity
(28:21):
came in as a potential defense for Sydney Powell, or
it was hinted at that she's got multiple psychological issues
that she's having to deal with. And what you try
to determine is the idea of menace ray, which means
guilty mind, and it comes from the Latin minice ray.
(28:42):
And you're, you know, the person, they're trying to assess
them as to whether or not with a guilty mind
that they have an awareness of guilt and then you
have to have what's referred to as the actess ray
and the actus ray is the guilty act. And so
when you have both of these and I think I've
spoken of this before and we'll speak it again, if
you have both of those elements together, you get what's
(29:04):
referred to as concurrence. So both of those things come together.
Did she have a guilty mind? Was she aware that
this was wrong? Well, one of the things if you're
going about staging something, when we get there as forensics people,
we can try to understand, Well, first off, what was
the location of the broken glass?
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Is it the door? What is it consistent with someone
trying to knock out, say a side panel of glass
and stick their hand through it and try to open
the lock, manipulate the locked again in or is it
adjacent to a locked window and you're trying to get
access to the locking mechanism of the window so you
can open it and crawl in. And this is very
broad terms. If you break the window, is it in
(29:44):
a location let's say that it's at the top of
the window. Well, why in the world would someone break
the top of the window and not break the window
in order to facilitate getting in. You know, you can
knock glass out of any but it doesn't mean it's
not going to point to with somebody that has organized
thought and they're thinking, well, we're trying to get into
(30:05):
this place in order to steal or harm whoever's in there.
You just got broken glass, man, And that's one of
the things we're going to look at. And we're also
going to look at the direction of the glass. Was
a glass broken from the inside and it's blown out,
or is it broken from the outside and blown in.
We look at the edges of the glass to see
if it's got inter internal beveling, for instance. We're going
(30:27):
to check it to see if this area would facilitate
a person being able to get into that. And then
if we have a suspect in any way that we
think may have done something, we're going to look for
glass fragments on their clothing, because clothing, when it comes
to broken glass, is something that the individual could just
be covered with any kind of glass particles or anything
(30:49):
like that that just doesn't exist here in this particular case.
So she was actually charged with tampering with evidence, and
I found that very very interesting relative to the prosecution's
case against Sidney Powell, because that goes to this idea
of acts ray our minicerae, where you have not only
(31:09):
the guilty act, but you have the guilty mind. Here, Dave, I.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Got to ask you about back to the stab wounds
of the neck and the blunt forced from the frying pan,
how do you determine what was the cause of death
when you've got a frying pan used for beating and
a knife. Can you separate the two and say it
was this or that or is it a combination of both?
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Well, in this particular case, when the medical examiner actually
testified at the trial, what they came up with in
this particular trial was that the cause of death was
a combination of both. And this is why when the
medical examiner did their assessment of this blunt force trauma
that she would have sustained, they're going to try to see,
(31:50):
first off, anatomically, where were these strikes located, And you
can assess that externally because with a blunt force strike,
you're going to see lacerations, and with lacerations you have
was referred to as tissue bridging, and they're nasty and
they're jagged, and that's interesting because you're also dealing with
stab wounds here too, Dave. So stab wounds might look
(32:11):
like a laceration, but they're not because there won't be
tissue bridging with stab wound, and that means the edges
will be clean because you've got this knife that's being
inserted into the tissue. With blunt force trauma, you're literally
ripping the skin every time that skillet strikes. If it's
if the area is struck hard enough, that laceration occurs
(32:32):
from that blunt force trauma to literally tear the skin.
That's why they look so jagged, and you have to
assess externally. You know, okay, well, is this a stab
wound or is this a laceration. That's why we're very
specific when we begin to talk about these things in forensics.
Then when you get internally, because it's not just an
external examination and it was certainly not in the case
(32:53):
of Brenda, you have to understand what anatomical structures were impacted.
First off, within the brain, because she's striking the outside
of the skull. Here, you've got the laceration. You're going
to have a big focal area of hemorrhage on the outside.
More than likely overlying the external table of skull. But
then when you get into the inside and you look
(33:14):
at the brain, there'll be big focal areas of hemorrhage
there and that creates pressure on the brain and depended
upon where she was struck on the brain, that can
really compromise her ability to breathe and respire everything. And
then you combine that with the assessment that's done on
these multiple stab wounds on the neck, and because there
are so many, it's hard to try to understand how
(33:37):
many there actually were. And I know that you and
I have spoken of this before, Dave. Where you have
such overkill that's going on, you will have these wounds
that are communicating with one another, so you can have
a stab wound on top of a stab wound, and
so we can't really assess the order that these actually
(33:57):
came in. We can only enumerate them. And then it's
going to be totality of the injuries that's going to
lead to her death, and it certainly was in the
case of Brenda Powell. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this
is bodybacks
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. There are many things
in my life where I can reflect back and I
remember the first time I heard them. I remember the
first time I heard my child laugh in that giggle
(00:33):
that kind of bubbles up in them. I remember the
first time my wife told me that she loved me.
Those sounds, those remembrances that you have that are precious
and you kind of lock them away and you can
reflect back to them years in my case, decades now,
and it's something that's certainly precious. And when you think
about investigations, we rely heavily on Eyewooden's statements. We talk
(00:57):
about it all the time. You talk about it in
the New talk about in the courts. I talk about
it to my students that I teach at Jacksonville State.
But there's a different kind of witness that you don't
pardon the pun, hear much about. And those are ear witnesses. Today,
we're going to discuss a case that actually begins with
an ear witness. Today we're going to chat about the
(01:21):
brutal homicide of Brenda Powell. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and
this is Body Backs. Dave, do you remember precious sounds.
Do you remember those things in your life that you
can reflect upon, Just kind of close your eyes and
for a moment you kind of drift back and you
(01:42):
can in dwell that moment because it's this thing that
it just really anchors in your soul for whatever reason,
part of who we are as humans. And they're joyful.
Of course, there's a lot of bad things we hear too, right.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
As you were talking about those joyful noises that children
in particular. You know, we all remember our kids, and
we have memories, we picture them, but we also we
hear them. It's one of the things that does leave
us sometimes when a loved one passes is the sound
of their voice. Why recordings are so helpful having that
recording of a loved one's voice. But in this particular
(02:17):
case with Sidney Powell, Joseph Scott Morgan, there was a
description given in this case that I had actually never
heard before, and it was describing something that you and
I and everybody else have We've talked about and probably
have said it. If you've ever played a game and
you got out of breath or whatever you said, I
had the win knocked out of me. That actually comes
(02:38):
into play today. And the shocking part of it, Joe
is I'd never actually thought about it until we were
researching this case and that phrase actually came out. It's
a huge part of what we're going to be talking
about today with regard to Sidney Powell at the time
nineteen years old college student and her fifty year old
(03:01):
mother who was an angel. When you talk about trying
to find about a person and you think, even when
they're the victim, maybe they have some bad stuff in
their life, this is a person that when you look
up her background and people talk about her, nobody says
anything bad. Brenda Powell worked as a child life specialist
(03:22):
in the Hematology on Cology unit at Akron Children's Hospital
for twenty eight years. She worked with children with cancer.
That's a special person. Joe Scott Morgan.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Yeah, it truly is, Dave. There are parents, there are
stories out there about her. You know, once her case
kind of bubbled up in the media and people began
to make comment about it. And one of the things
that really strikes a chord is the fact that there
were parents who had remembrances of her. One in particular
comes to mind where the parents said she was there
(03:57):
at the last moment, my child took that last breath
and kind of drifted off. And you know, think about
people that work in oncology in particular, if you've never
been around an oncology unit or those individuals that occupy
this space, it takes a special breed of person. You know.
They say that about medical legal death investigation and people
(04:18):
that work in the emme's office and corners offices. But
with on ecology, your goal is a therapeutic environment. You're
hoping for great outcomes. But if you're a professional work
in that environment, you have to understand what the realities
are and sometimes the families are not prepared for that.
You have to shoulder that burden many times, I think
as a worker in that environment, and because you see
(04:39):
it played out in front of you all the time. Right,
you have patients that succeed with their treatment, and you
have others that succumb to these horrible diseases, and the
families are not fully aware that that might happen. But
Brenda Powell was. She was a true caregiver in that
sense that she would take time to be with these
families and be with these patients as well.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
And That's why as we were putting this together and
talking about her, she was that person. She was that
special person. You mentioned the sounds hearing things, and today
we're actually going to be talking about what an ear
witness is because one of the most powerful parts of
the testimony of what actually happened to Brenda Powell was
(05:25):
not actually seen, It was heard by people on the phone,
and that ear witness was able to describe something that
we've all used that getting the wind knocked out of you,
and the description she gives on the stand was just remarkable.
Never have I heard that before. But to get down
to the nitty gritty here, Joe. As a professor in college,
(05:49):
I imagine you've had a student or two who did
not keep up with their academics the way they needed to.
They're actually when you apply to college, people don't realize
that there's more than just board scores that go into
determining whether or not a student will be successful academically.
But they have a pretty good idea based on the
grades they got in high school and the board scores
(06:12):
they did get, whether it's the SAT or the ACT, whatever,
they have a way of determining this person. They're going
to be borderline successful. That's a tough thing to choose,
because we all want our children to be brilliant college
graduates and all that. Not everybody's a college student capable.
And that's what happened to Sidney Powell. When she got
to school. She pretty much was on academic probation almost
(06:34):
from her first semester, actually what I think it was
from her first semester, from her first weeks in college,
Sidney Powell was not academically keeping up. She hid this
information from her parents, and in doing so, the parents
did not know how bad things were for her academically,
to the point where as a matter of fact, her
dad is trying to look up information through the portal
(06:58):
online to find out when his next payment is due
for the school and he can't get in. He's like,
it's not letting me in, said, what's going on? And
she goes, AHw it's just a mess up. I'll take
care of it. Don't worry about it, dad, And that
was the first inkling, Wait a minute, I can't log
into your portal. I can't find out what I owe.
Sidney covered for a while, but not long enough. She
actually had been not just academic Lisas put on suspension.
(07:22):
She actually had been booted g had been kicked out
because of academics, so she was not a student anymore,
and she hadn't told her parents that.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
Now.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
I don't know about you, Joe, but that's going to
be a pretty bad conversation.
Speaker 1 (07:35):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. It's one thing if your
child is failing, because people fail, and they fail in
the collegiate environment. And you know when kids are at
home and the parent is standing over the shoulder, or
you have those parents that are the first people that
are going to run down to the central office or
the principal's office and complain about something that disappears at
(07:57):
the university level that no longer exists. So then it
becomes totally the responsibility of the student to attend to
what has to be attended to. Some people are prepared
and others are not. And just hey, look, just because
you do well on a test does not I don't
think that it's a perfect indicator of how you're going
(08:18):
to do once you get within that environment academically, because
all the social stuff comes into play there. Because you
can be you know, you can be an outstanding student.
I think in a very controlled environment maybe at high school,
but once you walk through through those doors at a university,
if you're not prepared emotionally, you can train wreck anything
(08:40):
that's on the horizon for you. And so, yeah, people
want answers. And this is no community college she's going to.
This is Mount Union and Mount Union is a private college.
And so even if you're aided through scholarship money and anything,
you're still going to come out of pocket for things.
And that was the case with the father here. He
wants to know where his money's going and why can't
(09:02):
he get access to it, why can't he make payments,
you know, and what's going on? And for a time
you can kind of patch it up if you're a student. Ah,
you know, they're always having I don't know, computer problems
or whatever it's on them. But sooner or later you're
going to try to figure things out and it gets
to a boiling point and you have this happen with
any kind of violent crime. There will be a boiling
(09:25):
point that occurs in some type of interpersonal relationship where
too much stuff has gone on unattended to, or the
perception of somebody where all of a sudden, the world
the environment just kind of explodes and you have these
really bad outcomes. And that's certainly the case here with Powell.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
Very bad outcome. Yeah, I think you're understating it, just
a tad Joe.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
It's I mildly understated that. Yes, I have to say,
and yeah, And it's many times they're reactive events. In
this case, I think this is an indication when you
begin to take into account everything that happened in this event,
it was reactive. And that's why this phone call that
(10:11):
was made by Brenda Powell to the registrar's office, perhaps
to the university, to try to get information. That's why
this phone call plays into this case so critically.
Speaker 2 (10:24):
And it was actually kind of a conference called that.
You had the dean of students, you had the registrar,
you had everybody involved. They're all on the phone because
the Poles want answers what's going on. They've been told
something by Sydney that they now are finding out might
not be exactly true. And that's when and this is
the part that I'm kind of I'm still trying to
(10:45):
wrap my hands around this. Sydney Powell somehow had convinced
herself that she could walk on eggshells and get away
with this. But she had to know her parents were
going to find out at some point in time. Mom
and dad are going to find out, and I don't
have an answer. And that's where the powells. They're no idiots,
you know, her mom and dad are not stupid. And
when they when mom gets on the phone with the school,
(11:07):
they're telling her, well, your daughter's not enrolled anymore. That's
why you can't get in through the portal. She's not
actually a student here anymore. She was suspended and when
her grades didn't improve, we had to kick her out.
And Sidney knows what's going on. She knows Mom is
on the phone with the school. She knows her mom
is finding out. Now the school people, they're on the
(11:29):
phone hearing what happens, and that is they hear a
loud thud, a loud thud, and then screaming or screaming
an alloud thud. Because of what is taking place, there's
a little confusion. Did I hear the scream? Where the
thud or the thud or the scream? But it was
a bunch of both. And that's where our story begins,
(11:51):
is with the registrar and Dean of students at Mount
Union on the phone with Brenda Powell and them here
sounds they haven't heard before.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Yeah, it's one thing for me in a collegiate environment
as college professor, but as former death investigator, to be
faced with this. But can you imagine you live in
this We call it the ivy covered walls these in
this academic environment because let's face it, it's a bubble.
This is the last thing you expect to hear. But
what they were hearing, Dave, was the sound of an
(12:27):
iron skillet striking the head of Brenda Powell, and it
was at that moment in time she began to die
at the hands of her daughter. There are organized and
(12:57):
disorganized crimes. We know that for a This is something
that has been studied over and over again when it
comes to criminal behavior, particularly as it applause to homicides.
And part of disorganization is that you show up and
you really don't have a plan. It's more of a
reaction as opposed to being proactive about something. And it's
(13:23):
a horrible thing to say, but you have planners. You
have people that are going to perpetrate crimes where they
lay everything out before them, including the tools, the horrible
tools they are going to utilize. But Dave, in this
particular case, it would seem that Sidney Powell used what
was at her disposal, and it includes both a rusty
frying pan and also a steak knife.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Dave kind of tells you where they were standing. We
used to have a phone like hanging in the kitchen
or whatever, and I'm wondering if they were on that
kind of a house phone or not because of the
fact of the frying pan and the knife. Now dealing
with like a heavy duty frying pan.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Yeah, no, I've seen images of it and it was
presented and there's actually oxidation.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
On it, like an iron skillet.
Speaker 1 (14:10):
Yeah, it is an iron skillet, and you can see
rust that has built up on it. And you can't
judge the cleanliness of a pan by that, because cast
iron skillets in particular will rust, particularly if you don't
use them. And the thing about it is, I'll give
you for an instance, my wife and I both have
cast iron pans in our kitchen. And guess what the
(14:30):
origin of those pans were, Dave. They actually came down
from our grandmother's I have one from my grandmother, My
wife has one from her grandmother. That doesn't necessarily mean
that we use them, but we hold on to these
things because there's something from our past and they're kind
of buried back there, and after a period of time
they'll begin to oxidize. And in this particular case, you
can actually see some of the rust within the interior
(14:53):
of the pan itself, so it gives you an idea
that this is something that's been possessed. It's in that
kitchen and it belongs to this family. It's not like
someone went out and purchased this for this specific attack.
It's something It is a weapon of opportunity, and we
see this played out all the time, Dave.
Speaker 2 (15:08):
A frying pan, like a teflon pan, is just one
step above ten boil in a lot of cases, pretty lightweight,
but an iron skillet, they're heavy. There's something you better
be prepared to hold on to. And as a weapon,
I'm thinking it's pretty good in terms of it's because
of its size and it's not going to bend. It's
going to attack.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
No, it's not. And you have to be a rather
robust person in order to wield this thing. I don't know,
it's kind of interesting that over the years, frying pans
have been portrayed as something that's utilized in order to
attack someone with. It's almost a comical kind of turn.
I even think that in the original Raiders of the
Lost Arc movie, the young lady in there actually hit
(15:50):
someone with a frying pan, and it's almost a comic turn.
But people don't understand how heavy these things are. That
goes to another point here, and to prosecute Sidney Powell.
During her trial, the prosecution actually brought this out the
fact that she transitioned weapons. And when we hear transitioning
of weapons, that's something most of the time that you
(16:11):
think about with like military operators. You know, I transitioned
from my M four carbing rifle to my side arm. Well,
in this particular case, you have Sidney Powell who transitions
from an iron skillet to actually a stake knife dave
to further her attack against her mother, Brenda. Wow.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
Now to go back on this, I was pulling up
the actual testimony from Michelle Gaffney. She actually testified that
she said talking about the phone call that they were
on the phone with Brenda, and she said Dean Fraser
was speaking and simply said Brenda. This is Dean Fraser.
I'm sitting here with Michelle Gaffney, our associated in his students.
We're returning your call, and then she says, that's about
(16:53):
as far as we got. She said, it was at
that moment when we're returning your call, and she said, quote,
there was a very large, loud thud, sound like a
pounding or a thud, accompanying by a pretty loud scream.
The scream might have actually been first and then the thud,
as I think about it, there was sort of an explosion.
(17:15):
Another sound that I heard about that same time or
right after was sort of like an explosion of air.
The air was knocked out of somebody. Now we've heard
the phrase I had the wind knocked out of me,
something along those lines. But she said another sound that
I heard about the same time or right after that
(17:36):
was sort of like an explosion of air was knocked
out of somebody. Joe, what would that sound like to
have the air knocked out and what would the impact
be on the victim who has the wind knocked out
of them?
Speaker 1 (17:52):
It's hard to know. And I found that testimony quite
interesting because it's hard to know if what they were
hearing was almost a reactive gasp to being struck, because
even though an individual is being bludgeoned with something in
this case, this skillet, even though they're being bludgeoned with
something like this, a heavy object, it doesn't necessarily mean
(18:14):
they are literally having you know, they're being struck in
their core and the wind is being knocked out. You know,
a lot of us have been fallen to the ground
or been hit playing some kind of sport and you
have your wind literally knocked out and you kind of
exhale or you're trying to gasp for breath. If an
individual were to be struck, for instance, in the back
(18:35):
of the head, that could actually disrupt their ability to
breathe for a moment where it's almost you know, of
course you would hear potentially, depend upon the quality of
the call, you would actually hear a thud preceding that
kind of gasp for air. It would be something that
would be partly shock. It would be a physiological reaction
(18:57):
to it. But here's the thing. Even with the initial strike,
you're not going to be able to escape the fact
that this individual would not have gone down immediately. Unfortunately,
I think many people that watch any number of television
shows from over the years. It's weird. An actor will
take a heavy object and will strike somebody in the
(19:18):
head and immediately that person collapses. That doesn't happen. If
it does happen, the attacker would have to strike the
person in the precise location to render them unconscious immediately.
It doesn't happen like this. This again, is a randomized attack.
And you've got a young lady wielding an iron skillet
(19:41):
attacking her mother. Now, even though this thing is heavy,
it's not going to that first blow is not going
to First off, it's not going to kill her, and secondly,
it's less likely that it is going to create unconscious state.
At that point in time, she's going to be aware
that she is a attacked. And the reason I know
(20:01):
this is that when an assessment was done on Sidney
Powell following this, the fact is she had injuries on
her that would be consistent with trying to fend off
an attack by someone else. So what that means is
there's a probability that Brenda may have attempted to fight
(20:25):
back as her daughter is attacking her, not just with
the skillet, but also this knife that comes into play
as well.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
What does that mean to you investigating a depth when
somebody actually changes their equipment, they change their tools.
Speaker 1 (20:39):
I think that's a fantastic point. We talked about transitioning
of weapons a moment ago. I think the weight of
something like an iron skillet, if you've never held one
and you're curious about it, next time you go to
the store, particularly if you go to a place that
has camping equipment, they actually sell cast iron there where
you can go pick just pick one of these things
up and feel and you can get the weight of
(21:01):
it in your hand and imagine attempting to swing this
thing over and over again. Now, when you do that,
you'll see that it is cumbersome because it's not made
for this purpose. It's different if you're wielding something like
a baseball bat. It's got to handle. It's got the
barrel of the bat. That's what it's referred to. And
I know you know that because you're a baseball player day.
(21:22):
But it's made for clubbing right with a frying pan
an iron skillet, if you will. It's got a short handle.
You can't leverage the thing really well, and then it's
unwieldy because you have the pan portion of it that's
deep and cast iron is very very heavy, and it's
hard to balance. And if you're diminutive in any way,
(21:44):
you don't have good upper body strength. And Sidney Powell
does not look like she's the fittest of the fit here.
After maybe two or three blows, I would think you
would begin to weaken greatly. Adrenaline will only carry you
so far. And trust me, there's adrenaline at work here.
So if you go from this heavy blunt object, you're
(22:06):
looking around, well, what's the most convenient thing that I
can do? And it's registering in your mind as the attacker,
what has the highest probability of lethality and the default position,
particularly in this case Dave, is a knife. There's a
(22:43):
theme that runs through these events where you have people
that are injured multiple times. It goes to things like
facial disfiguration. You're not just savagely attacking them for the
purpose of killing them, but you're going to the point
where you're trying to maim them to disfigure them. Because
there's so much anger that's involved in this. This goes
(23:05):
to the idea that this event, this homicide, was not
a planned event, who in their right mind and I
got to be real careful about using that term because
that comes into play in the trial. But who in
the right mind would sit there and say, Okay, I
think it's a good idea to have witnesses, though they
be ear witnesses to this event of me attacking my mother.
(23:29):
But on the flip side, this goes to kind of
an idea of thinking beyond whatever kind of psychopathology that
you might be dealing with. I got to make this
look like something else, so we're not just talking about
this bludgeoning. And then we've got multiple sharp force injuries.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
She actually stabs your mom what thirty times in the
neck region. I'm going to say that because thirty times
in the neck seems to be a bit of overkill.
Speaker 1 (23:55):
Thirty stab winds approximately because it's real hard, and we
can get into the nature of those injuries. But now
you've got Sidney Powell who goes over and didn't she
knock in a window, Dave in order to make it
look like I don't know, what was she trying to
make it look like, well.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
You know what, we mentioned that on the phone, you
have the administration from Mount Union. They're on the phone
still and after Sidney has used the frying pan and
beat her mother head and everything else and then stabs her. Well,
they're still on the phone, and Sydney actually picks up
the phone and she hears one of the saying Brenda,
(24:31):
and Sydney actually answers, yes, this is Brenda. And the
administrator he knows it's not her. He knows it's Sydney.
She sounds different than her mother, she's nineteen. And he said, Sidney,
I know this is you. I know this is not Brenda.
And that's when Sydney hung up the phone. They called
the police, they being the Mountain Union University. They called
(24:51):
nine one one and say, hey man, something bad's going on.
We were on the phone herd a fight break out.
We hear screaming, we hear thudding, and that's when Sydney
she hangs up the phone. She starts thinking what do
I do now? Well, her first thought is stage it
to look like a home invasion, and so she breaks
the glass in a window to try to make it
look like somebody had come inside that house and grabbed
(25:15):
a frying pan and a knife and just started doing damage. Now,
Sidney did have a couple of wounds on her that
required treatment. Now I don't know what type of wounds
they were, but I know that usually when there's a
knife being used by somebody, oftentimes they cut themselves their
hands slips from the blood. So Sidney did have some wounds,
but she did try to stage the scene as if
(25:37):
there had been a home invasion.
Speaker 1 (25:38):
Yeah, here's something that's kind of fascinating about this, going
back to these college administrators that are on the phone.
They're in Alliance, Ohio. The pals didn't live in Alliance, Ohio.
They lived in Summit County, Ohio. And so the fact
that and this is always fascinating because I've been involved
in a couple of cases like this where people have
(26:00):
been on the phone and an event has occurred and
they're like a distance away from the people that were
on the phone. You have to get off the phone
and then call another jurisdiction or call You're nine one
one and say, look, we were just talking to this
mom and her daughter, and we think that something bad
has happened. Can you imagine being on the other end
(26:22):
of that line as these administrators and they're thinking, what
did we just hear? What happened, and they obviously think
that it's something horrible because now they're calling nine to
one one to send somebody out there. And when you know,
when the police arrived out there at the scene, it's
a horror show. You know, when they show up. You
got broken glass, You've got this young person, this woman,
(26:47):
Sidney Powell, who's saying that someone actually came into the
house and attacked her mother. Now, why in the world,
in the family's neighborhood would some random person knock out
this glass an attempt to break in and then all
of a sudden attack the mother. You know, we've already
established that the mother is like she's regarded by many
(27:08):
as like an angel on earth, the way she's treated
people over the years in the hospital. Who could have
any kind of animosity toward this woman.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
That's the shocking thing is that a neighbor actually saw
Sydney come running out of the house and in the
front yard. It was just as crazy because you Brenda
is in the house and Sydney, in her whatever state
of mind, in trying to make it look like there
had been a home invasion, she goes out in the
front yard and as this happens, a neighbor hears sirens,
(27:38):
they hear all the sirens showing up and everything else.
So Sydney did not have an incredibly long period of
time to stage this as a scene that would look
like it was a home invasion. And again you're talking
about daytime neighbors are home. In her mind's actually staging
it to look like a Robert just decided to pick
(27:58):
their house and break in and attack for no reason,
you know, this angel on earth. And that's that was
her thought process. Apparently, Yeah, and she understands. And here's
the thing. This goes to one of the things that
you try to understand relative to the law and how
these cases are evaluated. And certainly I think that insanity
(28:21):
came in as a potential defense for Sydney Powell, or
it was hinted at that she's got multiple psychological issues
that she's having to deal with. And what you try
to determine is the idea of menace ray, which means
guilty mind, and it comes from the Latin minice ray.
(28:42):
And you're, you know, the person, they're trying to assess
them as to whether or not with a guilty mind
that they have an awareness of guilt and then you
have to have what's referred to as the actess ray
and the actus ray is the guilty act. And so
when you have both of these and I think I've
spoken of this before and we'll speak it again, if
you have both of those elements together, you get what's
(29:04):
referred to as concurrence. So both of those things come together.
Did she have a guilty mind? Was she aware that
this was wrong? Well, one of the things if you're
going about staging something, when we get there as forensics people,
we can try to understand, Well, first off, what was
the location of the broken glass?
Speaker 1 (29:22):
Is it the door? What is it consistent with someone
trying to knock out, say a side panel of glass
and stick their hand through it and try to open
the lock, manipulate the locked again in or is it
adjacent to a locked window and you're trying to get
access to the locking mechanism of the window so you
can open it and crawl in. And this is very
broad terms. If you break the window, is it in
(29:44):
a location let's say that it's at the top of
the window. Well, why in the world would someone break
the top of the window and not break the window
in order to facilitate getting in. You know, you can
knock glass out of any but it doesn't mean it's
not going to point to with somebody that has organized
thought and they're thinking, well, we're trying to get into
(30:05):
this place in order to steal or harm whoever's in there.
You just got broken glass, man, And that's one of
the things we're going to look at. And we're also
going to look at the direction of the glass. Was
a glass broken from the inside and it's blown out,
or is it broken from the outside and blown in.
We look at the edges of the glass to see
if it's got inter internal beveling, for instance. We're going
(30:27):
to check it to see if this area would facilitate
a person being able to get into that. And then
if we have a suspect in any way that we
think may have done something, we're going to look for
glass fragments on their clothing, because clothing, when it comes
to broken glass, is something that the individual could just
be covered with any kind of glass particles or anything
(30:49):
like that that just doesn't exist here in this particular case.
So she was actually charged with tampering with evidence, and
I found that very very interesting relative to the prosecution's
case against Sidney Powell, because that goes to this idea
of acts ray our minicerae, where you have not only
(31:09):
the guilty act, but you have the guilty mind. Here, Dave, I.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
Got to ask you about back to the stab wounds
of the neck and the blunt forced from the frying pan,
how do you determine what was the cause of death
when you've got a frying pan used for beating and
a knife. Can you separate the two and say it
was this or that or is it a combination of both?
Speaker 1 (31:29):
Well, in this particular case, when the medical examiner actually
testified at the trial, what they came up with in
this particular trial was that the cause of death was
a combination of both. And this is why when the
medical examiner did their assessment of this blunt force trauma
that she would have sustained, they're going to try to see,
(31:50):
first off, anatomically, where were these strikes located, And you
can assess that externally because with a blunt force strike,
you're going to see lacerations, and with lacerations you have
was referred to as tissue bridging, and they're nasty and
they're jagged, and that's interesting because you're also dealing with
stab wounds here too, Dave. So stab wounds might look
(32:11):
like a laceration, but they're not because there won't be
tissue bridging with stab wound, and that means the edges
will be clean because you've got this knife that's being
inserted into the tissue. With blunt force trauma, you're literally
ripping the skin every time that skillet strikes. If it's
if the area is struck hard enough, that laceration occurs
(32:32):
from that blunt force trauma to literally tear the skin.
That's why they look so jagged, and you have to
assess externally. You know, okay, well, is this a stab
wound or is this a laceration. That's why we're very
specific when we begin to talk about these things in forensics.
Then when you get internally, because it's not just an
external examination and it was certainly not in the case
(32:53):
of Brenda, you have to understand what anatomical structures were impacted.
First off, within the brain, because she's striking the outside
of the skull. Here, you've got the laceration. You're going
to have a big focal area of hemorrhage on the outside.
More than likely overlying the external table of skull. But
then when you get into the inside and you look
(33:14):
at the brain, there'll be big focal areas of hemorrhage
there and that creates pressure on the brain and depended
upon where she was struck on the brain, that can
really compromise her ability to breathe and respire everything. And
then you combine that with the assessment that's done on
these multiple stab wounds on the neck, and because there
are so many, it's hard to try to understand how
(33:37):
many there actually were. And I know that you and
I have spoken of this before, Dave. Where you have
such overkill that's going on, you will have these wounds
that are communicating with one another, so you can have
a stab wound on top of a stab wound, and
so we can't really assess the order that these actually
(33:57):
came in. We can only enumerate them. And then it's
going to be totality of the injuries that's going to
lead to her death, and it certainly was in the
case of Brenda Powell. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this
is bodybacks
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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