November 9, 2021 • 36 mins
Chris Watts’ wife and daughters were missing for three days before their bodies were found on the dad's former jobsite at Anadarko. Shanann Watts was buried in a shallow grave. The girls were stuffed through hatches into oil tanks. During the days before the bodies were discovered, Watts played the grieving dad, giving interviews, begging for information on his missing family. What no one knows is Chris Watts is having an affair, and no longer wants to be part of a family unit. Murder was his way out. Ultimately, he tells police where he deposited their bodies. Today on Body Bags, former death scene investigator and forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan walks us through what investigators would have found at Anadarko.
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Body backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. One of the greatest
gifts any man can be given, as a beautiful wife, too,
adoring daughters, and a child he had unborn. For years now,
(00:33):
the case of Chris Watts has puzzled many of us,
wondering what his motivation was to literally go in and
destroy this beautiful gift he had been given. My name
is Joseph Scott Morgan and this his body backs. Joining
me right now is my good friend Jackie Howard, producer
(00:57):
of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, what can you
tell us about this case? As you said Joe, Chris
Wats and his wife, Shanane had two daughters, four year
old Mella and three year old Celeste, and Chanane was
expecting a baby boy. Shanan had been out of town
and came home and that's where things go sideways. Chanan
misses a doctor's appointment and when a friend goes over
(01:20):
to check on them, NaN's car is still in the
driveway with the car seats in it, and Chris Watts
tells her that Chanane had taken the kids on a playdate.
At that point, the friend knew there was exactly a
problem because the car seats were still in the car
in the driveway. Police are called. We know now, Joe,
that Chris Wats strangled his wife in their bed after sex,
(01:42):
which leads us to wonder how was he able? Yes,
she was pregnant, but how was he able to so
easily overpower his wife. We know that she traveled, so
she was tired, she had just gotten home, she is pregnant,
and we also find out later on that over the
weeks before her murder had been dosing her with oxycodone.
(02:03):
Any of these things alone would have taken her strength away.
What happens when you've got all of these things going
on together, Jackie, I think the thing comes to mind
for me in regards to Shenan in this case is
a term that you hear many times, bone weary. Can
you imagine she is in the advanced months of pregnancy,
(02:26):
She's been carrying her and born son Nko for all
this time, and she's still on the road going to
sales meetings and this sort of thing, and that even
and she had in fact return from a sales meeting
her friend to drop her off. Can you imagine how
weary she was and then to come home into this
environment with a husband who she was troubled with. They
(02:50):
didn't have a solid marriage anymore. There were dark storm
clouds on the front. And then just think about this
for a second, because we really couldn't get real good
toxicology off of Snan's body. But if in fact he
had been dosing her with oxycon along the way, perhaps
maybe to induce a premature birth at some point in time,
(03:16):
but tonight plan was different. He was going to dose
her with this and then she was going to drift
off into a very very deep sleep. And you know
from the reports that we have heard, they may have
had intercourse just prior to this. And this goes to
this idea that he's kind of drawing her in the
entire time, trying to make her feel safe and secure,
(03:38):
maybe one last time. Maybe she thinks that everything's going
to be okay, but she's not going to have the
will or the physical ability to fight back. So when
he wrapped his hands around her throat, and there is
evidence that she was choked on the right side, there
was some hemorrhage of her neck, she couldn't fight a
(04:00):
matter of fact, it took so little pressure in order
to squeeze the life out of this pregnant mama. That
we didn't even see any evidence of particular hemorrhages in
her eyes, which normally come about within a fixial death.
You know, this increased pressure, so that gives you an
indication perhaps of how a little pressure it took to
subdue her and eventually in her life, Joe. We actually
(04:25):
do not know specifically whether or not Chris Watts dosed
his wife with oxycodon that day. It has been suspected
he told someone, a pimpal that he had been writing to,
that he had been trying to poison her. But with
the tissues that remained when Shenanne's body was found, but
they proved that our body was in such a stated
(04:47):
decomposition that it's actually an unprovable point. When you recovered
decomposed tissue, it's a real uphill battle to retrieve sufficient
sam one in order to conduct toxicology examination. Just think
about it. The more compromised the body is by natural
(05:08):
decay that's occurring out in the elements, and she was,
in fact in the elements buried in a very shallow grave.
Those elements that we would normally examine after death are
compromised to the point where you can't you can't really
appreciate if, in fact, there was a lethal level of
(05:29):
any kind of substance in her system. Now you might
be able to find out, and these are two terms
we use in forensics and forensic toxicology. You can you
might perhaps can qualify a substance in the body and say, yes,
we have an opiate in the system, okay, But because
a tissue is so compromised, you're not necessarily going to
(05:51):
be able to quantify that, and that means apply a
specific number to that agent in the body. Well, why
is that important? And it's important because there are what
are called therapeutic doses. That is, if you go to
the doctor and they give you medicine for a hurt
back or maybe a busted knee, there's a certain amount
(06:13):
that's acceptable to be taken into the body that is
not going to put you into a lethal range. But
you can't achieve that would decompose tissue. More than likely,
there is no blood left where you can draw it
up and examine it in its normal state post mortem,
that is a non decomposed status, and then the tissue
(06:33):
that's left behind you can't really examine it for it
at least to put a fine point on it. With
those numbers, Is it a lethal level, is at a
non therapeutical level, Those things that would give us an
indication that maybe this was an intentional overdose. When you're
looking at a body that has been buried in a
shallow grave versus six or eight feet deep. When we
(06:54):
think about how people are normally buried, although yes they're
normally in a coffin, but a body that's been buried
in a shallow grave versus someone that was much deeper,
what is the difference that you are going to be
able to see forensically? Is there going to be a
difference between a shallow grave and a deep grave? You know,
the fact that that Nan was buried in a shallow
(07:15):
grave brings all kinds of problems along with it, as
opposed to somebody digging down traditionally, which you think about,
you know, six feet deep, we've heard that term before.
When you get down into that kind of substrata what
they call substrata, you're just barely on the surface here there.
It doesn't afford a lot of protection for the body.
So any kind of insect life that's out there, the
(07:38):
body may as well be on top of the ground
because for a fly that's coming by, it's nothing for
the fly since this body buried under a very thin
layer of soil. So you're going to still have, for instance,
larval development that turns into to maggot. For instance, you're
going to have burrowing animals that might not be quite
(08:01):
as prone to get down to six feet would you know,
just a very shallow area, they can dig down very easily.
And then you know, out in this area you've got
things like coyotes and they've got this tremendous sense of smell,
so it's not really going to inhibit their ability to
sense this body. And with that comes the fact that
(08:23):
the body will be further compromised. It's just kind of logic,
you know that earth. The deeper in the earth that
you go, the body becomes more and more protected from
what's going out on the surface and what's happening. And
then you still have the environmental factors. If the body
is in a shallow grave, the body is not going
to be very well protected from heat either, maybe not
(08:44):
to the degree that you would appreciate if the body
was laying out on bare earth, but still heat is
going to impact the body and it's going to speed
up the process of decomposition. As you said earlier, joke,
there is cough and birth. Talk to me about what
that is, how that happens and this date's body when
she has discovered here's here's what this scene would have
(09:06):
looked like. And you know, I had an opportunity to
hear some of the comments were made by many of
the investigators that were out there and they're still to
this day. Jackie just troubled down to to their soul
over what they saw and we're just talking about Chanane's grave. Chanan,
according to them, was essentially buried in a very very
(09:29):
shallow grave. It wasn't There was not great effort that
was taken in this. And we can learn a lot
about an individual based upon this preparation, if you will.
They have described her body as essentially being dumped in
there like a pile of garbage. We do know that
she was wrapping a sheet in the line on one
(09:51):
side of her body. It's it's not you know, when
we think about burial in a modern context, we think
about people being on or don't we We think about people,
say perhaps being laid on their back, maybe their hands crossed,
not thrown away like rubbish. And according to the investigators,
that's what they saw. It was hurried, it was frenzied,
(10:14):
it was disordered. And as they began to kind of
peel away these levels of dirt. As they kind of
began to peel away these layers of dirt that have
been quickly placed over her body, and they began to
pull back the sheet that she was wrapped in, one
of the things they saw was the body of a
(10:38):
little nico that she had been pregnant with. And this
gives you an indication as to how decomposed her body was.
When humans are in a normal state, there's a certain
amount of muscle tension that's in the body, and just
thinking about that relative to a pregnancy, there's a certain
amount of elasticity in tension that is occurring, say for instance,
(11:03):
in the womb, in the uterus, that retains a child
in place. But as decomposition begins to set in, that
tension is released because the muscles they no longer have
the same continuity. And as they release, as the body
of the mother begins to decompose, this tension that endwells
(11:24):
a body naturally releases, the muscles are no longer as
resilient as they once were, and suddenly we have what
it's called a coffin birth. So the baby is literally
born in a post mortem state. That means that the
mother's decomposing body has the child's body issued forth from her.
(11:48):
It's no longer contained in And when the investigators pulled
back that sheet, they found little Nico laying there, and
they describe his body as being in a state of
decomposition as well, you know, no longer protected by his
mother's body. Now that little fetus, that little now born
(12:09):
child in death is exposed to the same elemental factors,
the same decompositional factors as his mother's body. And there
he lay in that dirt next to his mama's body,
knowing that nan had been dead probably about twelve hours
at this point, Nico would not have been born alive. Correct,
(12:30):
That's not possible for that baby to have been born alive.
This was something that occurred postmortal. Man, keep in mind,
and this really kind of drives drives a point home here,
and this is why this is just one of the
points along this that makes this so gut wretched, is
(12:51):
the fact that when Chris Watts wrapped his hands around
Channan Watts's throat and he called is that hemorrhage in
the muscles around her neck? As he squeezed the life
out of her, he was in effect squeezing the life
out of this unborn child. And it is a sad said,
(13:14):
ending to this life, Jackie. We've talked a little bit
(13:40):
about Chanan and little Nico. What do we know about
Celeste and Bella? Chris Watts took his children with him
in the vehicle on the way to bury Chanan Watts,
but what happened once they got to the oil field
is certainly disturbing. We know the girls, we're asking what
(14:01):
was wrong with their mother? And then he smothered his
girls one at a time. What is the difference job
between smothering a child and strangling an adult or is
there any difference? That's a good question, Jackie. And forensics
we actually refer to both of these kinds of deaths,
(14:21):
whether it's a strangulation or a suffocation as an asphyxial death.
And what that means is it's a deprivation of oxygen.
As we say in the South, things got cut off
you know, you're cutting off the air, the air supply,
and so that's what's actually happening here. So you're depriving
these little bodies, both Celeste and Bella, of their source
(14:46):
of oxygen. And you know they're they're believing, at least
the m is believing that this in fact was a smothering.
And you know it's floated around for years and years.
It's smothering is one of the most difficult things to detect.
And you'd be absolutely right because you know, you think about, well,
how would you go about smothering smothering these children. Well,
(15:11):
in the case of say, for instance, we've got Celeste,
who's tiny. You know, she's only three years old, you
could very simply if you're a grown man, particularly the
size of their daddy. Remember he worked out all the time.
He took a lot of pride in displaying how what
a fantastic physique he has. They would be no match
(15:34):
for this man. With Celeste, there was very little evidence
of trauma on her little body, so it would be
very simple for him to take, say, for instance, the
palm of his hand or even a pillow and place
it over her mouth. I think that probably in these
circumstances out there. Remember that the investigators believe these two
(15:57):
children were actually alive. In his vehicle as he is
transporting the body of his deceased wife out to her
burial spot. He could have easily placed his hand over
celesque face, over her nose, in her mouth and deprived
her of oxygen and she would have essentially just kind
(16:17):
of gone to sleep. And this is what's referred to
as an anoxic death, which means that you're literally depriving
the brain of oxygen. The brain requires oxygen in order
to do all of its functions and including keeping our
heart beating. Now, Bella is a completely different story, and
(16:39):
I'll tell you why. There's something that's very very significant
here from a forensic standpoint that gives us an indication
of what may have happened to her and what he
actually did to her. She had no evidence of BATIKUII,
and that is those little vessels that are bursting in
her eyes due to pressure. However, there is something significant,
(17:02):
and it has to do with her mouth. Investigator's report
and theme reports that she had some trauma to her tongue.
You know, how else would she get trauma to her tongue?
Unless she's probably resisting, and not only in her tongue,
but there's a little piece of tissue that attaches our
(17:24):
upper lip and our lower lip to the gums, respectively,
and that's referred to as frenulum, and it's a classic
thing that you look for in suffocation or smothering. Her
upper frenulum was actually lacerated or torn. And if people
at home will just kind of take the tip of
your tongue, put it outside your gum and in between
(17:45):
your lip, and you can actually feel that little piece
of connective tissue if there is pressure directly applied to
the mouth with a hand, for instance, and you're fighting,
you're resisting, you're trying to save your own life, you're trying,
you're struggling to get a breath. That can actually tear.
And I find it very interesting that out of the
(18:09):
essentially four lives that he ended, little Bella fought the most.
She was only four years old. Just let that sink in.
We you know, we were all four years old at
one point in time. Maybe we have children or grandchildren
that are four. You can think about the size of
a child, a little girl like this, But she fought,
and you know what, the one thing that they found
(18:31):
on Chris Watts at night when they interviewed him, the
one bit of evidence when they talked to him the
next day. He had a small mark on his neck,
and I've often wondered if that was not Bella in
just a last gasp, a desperate gasp, but try to
reach up and fend her daddy off, her father, her father,
(18:52):
the man that was there to protect her and love
on her and watch after her as she grew up.
She's trying to fight him off, perhaps, and she scratched
him on his neck, and they have evidence of this.
They took pictures of that. They've never actually linked the two,
but I've often thought about that, because she did fight back.
She fought back to the point where this tissue in
(19:13):
her mouth was essentially lacerated and there were little areas
of hemorrhage, which means it happened in life. Joe, you
just confused me by saying that there was no particular
hemorrhage in her eyes. How is that possible? And you're
gonna have to explain that to me because you've repeatedly
said that when people are smothered, that's one of the
first things that forensic experts look for. So how was
(19:37):
it possible if she was smothered that there's not any
I'll tell you why, Jackie. I'm a simple guy and
I kind of like word pictures, and so the way
I always try to explain particular hemorrhaging is ill you
think about a water hose that's attached to your house,
and you've got a nozzle on one end, and it's closed,
(19:58):
and you turn up the water pressure on this faucet
outside of your house, and the hose might begin to expand,
but yet you turn it off and suddenly the water
that's trapped in there you can release it if you
if you squeeze the nozzle. There has to be sufficient
amount of time that goes by where this internal pressure
(20:21):
is placed on these tiny little vessels. These vessels are
actually located and what's referred to as our capillary beds,
which are these tiny, tiny little vessels. You've got what
are called arterials and you've got what are called venules.
And what happens is that most of the time with
particular hemorrhagy, if you put enough pressure on them, they're
(20:42):
going to literally burst and in the little areas of
tissue that surround these vessels, that blood seeps out, It
seeps out into what's called interstitial tissue, and it presents
You can't you can't make it go away. It's not
like a crime scene that you go back and you
try to clean it up. That doesn't happen. With these
little pen prick hemorrhages. It's going to be there forever
(21:03):
and ever. Amen. The trick here, though, is that in
all three of these cases where Chris Watts put his
hands on these two children, these two little precious baby
girls and his precious wife it's lading their sleep, is
that he didn't render enough pressure for long enough time,
(21:26):
for long enough time for these vessels to burst in
their eyes so that they could appreciate. You're not always
going to get these little focal areas of hemorrhage like that.
It is not necessarily going to happen. So what you're
telling me, Joe, is that the difference in the two
is that it took less pressure and less time to
(21:48):
kill a child as opposed to an adult. Yeah, and
you're absolutely right, Jackie. It did take less pressure and
less time because they're weaker and so it only takes
a smaller amount of time to compromise their airway, their
ability to uptake oxygen so that their brain can still
function as opposed to someone that might be more robust,
(22:12):
like a full grown man, an adult, if you will.
And you know, Nan is not too far removed from
this category because we reflect back and think about what
we think may have been her status. We know that
she was tired, we know that she was advanced in
her month's relative to pregnancy, and also there's that specter
(22:32):
that she may have had some type of drug on
board that would cause her to be in a weakened state,
cause her to be I don't know, just probably barely
semi conscious. So yeah, it's not going to take too
much in their lives. It's such a tragedy when you
(23:08):
begin to think about these two little girls whose lives
were snuffed out by their daddy. But one of the
really puzzling and most horrific parts to this whole story
is what he did with the bodies afterwards. You're absolutely right, Joe.
Let's start at the beginning. We know that once the
little girls were dead, that he first stuffed at their
(23:28):
little bodies through an eight inch hatch into an oil tank.
Let's just start there. How do the bodies of two
little girls four and three years old fit through an
eight inch hole? Think about it. That's about the size
(23:50):
of a dinner plate. It's horrific, you know. And it
was the Anna Darco wall fields out there, and it's
a desolate area. I mean it is you talk about
being removed. It was removed from breast of civilization and
just kind of sits out there. It kind of rises
up out of this prairie out there. Why there, Well,
(24:10):
he knew that it would be isolated. This guy was
familiar with this area. He had a full awareness of
what went out there. And these tanks are essentially storage
tanks for raw petroleum. He takes these two children out there,
and he's got a problem. What am I going to
do with him? Well, he had already dug a very
(24:31):
shallow grave for his wife not too far away from
the base of these tanks, and quickly deposited her body
in that area. Now, what do you do with these
two children where there's two tanks. Now, these things are
made very specifically. They're kind of high. They're probably approximating
maybe twenty feet in height there, so and on top
(24:52):
they have these little hatches and they've got a very
interesting name. They're called thief hatches. And he popped the
latch on the thief hatch on each one of these tanks.
And with Bella in particular. She's four years old, so
her body is certainly larger and more robust than her
(25:14):
three year old sister Celeste. How do you get her
into this hole? Well, the only way I can really
describe it is the fact that she was actually jammed
down into that hole. And how do I know that?
You know, the investigators reported that one of the first
things that they noticed when they got out there to
that site, and they had been given the information that
(25:37):
this is where these two little angels were, they looked
at the thief hatch where Bella's body had been deposited,
and a right along the rim there, some of her
hair was caught in that. And it wasn't just like
a strand I don't think it was like a clump
of hair. Now, how's that accomplished? Well, her body is
(25:59):
obviously you just think about how big eight inches is
that's the diameter on this thing. How in fact do
you drive the body of a four year old through
this tiny opening? Well, it was hard and The evidence
of that is the fact that her hair was left
behind in the edge, which means that it was torn away.
(26:20):
It was ripped away as he's jamming her down through
this hole. And another thing this demonstrates when they finally
do examine Bella's body, She's got scrapes where the edge,
the metal edge of that thief hatch caught hold and
it left these marks on her body. There have been
broken bones. Joe, we think about what he would have
(26:43):
had to have done to get Bella through that thief hatch.
Isn't that inappropriate appropriate term? Considering this guy stole the
life of these two little, precious girls. He would have
had to have taken Bella probably would not have needed
to break bone, but he would have at her shoulders
kind of folded her in toward the center in order
(27:05):
to facilitate getting her down. She probably would have went
in head first. And as he's pressing her down through
this opening, through this thief hatch, the metal edges of
this thing called hold of the tissue the skin, and
it raked it away, and it left these scratches on
her body as she fell through this thing. Finally, I'm
sure that it took a tremendous amount of force on
(27:27):
his part to get her down there. And looking at
the drop from this thief hatch that you're talking about, Joe,
as he stepped the bodies down, you said that most
likely he would not have had the broken bones to
get the children inside those catches. But what about the drop.
We don't necessarily know how far they fell if they
went right into the contents of the oil tank, so
(27:49):
would there have been broken bones from the drop itself.
I think that the fact that they're falling, though it
is a kind of a height. You know, we're looking
at maybe fifteen to eighteen feet and height that they're
falling from the opening of the seashatch. They're splashing down
into a fluid environment. So that's actually going to break
(28:11):
the fall to a certain degree, provided that they don't
strike the bottom of this tank, you know, the bare bottom,
you know. I think that there's enough of a layer
of fluid there that kind of cradle the bodies when
they hit. So you're not going to see any kind
of fracturing or impact injuries necessarily related to this. And
one other thing you have to keep in mind, there's
not going to be any hemorrhage related to the fall either,
(28:34):
you know, because this is a postmorn event, he had
killed these girls before he put them in there, So
I don't know that we would ever really know, and
you know, not to mention the bodies were greatly compromised,
Their status was greatly compromised when it came to the
medical examiner or the corner being able to examine these
bodies once they got them back to the morgue. That
(28:56):
leads us to the next point in our discussion, Joe,
is what happened to the bodies of those two little
girls once they were inside those oil tanks. How caustic
is oil and what is it going to do to
human tissue that is left in there for any period
of time. The horrific part to this is that, first off,
(29:18):
when you go into this environment, and this is raw petroleum,
and there's a lot of stuff that comes off of
raw petroleum that we create in this world that we use.
It's not just gasoline, and it's not just lubricantness all
kinds of stuff that it's used for. But something that's
naturally occurring is what's for two, is aromatic hydrocarbons, and
(29:41):
in this environment, in this environment, two substances stick out.
One's called taluween and another's called benzene. And if you've
ever heard of benzene, you know that it can be
used to polish things with. It is very lethal taluween
as well, and it causes things to break down very quickly.
(30:02):
It eats into tissue, not to the same degree as
certain assets do, but it causes a tissue to become
greatly compromised. It softens things, it begins to promote this
kind of coming apart, and then you marry that up
with natural decompositional process, and these bodies are going to
(30:24):
wind up and what's referred to as kind of a
macerated state, which means that the decomposition has gotten to
the point, this chemical effect that has gotten to the
point where the structural integrity of the body, it's really hard.
The structural integrity of the body is so compromised that
assessing the body at the autopsy is going to be
(30:48):
quite the chore. So are you telling me, then, Joe,
that their bones would have impliable. I don't know that
the bones would have necessarily been pliable in this I
know that the soft tissue surrounding them though, just imagine,
if you will, the worst sunburn that you've ever seen
in your life, where tissue is beginning to peel away.
(31:11):
It's almost like a chemical burn that's taking taking place,
and you would have seen the layers and layers of
tissue that would have been coming off just by touching it. Now,
it's not going to necessarily appear that way initially, but
when you begin to move these bodies around, the bodies
are very fragile, so tissue will begin to fall off
(31:31):
of the bone, if you will. In certain cases deepended
upon the length of exposure, they have to these horrible
chemicals there that they're found in. You know, they had
to drain both of these tanks when this occurred. They
had to call the EPA out because this is such
a dangerous situation. So not only did this guy murder
(31:54):
his children and his wife, but where he placed Belle
and Celeste is such a volatile environment that all of
the workers, all of the investigators, the people that work
out there that have control over these tanks, because they
had to be drained, all these people were exposed to
(32:15):
these chemicals. And just think about that just for a second.
This is the ultimate in a selfish act, you know,
and nobody really talks about this. These investigators that are
out there and the workers that are out there are
traumatized to the fact that they're having to extricate these
little girls out of these tanks, after they know they've
been sitting out there all night long, after the tanks
(32:36):
have been drained, and they got to go out in
there and do that. But they've got to put on
hazmat suits in order to facilitate this. It was a
monumental undertaking and I can tell you these investigators and workers,
they're going to be scarred by this for the rest
of their life. Joe, I've heard you talk about this
case before, and one of the things that always rings
out for me is the phrase, the term degloved. I've
(33:02):
heard you reference that word in regards to these girls.
Explain that to me. We've got two layers of skin
we commonly think about. We think about the epidermist, which
means tops, the top layer. You know. It's like when
you get a blister on your hand. That's the top
layer of the skin that's rising ups, filled with fluid.
(33:23):
And then you've got the dermist, which is that underlying surface.
Beneath the epidermist. It's a bit more robust, it's thicker
with deep clubbing. It can happen in a couple of ways.
You find it a lot in water environments where you
have a body that's found out in a lake or
a river and maybe the ocean, and that skin begins
to come away, that dermist begins to come away from
(33:45):
the underlying connected tissue that you can actually peel a
an entire hands. You can actually peel the surface of
tissue off of a human hand, and that's where we
get this term de glove, and it's like you're peeling
a glove off of a hand. And this can happen
(34:07):
over the entire body. When you're talking about exposing them
to things like benzene and taluweene and this sort of thing.
The whole body can become degloves so that the tissue,
that outer lay of tissue becomes peeled away. And you
can actually appreciate this. It's almost like the skin it's
just being kind of rolled off, if you will. And
(34:31):
you know, I've seen this in environments when you bring
bodies into the mark that have been exposed to chemicals
like this, you have to be very very careful because
it's all very fragile. It'll come off in an instant.
You can actually take your gloved hand you have a
rubber glove on in the morgue and touch it to
the surface of these bodies, and sometimes when you pull
your hand away or that tissue comes off on your
(34:53):
gloved hands and it's it really magnifies this in that
sense that and they got these bodies back to the morgue.
This is something that we're having to deal with. There's
a horrible smell that comes along with this. You would
probably have to wear some type of not just regular mask,
probably a respirator if you're going to do this examination.
(35:15):
And the evidence that you're talking about here is so fine, Jackie.
I mean we're talking about you know, we talked about
petiquii or the eyes even preserved well enough that tissue
around the eyes so that you can see if there
are any particular hemorrhages. Are you able to appreciate the
neck to the degree you need to see if there
was any kind of hemorrhage relative to manual strangulation in
(35:37):
of course, in Bella's case, they were able to see
this trauma to the tongue and that little piece of tissue,
the fregulum in her lip. They were able to appreciate that,
but a lot of other evidence is gone. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is Body Backs
Body backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. One of the greatest
gifts any man can be given, as a beautiful wife, too,
adoring daughters, and a child he had unborn. For years now,
(00:33):
the case of Chris Watts has puzzled many of us,
wondering what his motivation was to literally go in and
destroy this beautiful gift he had been given. My name
is Joseph Scott Morgan and this his body backs. Joining
me right now is my good friend Jackie Howard, producer
(00:57):
of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, what can you
tell us about this case? As you said Joe, Chris
Wats and his wife, Shanane had two daughters, four year
old Mella and three year old Celeste, and Chanane was
expecting a baby boy. Shanan had been out of town
and came home and that's where things go sideways. Chanan
misses a doctor's appointment and when a friend goes over
(01:20):
to check on them, NaN's car is still in the
driveway with the car seats in it, and Chris Watts
tells her that Chanane had taken the kids on a playdate.
At that point, the friend knew there was exactly a
problem because the car seats were still in the car
in the driveway. Police are called. We know now, Joe,
that Chris Wats strangled his wife in their bed after sex,
(01:42):
which leads us to wonder how was he able? Yes,
she was pregnant, but how was he able to so
easily overpower his wife. We know that she traveled, so
she was tired, she had just gotten home, she is pregnant,
and we also find out later on that over the
weeks before her murder had been dosing her with oxycodone.
(02:03):
Any of these things alone would have taken her strength away.
What happens when you've got all of these things going
on together, Jackie, I think the thing comes to mind
for me in regards to Shenan in this case is
a term that you hear many times, bone weary. Can
you imagine she is in the advanced months of pregnancy,
(02:26):
She's been carrying her and born son Nko for all
this time, and she's still on the road going to
sales meetings and this sort of thing, and that even
and she had in fact return from a sales meeting
her friend to drop her off. Can you imagine how
weary she was and then to come home into this
environment with a husband who she was troubled with. They
(02:50):
didn't have a solid marriage anymore. There were dark storm
clouds on the front. And then just think about this
for a second, because we really couldn't get real good
toxicology off of Snan's body. But if in fact he
had been dosing her with oxycon along the way, perhaps
maybe to induce a premature birth at some point in time,
(03:16):
but tonight plan was different. He was going to dose
her with this and then she was going to drift
off into a very very deep sleep. And you know
from the reports that we have heard, they may have
had intercourse just prior to this. And this goes to
this idea that he's kind of drawing her in the
entire time, trying to make her feel safe and secure,
(03:38):
maybe one last time. Maybe she thinks that everything's going
to be okay, but she's not going to have the
will or the physical ability to fight back. So when
he wrapped his hands around her throat, and there is
evidence that she was choked on the right side, there
was some hemorrhage of her neck, she couldn't fight a
(04:00):
matter of fact, it took so little pressure in order
to squeeze the life out of this pregnant mama. That
we didn't even see any evidence of particular hemorrhages in
her eyes, which normally come about within a fixial death.
You know, this increased pressure, so that gives you an
indication perhaps of how a little pressure it took to
subdue her and eventually in her life, Joe. We actually
(04:25):
do not know specifically whether or not Chris Watts dosed
his wife with oxycodon that day. It has been suspected
he told someone, a pimpal that he had been writing to,
that he had been trying to poison her. But with
the tissues that remained when Shenanne's body was found, but
they proved that our body was in such a stated
(04:47):
decomposition that it's actually an unprovable point. When you recovered
decomposed tissue, it's a real uphill battle to retrieve sufficient
sam one in order to conduct toxicology examination. Just think
about it. The more compromised the body is by natural
(05:08):
decay that's occurring out in the elements, and she was,
in fact in the elements buried in a very shallow grave.
Those elements that we would normally examine after death are
compromised to the point where you can't you can't really
appreciate if, in fact, there was a lethal level of
(05:29):
any kind of substance in her system. Now you might
be able to find out, and these are two terms
we use in forensics and forensic toxicology. You can you
might perhaps can qualify a substance in the body and say, yes,
we have an opiate in the system, okay, But because
a tissue is so compromised, you're not necessarily going to
(05:51):
be able to quantify that, and that means apply a
specific number to that agent in the body. Well, why
is that important? And it's important because there are what
are called therapeutic doses. That is, if you go to
the doctor and they give you medicine for a hurt
back or maybe a busted knee, there's a certain amount
(06:13):
that's acceptable to be taken into the body that is
not going to put you into a lethal range. But
you can't achieve that would decompose tissue. More than likely,
there is no blood left where you can draw it
up and examine it in its normal state post mortem,
that is a non decomposed status, and then the tissue
(06:33):
that's left behind you can't really examine it for it
at least to put a fine point on it. With
those numbers, Is it a lethal level, is at a
non therapeutical level, Those things that would give us an
indication that maybe this was an intentional overdose. When you're
looking at a body that has been buried in a
shallow grave versus six or eight feet deep. When we
(06:54):
think about how people are normally buried, although yes they're
normally in a coffin, but a body that's been buried
in a shallow grave versus someone that was much deeper,
what is the difference that you are going to be
able to see forensically? Is there going to be a
difference between a shallow grave and a deep grave? You know,
the fact that that Nan was buried in a shallow
(07:15):
grave brings all kinds of problems along with it, as
opposed to somebody digging down traditionally, which you think about,
you know, six feet deep, we've heard that term before.
When you get down into that kind of substrata what
they call substrata, you're just barely on the surface here there.
It doesn't afford a lot of protection for the body.
So any kind of insect life that's out there, the
(07:38):
body may as well be on top of the ground
because for a fly that's coming by, it's nothing for
the fly since this body buried under a very thin
layer of soil. So you're going to still have, for instance,
larval development that turns into to maggot. For instance, you're
going to have burrowing animals that might not be quite
(08:01):
as prone to get down to six feet would you know,
just a very shallow area, they can dig down very easily.
And then you know, out in this area you've got
things like coyotes and they've got this tremendous sense of smell,
so it's not really going to inhibit their ability to
sense this body. And with that comes the fact that
(08:23):
the body will be further compromised. It's just kind of logic,
you know that earth. The deeper in the earth that
you go, the body becomes more and more protected from
what's going out on the surface and what's happening. And
then you still have the environmental factors. If the body
is in a shallow grave, the body is not going
to be very well protected from heat either, maybe not
(08:44):
to the degree that you would appreciate if the body
was laying out on bare earth, but still heat is
going to impact the body and it's going to speed
up the process of decomposition. As you said earlier, joke,
there is cough and birth. Talk to me about what
that is, how that happens and this date's body when
she has discovered here's here's what this scene would have
(09:06):
looked like. And you know, I had an opportunity to
hear some of the comments were made by many of
the investigators that were out there and they're still to
this day. Jackie just troubled down to to their soul
over what they saw and we're just talking about Chanane's grave. Chanan,
according to them, was essentially buried in a very very
(09:29):
shallow grave. It wasn't There was not great effort that
was taken in this. And we can learn a lot
about an individual based upon this preparation, if you will.
They have described her body as essentially being dumped in
there like a pile of garbage. We do know that
she was wrapping a sheet in the line on one
(09:51):
side of her body. It's it's not you know, when
we think about burial in a modern context, we think
about people being on or don't we We think about people,
say perhaps being laid on their back, maybe their hands crossed,
not thrown away like rubbish. And according to the investigators,
that's what they saw. It was hurried, it was frenzied,
(10:14):
it was disordered. And as they began to kind of
peel away these levels of dirt. As they kind of
began to peel away these layers of dirt that have
been quickly placed over her body, and they began to
pull back the sheet that she was wrapped in, one
of the things they saw was the body of a
(10:38):
little nico that she had been pregnant with. And this
gives you an indication as to how decomposed her body was.
When humans are in a normal state, there's a certain
amount of muscle tension that's in the body, and just
thinking about that relative to a pregnancy, there's a certain
amount of elasticity in tension that is occurring, say for instance,
(11:03):
in the womb, in the uterus, that retains a child
in place. But as decomposition begins to set in, that
tension is released because the muscles they no longer have
the same continuity. And as they release, as the body
of the mother begins to decompose, this tension that endwells
(11:24):
a body naturally releases, the muscles are no longer as
resilient as they once were, and suddenly we have what
it's called a coffin birth. So the baby is literally
born in a post mortem state. That means that the
mother's decomposing body has the child's body issued forth from her.
(11:48):
It's no longer contained in And when the investigators pulled
back that sheet, they found little Nico laying there, and
they describe his body as being in a state of
decomposition as well, you know, no longer protected by his
mother's body. Now that little fetus, that little now born
(12:09):
child in death is exposed to the same elemental factors,
the same decompositional factors as his mother's body. And there
he lay in that dirt next to his mama's body,
knowing that nan had been dead probably about twelve hours
at this point, Nico would not have been born alive. Correct,
(12:30):
That's not possible for that baby to have been born alive.
This was something that occurred postmortal. Man, keep in mind,
and this really kind of drives drives a point home here,
and this is why this is just one of the
points along this that makes this so gut wretched, is
(12:51):
the fact that when Chris Watts wrapped his hands around
Channan Watts's throat and he called is that hemorrhage in
the muscles around her neck? As he squeezed the life
out of her, he was in effect squeezing the life
out of this unborn child. And it is a sad said,
(13:14):
ending to this life, Jackie. We've talked a little bit
(13:40):
about Chanan and little Nico. What do we know about
Celeste and Bella? Chris Watts took his children with him
in the vehicle on the way to bury Chanan Watts,
but what happened once they got to the oil field
is certainly disturbing. We know the girls, we're asking what
(14:01):
was wrong with their mother? And then he smothered his
girls one at a time. What is the difference job
between smothering a child and strangling an adult or is
there any difference? That's a good question, Jackie. And forensics
we actually refer to both of these kinds of deaths,
(14:21):
whether it's a strangulation or a suffocation as an asphyxial death.
And what that means is it's a deprivation of oxygen.
As we say in the South, things got cut off
you know, you're cutting off the air, the air supply,
and so that's what's actually happening here. So you're depriving
these little bodies, both Celeste and Bella, of their source
(14:46):
of oxygen. And you know they're they're believing, at least
the m is believing that this in fact was a smothering.
And you know it's floated around for years and years.
It's smothering is one of the most difficult things to detect.
And you'd be absolutely right because you know, you think about, well,
how would you go about smothering smothering these children. Well,
(15:11):
in the case of say, for instance, we've got Celeste,
who's tiny. You know, she's only three years old, you
could very simply if you're a grown man, particularly the
size of their daddy. Remember he worked out all the time.
He took a lot of pride in displaying how what
a fantastic physique he has. They would be no match
(15:34):
for this man. With Celeste, there was very little evidence
of trauma on her little body, so it would be
very simple for him to take, say, for instance, the
palm of his hand or even a pillow and place
it over her mouth. I think that probably in these
circumstances out there. Remember that the investigators believe these two
(15:57):
children were actually alive. In his vehicle as he is
transporting the body of his deceased wife out to her
burial spot. He could have easily placed his hand over
celesque face, over her nose, in her mouth and deprived
her of oxygen and she would have essentially just kind
(16:17):
of gone to sleep. And this is what's referred to
as an anoxic death, which means that you're literally depriving
the brain of oxygen. The brain requires oxygen in order
to do all of its functions and including keeping our
heart beating. Now, Bella is a completely different story, and
(16:39):
I'll tell you why. There's something that's very very significant
here from a forensic standpoint that gives us an indication
of what may have happened to her and what he
actually did to her. She had no evidence of BATIKUII,
and that is those little vessels that are bursting in
her eyes due to pressure. However, there is something significant,
(17:02):
and it has to do with her mouth. Investigator's report
and theme reports that she had some trauma to her tongue.
You know, how else would she get trauma to her tongue?
Unless she's probably resisting, and not only in her tongue,
but there's a little piece of tissue that attaches our
(17:24):
upper lip and our lower lip to the gums, respectively,
and that's referred to as frenulum, and it's a classic
thing that you look for in suffocation or smothering. Her
upper frenulum was actually lacerated or torn. And if people
at home will just kind of take the tip of
your tongue, put it outside your gum and in between
(17:45):
your lip, and you can actually feel that little piece
of connective tissue if there is pressure directly applied to
the mouth with a hand, for instance, and you're fighting,
you're resisting, you're trying to save your own life, you're trying,
you're struggling to get a breath. That can actually tear.
And I find it very interesting that out of the
(18:09):
essentially four lives that he ended, little Bella fought the most.
She was only four years old. Just let that sink in.
We you know, we were all four years old at
one point in time. Maybe we have children or grandchildren
that are four. You can think about the size of
a child, a little girl like this, But she fought,
and you know what, the one thing that they found
(18:31):
on Chris Watts at night when they interviewed him, the
one bit of evidence when they talked to him the
next day. He had a small mark on his neck,
and I've often wondered if that was not Bella in
just a last gasp, a desperate gasp, but try to
reach up and fend her daddy off, her father, her father,
(18:52):
the man that was there to protect her and love
on her and watch after her as she grew up.
She's trying to fight him off, perhaps, and she scratched
him on his neck, and they have evidence of this.
They took pictures of that. They've never actually linked the two,
but I've often thought about that, because she did fight back.
She fought back to the point where this tissue in
(19:13):
her mouth was essentially lacerated and there were little areas
of hemorrhage, which means it happened in life. Joe, you
just confused me by saying that there was no particular
hemorrhage in her eyes. How is that possible? And you're
gonna have to explain that to me because you've repeatedly
said that when people are smothered, that's one of the
first things that forensic experts look for. So how was
(19:37):
it possible if she was smothered that there's not any
I'll tell you why, Jackie. I'm a simple guy and
I kind of like word pictures, and so the way
I always try to explain particular hemorrhaging is ill you
think about a water hose that's attached to your house,
and you've got a nozzle on one end, and it's closed,
(19:58):
and you turn up the water pressure on this faucet
outside of your house, and the hose might begin to expand,
but yet you turn it off and suddenly the water
that's trapped in there you can release it if you
if you squeeze the nozzle. There has to be sufficient
amount of time that goes by where this internal pressure
(20:21):
is placed on these tiny little vessels. These vessels are
actually located and what's referred to as our capillary beds,
which are these tiny, tiny little vessels. You've got what
are called arterials and you've got what are called venules.
And what happens is that most of the time with
particular hemorrhagy, if you put enough pressure on them, they're
(20:42):
going to literally burst and in the little areas of
tissue that surround these vessels, that blood seeps out, It
seeps out into what's called interstitial tissue, and it presents
You can't you can't make it go away. It's not
like a crime scene that you go back and you
try to clean it up. That doesn't happen. With these
little pen prick hemorrhages. It's going to be there forever
(21:03):
and ever. Amen. The trick here, though, is that in
all three of these cases where Chris Watts put his
hands on these two children, these two little precious baby
girls and his precious wife it's lading their sleep, is
that he didn't render enough pressure for long enough time,
(21:26):
for long enough time for these vessels to burst in
their eyes so that they could appreciate. You're not always
going to get these little focal areas of hemorrhage like that.
It is not necessarily going to happen. So what you're
telling me, Joe, is that the difference in the two
is that it took less pressure and less time to
(21:48):
kill a child as opposed to an adult. Yeah, and
you're absolutely right, Jackie. It did take less pressure and
less time because they're weaker and so it only takes
a smaller amount of time to compromise their airway, their
ability to uptake oxygen so that their brain can still
function as opposed to someone that might be more robust,
(22:12):
like a full grown man, an adult, if you will.
And you know, Nan is not too far removed from
this category because we reflect back and think about what
we think may have been her status. We know that
she was tired, we know that she was advanced in
her month's relative to pregnancy, and also there's that specter
(22:32):
that she may have had some type of drug on
board that would cause her to be in a weakened state,
cause her to be I don't know, just probably barely
semi conscious. So yeah, it's not going to take too
much in their lives. It's such a tragedy when you
(23:08):
begin to think about these two little girls whose lives
were snuffed out by their daddy. But one of the
really puzzling and most horrific parts to this whole story
is what he did with the bodies afterwards. You're absolutely right, Joe.
Let's start at the beginning. We know that once the
little girls were dead, that he first stuffed at their
(23:28):
little bodies through an eight inch hatch into an oil tank.
Let's just start there. How do the bodies of two
little girls four and three years old fit through an
eight inch hole? Think about it. That's about the size
(23:50):
of a dinner plate. It's horrific, you know. And it
was the Anna Darco wall fields out there, and it's
a desolate area. I mean it is you talk about
being removed. It was removed from breast of civilization and
just kind of sits out there. It kind of rises
up out of this prairie out there. Why there, Well,
(24:10):
he knew that it would be isolated. This guy was
familiar with this area. He had a full awareness of
what went out there. And these tanks are essentially storage
tanks for raw petroleum. He takes these two children out there,
and he's got a problem. What am I going to
do with him? Well, he had already dug a very
(24:31):
shallow grave for his wife not too far away from
the base of these tanks, and quickly deposited her body
in that area. Now, what do you do with these
two children where there's two tanks. Now, these things are
made very specifically. They're kind of high. They're probably approximating
maybe twenty feet in height there, so and on top
(24:52):
they have these little hatches and they've got a very
interesting name. They're called thief hatches. And he popped the
latch on the thief hatch on each one of these tanks.
And with Bella in particular. She's four years old, so
her body is certainly larger and more robust than her
(25:14):
three year old sister Celeste. How do you get her
into this hole? Well, the only way I can really
describe it is the fact that she was actually jammed
down into that hole. And how do I know that?
You know, the investigators reported that one of the first
things that they noticed when they got out there to
that site, and they had been given the information that
(25:37):
this is where these two little angels were, they looked
at the thief hatch where Bella's body had been deposited,
and a right along the rim there, some of her
hair was caught in that. And it wasn't just like
a strand I don't think it was like a clump
of hair. Now, how's that accomplished? Well, her body is
(25:59):
obviously you just think about how big eight inches is
that's the diameter on this thing. How in fact do
you drive the body of a four year old through
this tiny opening? Well, it was hard and The evidence
of that is the fact that her hair was left
behind in the edge, which means that it was torn away.
(26:20):
It was ripped away as he's jamming her down through
this hole. And another thing this demonstrates when they finally
do examine Bella's body, She's got scrapes where the edge,
the metal edge of that thief hatch caught hold and
it left these marks on her body. There have been
broken bones. Joe, we think about what he would have
(26:43):
had to have done to get Bella through that thief hatch.
Isn't that inappropriate appropriate term? Considering this guy stole the
life of these two little, precious girls. He would have
had to have taken Bella probably would not have needed
to break bone, but he would have at her shoulders
kind of folded her in toward the center in order
(27:05):
to facilitate getting her down. She probably would have went
in head first. And as he's pressing her down through
this opening, through this thief hatch, the metal edges of
this thing called hold of the tissue the skin, and
it raked it away, and it left these scratches on
her body as she fell through this thing. Finally, I'm
sure that it took a tremendous amount of force on
(27:27):
his part to get her down there. And looking at
the drop from this thief hatch that you're talking about, Joe,
as he stepped the bodies down, you said that most
likely he would not have had the broken bones to
get the children inside those catches. But what about the drop.
We don't necessarily know how far they fell if they
went right into the contents of the oil tank, so
(27:49):
would there have been broken bones from the drop itself.
I think that the fact that they're falling, though it
is a kind of a height. You know, we're looking
at maybe fifteen to eighteen feet and height that they're
falling from the opening of the seashatch. They're splashing down
into a fluid environment. So that's actually going to break
(28:11):
the fall to a certain degree, provided that they don't
strike the bottom of this tank, you know, the bare bottom,
you know. I think that there's enough of a layer
of fluid there that kind of cradle the bodies when
they hit. So you're not going to see any kind
of fracturing or impact injuries necessarily related to this. And
one other thing you have to keep in mind, there's
not going to be any hemorrhage related to the fall either,
(28:34):
you know, because this is a postmorn event, he had
killed these girls before he put them in there, So
I don't know that we would ever really know, and
you know, not to mention the bodies were greatly compromised,
Their status was greatly compromised when it came to the
medical examiner or the corner being able to examine these
bodies once they got them back to the morgue. That
(28:56):
leads us to the next point in our discussion, Joe,
is what happened to the bodies of those two little
girls once they were inside those oil tanks. How caustic
is oil and what is it going to do to
human tissue that is left in there for any period
of time. The horrific part to this is that, first off,
(29:18):
when you go into this environment, and this is raw petroleum,
and there's a lot of stuff that comes off of
raw petroleum that we create in this world that we use.
It's not just gasoline, and it's not just lubricantness all
kinds of stuff that it's used for. But something that's
naturally occurring is what's for two, is aromatic hydrocarbons, and
(29:41):
in this environment, in this environment, two substances stick out.
One's called taluween and another's called benzene. And if you've
ever heard of benzene, you know that it can be
used to polish things with. It is very lethal taluween
as well, and it causes things to break down very quickly.
(30:02):
It eats into tissue, not to the same degree as
certain assets do, but it causes a tissue to become
greatly compromised. It softens things, it begins to promote this
kind of coming apart, and then you marry that up
with natural decompositional process, and these bodies are going to
(30:24):
wind up and what's referred to as kind of a
macerated state, which means that the decomposition has gotten to
the point, this chemical effect that has gotten to the
point where the structural integrity of the body, it's really hard.
The structural integrity of the body is so compromised that
assessing the body at the autopsy is going to be
(30:48):
quite the chore. So are you telling me, then, Joe,
that their bones would have impliable. I don't know that
the bones would have necessarily been pliable in this I
know that the soft tissue surrounding them though, just imagine,
if you will, the worst sunburn that you've ever seen
in your life, where tissue is beginning to peel away.
(31:11):
It's almost like a chemical burn that's taking taking place,
and you would have seen the layers and layers of
tissue that would have been coming off just by touching it. Now,
it's not going to necessarily appear that way initially, but
when you begin to move these bodies around, the bodies
are very fragile, so tissue will begin to fall off
(31:31):
of the bone, if you will. In certain cases deepended
upon the length of exposure, they have to these horrible
chemicals there that they're found in. You know, they had
to drain both of these tanks when this occurred. They
had to call the EPA out because this is such
a dangerous situation. So not only did this guy murder
(31:54):
his children and his wife, but where he placed Belle
and Celeste is such a volatile environment that all of
the workers, all of the investigators, the people that work
out there that have control over these tanks, because they
had to be drained, all these people were exposed to
(32:15):
these chemicals. And just think about that just for a second.
This is the ultimate in a selfish act, you know,
and nobody really talks about this. These investigators that are
out there and the workers that are out there are
traumatized to the fact that they're having to extricate these
little girls out of these tanks, after they know they've
been sitting out there all night long, after the tanks
(32:36):
have been drained, and they got to go out in
there and do that. But they've got to put on
hazmat suits in order to facilitate this. It was a
monumental undertaking and I can tell you these investigators and workers,
they're going to be scarred by this for the rest
of their life. Joe, I've heard you talk about this
case before, and one of the things that always rings
out for me is the phrase, the term degloved. I've
(33:02):
heard you reference that word in regards to these girls.
Explain that to me. We've got two layers of skin
we commonly think about. We think about the epidermist, which
means tops, the top layer. You know. It's like when
you get a blister on your hand. That's the top
layer of the skin that's rising ups, filled with fluid.
(33:23):
And then you've got the dermist, which is that underlying surface.
Beneath the epidermist. It's a bit more robust, it's thicker
with deep clubbing. It can happen in a couple of ways.
You find it a lot in water environments where you
have a body that's found out in a lake or
a river and maybe the ocean, and that skin begins
to come away, that dermist begins to come away from
(33:45):
the underlying connected tissue that you can actually peel a
an entire hands. You can actually peel the surface of
tissue off of a human hand, and that's where we
get this term de glove, and it's like you're peeling
a glove off of a hand. And this can happen
(34:07):
over the entire body. When you're talking about exposing them
to things like benzene and taluweene and this sort of thing.
The whole body can become degloves so that the tissue,
that outer lay of tissue becomes peeled away. And you
can actually appreciate this. It's almost like the skin it's
just being kind of rolled off, if you will. And
(34:31):
you know, I've seen this in environments when you bring
bodies into the mark that have been exposed to chemicals
like this, you have to be very very careful because
it's all very fragile. It'll come off in an instant.
You can actually take your gloved hand you have a
rubber glove on in the morgue and touch it to
the surface of these bodies, and sometimes when you pull
your hand away or that tissue comes off on your
(34:53):
gloved hands and it's it really magnifies this in that
sense that and they got these bodies back to the morgue.
This is something that we're having to deal with. There's
a horrible smell that comes along with this. You would
probably have to wear some type of not just regular mask,
probably a respirator if you're going to do this examination.
(35:15):
And the evidence that you're talking about here is so fine, Jackie.
I mean we're talking about you know, we talked about
petiquii or the eyes even preserved well enough that tissue
around the eyes so that you can see if there
are any particular hemorrhages. Are you able to appreciate the
neck to the degree you need to see if there
was any kind of hemorrhage relative to manual strangulation in
(35:37):
of course, in Bella's case, they were able to see
this trauma to the tongue and that little piece of tissue,
the fregulum in her lip. They were able to appreciate that,
but a lot of other evidence is gone. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan and this is Body Backs
Host
Nancy Grace
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