August 28, 2022 • 49 mins
Emily Noble goes missing on the night of her 52nd birthday. Leaving behind her phone, keys, ID, wallet, and car, with no signs of a forced entry, and her husband claiming that he went to bed in the couple's guest room; Emily Noble has essentially vanished in the middle of the night.
In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard detail the search effort, potential pathways to solve any case that begins with almost no tangible evidence, and the unfortunate scene when Emily Noble's body is finally found.
Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan :
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Morgan. You know certain people in
this life that just have an inclination toward helping those
that are less fortunate. Emily Noble is such a person.
She particularly had a heart for those that were aged,
(00:31):
those that had lost loved ones that were up in
age and we're in declining health. And she had spent
her entire adult life taking care of individuals like this,
and people said that she would just light up a
room when she came in, and she was tenacious as well.
She worked in a medicare office and she would go
(00:51):
to bat for people and she would look out for them,
and she still to this day is remembered for that
specific trait. However, the one thing that sticks in my
mind about Emily is that Emily was found all alone
in a wooded area, deceased in a very unusual way. Today,
(01:15):
we're going to talk about the death of Emily Noble
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags. Joining me is
Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie,
you know she actually went missing on her birthday. That
(01:39):
day that we celebrate a life of an individual. I
can't even imagine how this impacted the world in which
she inhabited. You're absolutely right, Joe. We do know that,
as you pointed out, Emily was very highly thought of
by her friends and family. And let's look a little
bit at her life before we talk about her death.
(02:00):
Emily was in her second marriage. Her first husband had died,
he committed suicide, and then Emily met a new person
to share her wife with. Her second husband is Matthew Moore,
and he brought children into the marriage, a seventeen year
old son, and the son had some emotional difficulties, but Emily,
(02:21):
as you said, had experience with that, so bringing this
dynamic into their marriage was really not a hardship for Emily.
She went out with her husband again, Matthew Moore, to
celebrate her fifty second birthday in twenty twenty. That was
the Memorial Day weekend holiday. They went out, had a
(02:42):
nice evening already a little bit, had a few dreams,
had dinner with friends, and then they went home. That night.
After going to bed, Matthew Moore says he got up
and instead of returning to the bedroom after using the restroom,
he decided to go into a spare guest for him
so that he would not disturb his wife's sleep. When
(03:05):
he gets up the next morning, Emily's gone, what do
you do at that moment? You know, as an investigator,
a lot of people would ask me, you know, some
of the things that you're going to be looking for.
You know, when you show up at a scene like this,
where it seems as though the individual is just like
vanished into thin air, you know, those remnants of their life,
and you know, you think about the world that we
(03:26):
live in. You think about car keys and id and
pocketbooks and wallets and vehicles, you know, all these sorts
of things that give you an indication that someone has
actually left. And you know, when we come onto a scene,
as an investigator, will look for those little points of
(03:48):
evidentiary consideration along the way, just to try to try
to get an ideas to what was happening. Because understand this,
anytime you're talking about a missing person's case into a
great degree of death investigation, you've got nothing to work
with other than those physical things that are either present
or absent. My old adage is this, and I teach
(04:09):
my students this in the classes, is that you know,
negative findings are just as valuable as positive findings along
the way, because you know, if you create this huge
mental checklist in your mind, you're essentially knocking things off
that are going to probably block or clude your view
as an investigator. So you can begin to eliminate things.
(04:30):
So if you've got a person that lives at a
particular resonance, their keys are still there, their wallets still there,
their vehicles, their money, all those sort of things that
you need to kind of get by outside of the home,
then that begins to narrow your focus down quite a bit.
And then of course, the next thing you're going to
jump to or things like, you know, signs of struggle.
And we've all heard this before. There's no signs of
(04:52):
forced entry or struggle at the scene. And it's kind
of it's almost a boilerplate statement that we make, but
there's a lot of depth there, you know, when you
think about it, signs a forest entry, Well, we'll look
around the doorframe to see if it's been pressed in
any way. One of the things that I have been
witnessed to where you have somebody that comes into a
(05:12):
home and actually commits some kind of horrible crime in
this environment, I've seen any number of times where there
is a clear footprint on the door, generally near the
latch externally, where people have kicked it in, and it
really that tells a lot, doesn't it. Or maybe a
location where somebody's put their shoulder into the door and
you've got broken glass and the frame is kind of
(05:35):
caved in, and then when you get inside of the home,
if someone is resistant, for instance, you kind of surprise them.
You might have upturned furniture where they're struggling to get
away from the stranger. But none of that stuff existed.
And kimon Man chiefs in dwelling this residence with her husband,
even though he's not in the same room with her.
(05:55):
According to him, he's gone off and slept in a
separate area in order to avoid waking her up. He
would think that if something like that had occurred, he
could have been alerted, you know, a high pitched scream
or the crashing of furniture and all that sort of thing.
None of that really existed in this environment. Emiley just
(06:16):
kind of vaporized, just disappeared. You brought up being able
to hear if something happened. So you're talking eyewitness and
ear witness. So did the husband hear anything? Did he
hear someone trying to get into the home? And then
we want to look at the eyewitness not just did
anybody in the neighborhood see something going on? But looking
(06:38):
at what was found in the bedroom? Was anything missing?
Was the bed awry? Was there blood? Was there anything broken?
And those are all the things that you're talking about, Joe.
So how do the investigators perceived since at this point
there doesn't seem to be anything wrong? Yeah, there's not.
(07:00):
I think that one really salient point here that would
really you know, from an investigative standpoint, that would really
raise my red flags is what do we know about
what was occurring that evening? Well, we know that there
was a birthday celebration, and anytime you have as an
death investigator in particular, I've always had these kind of markers.
(07:20):
They involved anniversaries, birthdays, maybe anniversaries in your mind, where
their benchmarks in your own life, where people have passed
away that you greatly love. And sometimes those are indications
of an individual maybe going off to do some kind
of self harm, Aren't it because they're sad about getting older,
or they're sad because they're missing somebody in their life,
or you know, they've gone through a divorce or something
(07:41):
that happened on that particular day. And then you couple
that with the fact that she and her husband had
gone out that night to celebrate her birthday. And it's
not like they just stopped off at a local watering
hole and just kind of sat there and just you know,
talked and you know, had a few drinks. That they
went to multiple locations. And when you begin to talk
(08:04):
about something as weighty as this adult woman that just
vanishes off of the face the planet, you know, what
is it that she's engaging in at that moment time
or approximating that moment time that's different than any other
time in her normal day to day life. Well, she's
going out to these multiple locations. There's an opportunity if
(08:25):
you have a predator out there, for instance, that will
have spotted these two together or maybe had spotted her
and they were going to target her. So you're going
to multiple locations and you're kind of following them along
as an investigator. That's one of the things that we
pick up on. You know, you're going to do a
deep dive into this, go back look at CCTV captures
(08:47):
if you can, from local bars, also from anything that's
out on the street, street pewcams, those sorts of things
to see if anybody was shadowing them as they're kind
of walking around and moving back and forth to their
car and that sort of thing, because you have to eliminate,
like I said, you have to eliminate all of the
possibilities moving forward. You know, you only get really one
(09:09):
shot at this. And how a case like this will
vary from a say, a static death investigation where you
have a body and you're going out there and you're
kind of tracing back from that primary scene location back
to where they were living or where they had been
that sort of thing. This is still very dynamic because
(09:31):
your working assumption is that at this point in time,
she is still alive. So you throw in this idea
that you're you know, you're calling in missing person squad,
you might be calling in federal marshals or state police
that are going to be on the lookout, and so
you've got all this other data that's coming in, and
you know that's all fine and good, but what happens
(09:52):
is a lot of the stuff that you're looking at
forensically that a death investigator would look at. It's kind
of being lost. It's been last because your focus has
shifted in this type of investigation. I know that there's
not a printed list Joe of things that investigators go through.
It's probably a list in their mind of you know,
what they're looking for in a house or in a location.
(10:17):
Rather when someone goes missing. But here you have the evidence,
her phone, her keys, Emily's wallet are still in the home.
So you've got this checklist that you go by in
your mind that you're checking as anybody seen, or is
their cameras in the house, or their footprints outside, so
(10:38):
many things. But if there is, as you pointed out earlier,
negative findings, how do you go about setting yourself up
for a successful investigation. Well, it comes down to probability.
At that point in time, you begin to think, well,
if she is not here in this location and there's
no evidence that something has happen happened that is indicative
(11:02):
of a horrific event like broken furniture, blood trails, blood spots,
attempts to clean up blood, all those sorts of things.
Then you have to think, well, what are going to
be my highest probabilities for what happened to her, And
you have to follow kind of that line of logic.
And you know, if the car is still there, you think, well,
(11:23):
she's walking, she's ambulatory. At that point in time, she
has wandered away from the house. I don't know. Maybe
she came home that night, they'd had a lot to drink.
She's in the bedroom by herself, admittedly according to her husband.
Remember he said he wouldn't slept in the other bedroom.
She wakes up, she's disoriented, she walks out of the door,
closes the door behind her, and wanders off, maybe in
(11:45):
her bare feet. If you can't find her shoes around
the house, then you assume that she put them on.
But if she didn't, maybe she's got a pair of
house shoes. She walked out in those What are the
possibilities And it's from that central point, that central point,
which would be her bedroom where she was ass known
to be alive according to her husband, you would begin
to use that as your investigative hub, that's the hub
(12:08):
of the wheel. And then radiating out from that, you're
going to follow every type of physical path that she
could have potentially tried. If you will to get as
much distance between her and the central hub and an
ending location. You know, you begin to think about things, well,
is there a wooded area that she could have wandered
(12:28):
off into. If there is a wooded area, of what
kind of hazards are in there? Are we talking about
that there's some kind of gulture, you know, a cliff
that she could have stepped off on. If she's in
a rugged territory. Is there a river or body of
water nearby that she could have wandered off into and
became helpless and maybe drowned in that location? Is there
a major roadway if she was disoriented and she walked
(12:50):
out into the roadway where somebody could have snatched her up,
or even worse, she could have been struck as a pedestrian.
She's laying dead on the side of the road. And
you know, to your point, you know, we talk a
lot about these checklists that we kind of run through
in our mind. I've got to tell you, in my
time as a death investigator, and when I first started
as a very young death investigator, we didn't have a
(13:14):
bunch of checklists that you know, we could download off
of something. These things were literally handed down to us
verbally many times, and we would try to codify them
in some way and write them down. But after a
period of time, you begin to check these things off
in your brain as you're working these cases, because you
reflect back to earlier cases that you had handled, and
(13:36):
hopefully you don't do it every time, but hopefully you're
thinking back, you know, how did I screw up an
earlier case, or what did I'm miss in an earlier
case where I can go back and try to do
this one a little bit better. Now. They do have
checklists that will that they will run down, and I've
heard a couple of people say this kind of a
very interesting point. It's great to have a checklist, but
(13:57):
when you marry yourself to a checklist, there's a certain
amount of creativity that goes into an investigation, and you
kind of handicap yourself at that point in time because
you're doing this thing, as they say, by rote, and
you're not thinking outside the box at that point in time,
and that can be detrimental to the investigation as well.
(14:37):
You've got someone in your life that you just absolutely
dearly love. I cannot even begin to fathom fathom the
depths of pain and anguished that an individual goes through
when you wake up and that person is not there anythink,
what in the world am I going to do? Who
is there to help me? Because I can only imagine
that is probably as alone as you ever feel as
(15:01):
a spouse. So with that said, Jackie, you know the
search has got to start somewhere and you have got
to call and help at this point in time, and
helped came. Joe helped aim in droves Emily's family, Emily's
friends started searching. Now their home. There was a lot
of wooded areas around her home, so thought was knowing
(15:23):
that Emily liked being out in nature. Her friends said
she often would take photos and that she liked to
take an early morning qualt. So that was the first
place that her friends and family started looking, the nature
areas surrounding their home. They even brought in cadaver dogs,
(15:45):
drones and divers for those areas near them. Obviously they
were looking for a body or for her. What kind
of clues would these three things give you, Joe, Look,
you introduced canaan into this environment, and we all know
that when we see things, we're visualizing things. We kind
of have a visual spectrum that we work on where
(16:07):
we sense different types of light shading, all those sorts
of things. And dogs, by their nature have great eyesight
there you know, they're natural hunters. But if you think
their site is fantastic, you begin to think about and
I've worked with cadaver dogs before you begin to think
about this kind of all factory spectrum that they have
that sense of smell. It is beyond anything that we
(16:31):
can actually fathom as humans and so and it's very
finely tuned. And these dogs, when you're talking about a
cadaver dog as opposed to say, for instance, a tracking dog,
we have this old image of a bluetick hound dog
that they use and where prisoners have escaped and they
put these dogs on the trail. The cadaver dog is
specifically trained to go out and pick up scent of
(16:56):
the dead because it dead have a very specific odor
that dogs can pick up on. And you know, and
interestingly enough with you know, over the years when I
worked at the Corners offices and medical Examiner's offices I
worked for in the past, you know, daver dog trainers
would actually come to our facility and they would many
times grab a rag with our permission, bring a rag
(17:18):
with them that's uncontaminated, or an old sock, and they
would essentially sent that item with the scent of the dead.
It can come in a variety of choices. Here you
have the freshly dead to decompose, severely decomposed, which we
would have at the morgue, to something as benign as
(17:39):
skelptal remains, which you wouldn't think would have a scent,
but it does. And they would have samples from each
one of these. And they would take these dogs out
and train them on this all factory spectrum, if you will.
And so it's quite fascinating to see these animals work.
And so I think again you get when an investigator
is in the presence of a cadaver dog, it can
(18:03):
I think that on one level, it can make it
kind of lazy because you're you're sitting there and you're thinking, well,
if the dog doesn't hit out here, then there's nothing
to be found. Well, as great as these dogs are,
they don't always find everything that there is out there.
And you know you have to couple that with common
sense as well. The dog. The whole thing is not
on the dog itself. It's on how the handler manages
(18:25):
the animal, and then all of the peripheral people. Let's
think about you know, she had friends that were out
there there. There were people that really loved this woman,
cared about her because she had cared for so many
other people, and so yeah, people that would go out
day after day looking for her because they all knew,
you know, like we'd said earlier, her her wallet, her keys, money, everything.
We're the other vehicles still there. Where could she have
(18:47):
gone to? You know, she just didn't you know, kind
of ascend up in the air and float off. She
had to have left that location very specifically, probably walking
away or having been walked away from that location. So
you begin to look at this and you know some
of the other factors that come into play, Well, do
you have a person that tracks humans that's out there,
(19:11):
that can look for sign you know, things like cloth
caught in trees, threads reading sign of say, footprints, disturbed vegetation,
which you would look forward, things that are broken, things
that are pressed away. Because if you have somebody, let's
just say you have somebody that is in an altered state,
that altered state is going to impede their ability to
(19:32):
find a standard path to walk down. So they're going
to walk through overgrown brush areas, and a person that's
keen to this, that can look at this, can understand, well,
this area of vegetation has been penetrated by somebody or something.
You can see these broken branches, you can see the
ground is pressed down, all the vegetation is pressed down.
(19:54):
They're going to be really keen to follow that and
see that. One of the things that you're hoping is
not going to happen though, that you'll have a volunteer
that might walk through the same area and contaminate the
area or disrupt it from its original pristine composition. You
mentioned something that I found absolutely fascinating and talking about
the cadaver dogs. They can smell bones even when there
(20:19):
is no organic matter remaining. Well, yeah, and you know,
bone itself is in fact organic. But kind of what
you will have the problem is we're influenced so much
by by media. You know, the things that we see
on television, all the sorts of things that you think.
You know, people when they think skeleton or skeletonized remains,
they see some whitewashed collection of bones that have been
(20:43):
created on a set somewhere that's not the reality. These
bones are going to be. First off, unless they're sitting
out in the desert somewhere, they're not going to be
bleached white. They're going to have kind of a yellow
appearance to them, and there will still be remnant of
tissue that's left behind, but that remnantive tissue is not
going to be as robust as it would have been
(21:05):
in the earlier stages. And here's another thing that occurs
with skeletal remains, is that as bodies are left out
in nature and you have all of the local fauna,
which you know, when we're talking about forensic biology talking
about flora and fauna, flora being the plants, and in
fauna being the local animal kingdom that inhabits that particular area.
(21:29):
The fauna whether it's raccoons or possums, or even squirrels, yes, squirrels,
or certainly dogs or hogs. If you live in an
area where there's wild hogs, they will root around bodies
and they will drag things off. So many times you
can take a cadaver dog out in these areas and
they will have multiple hits on decomposing remains, even if
(21:50):
it is bone. Because these animals will take them to
their burrows and place them in these locations. So you're
getting hits, multiple hits, all over the place, as opposed
to say something that is what's referred to as concentrically located.
We've heard the term eccentrically well. As the body is
essentially taken apart, these remains become eccentric to the initial location,
(22:14):
the primary scene, and so you'll have them dispersed all
over the place, and this can be very very confusing.
That's why it's very important as to when you find
those elements that are separate from what you believe is
the primary scene, you mark those elements and you secure
them in place. And that does first off, it helps
you as you begin to document the location of that
(22:38):
gives you an idea. You can look at it and
you know you can kind of surmise what had happened.
Is this a post mortem event? As this something where
you have a remain, a skeletal remain, an element. Let's say,
for instance, it's a vertebral body, a bone from the spine,
where an animal is taken at that location, maybe buried
it or maybe simply gnawd on it and then walked
away and left that behind, or is this something more
(23:01):
sinister even than that, where you have somebody that has, say,
for instance, dismembered a body and left that portion there.
It may have never been touched by an animal, but
you document in that location. An Animal behaviorists also look
at these kinds of things to see what locations these
animals trapes off with. And if you have say two
competing animal groups, they're not necessarily going to go in
(23:23):
the same location with that remain that they find. You
can even see this behavior in dogs. If you have
a bunch of dogs around and you give elements for
them to chew on and that sort of thing, they're
going to take them off in different directions many times
because that is theirs. They possess that thing, they're going
to take it off. It's no different with human remains,
they do the same. You'll see the same behavior. And
(23:45):
particularly in the animal kingdom, there's a pecking order. That's
why they talk about animals that are out there like
bears and alligators and all sorts of things that are
apex predators. Well, the smaller animals don't want to have
anything to do with the bigger animals. They want to
take that little piece they have and go to their location.
So those are some of the things that you began
to look for out in this environment. A couple of
(24:06):
months went by, and the investigation into Emily Noble's disappearance continues.
But then, as Nancy would say, a twist, a group
of Emily's friends were out searching. What did they find? Joe,
we're talking four months for count them, four months down
(24:27):
range since her birthday. You began to look at this
and her friends have been searching high and low for
her had not been able to find her. I'm sure
that they're just broken hearted. But what before I'd dig
too deep into this, just understand what these friends have
been doing. They have stayed committed through this entire exercise.
(24:48):
You know, it's real easy for people to say, yeah,
we're going to gather together and go look for somebody,
but you're still doing a four months down range. That
gives you an idea as to how much they loved well,
four months, four months, they just didn't quit. They just
kept on. And what is so striking about this is
(25:10):
that when these four friends were purposefully outlooking for their friend,
they were out there with purpose to find her. They did,
(25:42):
you know, being a death investigator by trade, it wasn't
me that generally found bodies. I think maybe in the
entire course of my career I found actually found maybe
three bodies. You're the one that has always summoned out
after the body has been found. And I've always wondered
about a civilian that's out wandering about, particularly an individual
(26:04):
it might be vested, and they come across a body,
It's got to be one of the most shocking things
that anyone could be subjected to. It would have to
be a horrifying experience, especially to find your friend in
the position and the state that the body was in.
As Emily's friends were out searching, they came across a
(26:27):
decomposing body that was found in a kneeling position near
a tree, and there was a rope what appeared to
be a rope suspended from the tree. It actually turned
out that it was a USB cord around Emily's neck.
They had to use dental records to identify Emily Noble. Yeah,
(26:53):
you're talking four months down range, as I'd previously mentioned,
and during that period of tom and in this environment,
remember we've gone through the entire summer here remember, let's
let's reflect back just for a second. She went missing
back in May, all right. She was not found until September.
So regardless of what geographic location you may live in
(27:16):
in our country, in the United States, temperatures are going
to begin to rise, you know, going into well starting
in April, they begin to rise, and then you know
they'll gradually fall off. But with heat, with heat, as
we've previously discussed on body bags, with heat comes more
rapid decomposition. The colder it is, the slower decompositions, the
(27:38):
hotter it is, the quicker it happens. And the fact
that they were able to find her body still intact,
and to say that the body is intact is in
air quotes here because it's it's one of the most
bizarre things I've heard of in some time. They did
find her remains there, and this is not like you
(28:00):
can walk up to Emily's mortal remains and say, yeah,
that's Emily, all right. I've never been a fan of that.
I'm not a fan of showing family's bodies. You know
the old idea where you pull the sheet back and
they look at the face, say yeah, that's my loved one.
I like scientific verification. And as you had mentioned Jackie
just a moment ago, they did to use dental anti
(28:22):
mortem dental records. You know, you have to track down
to dentist because you suspect that it might be her,
but you have to have a forensic odentologist who is
a forensic dentist that will come in and actually do
a dental chart. Just think about going to your dentist
and the dentist charting your teeth in life. Forensic odentologists,
though many times they're known for bite mark examination, where
(28:44):
they really make them money is identifying bodies because the
teeth are so static, you know they're there. It's not
like other things in the body. It's as accurate as
you can be without getting into the area of DNA,
which they eventually did with Emily. But you compare the
anti mortem, which means prior to death, with post mortem
(29:04):
dental charting. So you're looking for missing teeth which may
have been missing in life. Say if somebody had had
I'm giving an example, if someone has had their wisdom
teeth extracted in life. Well, if you've come across a
body and they still have their wisdom teeth automatically, that
person doesn't qualify that chart that you have that you
suspect that it might be that person's out of the
(29:24):
bedding at that point in time. But if you see
that their wisdom teeth are missing in the anti mortem
chart that you have indicates those wisdom teeth, that's one
box you can check. And then you go and look
at fillings to see what teeth are filled. Did she
have any cavitations and her teeth, did she have any replacements?
Was there a bridge there? Did she have caps on
(29:45):
her teeth? You know some people will get porcelain caps
covering their teeth, crowns, those sorts of things, any kind
of manifestations. Teeth are absolutely fascinating in this sense as
for their utility to identify a body, and not just that,
but the position of teeth because teeth they have multiple
(30:05):
planes of identifications. It's the basis why people get correct
if things done to their teeth all the time. You know,
when where kids, people get bracest placed on the teeth,
because teeth will rotate, you know, along the compass phase
three hundred and sixty degrees. Along those points, they can
rotate in any number of degrees, and people want to
get those shifted back so that they look quote unquote normal,
(30:27):
you know, whatever that means relative to teeth. So they
can be pitched forward, pitched back, that can pitch sideways,
and they can rotate. So those are unique to each individual.
And so what makes it even more unique is that
there are thirty two teeth in the adult mouth. So
it's that's what makes it so fascinating. When you begin
(30:50):
to do the math on this, that the opportunity becomes
exponential in order to identify. So that's why they rely
upon this. But once they got her identified, because you
could not look at her body and say that that
is in fact her, then the assessment begins to, well
what actually happened to her? You talk about this ligature
(31:15):
that was found in place around her neck or her
neck area. You know, at first, I'm sure that they
thought that it probably was a rope or some kind
of chord. Turned out to be a USB chord, which
is not something that's very robust, you know, you think
about it. I mean, how many of us out there
have had to replace a USB chord because it just
(31:36):
craps out on so you can't use it any longer.
It becomes fraid or fragile, that sorre thing a USB
chord's going to be used in order to hang yourself with,
because that's what they were saying. They were saying that
this appeared to be at first a suicide, and the
fact that she was down for this period of time
(31:59):
and in a knee lean position when she was found
fully closed, her skeletal remains were still intact. Jackie, this
is mind blowing. In a kneeling position beneath this tree
with this USB cord around her neck and then anchor
to the tree somehow the authorities had not been very
specific about it, but this was entirely supporting her weight
(32:21):
at this moment in time. And you want to know
something else, what's really fascinating about this. She had decomposed
so much, huh that when they got her remains back
to the coroner's office, her total her total body weight
including clothing was nineteen pounds nineteen pounds, but yet the
(32:47):
body had remained intact, which is absolutely fascinating to me
in this case. There's so much about this case fascinating.
I am in tree fascinated and perplexed by the fact
that her body was in a kneeling position and remained there.
Now looking at the USB cord, I have never seen
(33:08):
a USB cord longer than ten feet. So yeah, if
she's in a kneeling position, and if it's a ten
feet you know, a USB cord that's only ten feet,
then you're looking at a trade branch that's really not
very by off the ground. So most people, when you
think of hanging yourself, you think, okay, my feet doesn't
(33:30):
touch the ground, right, So how is that possible? Yeah,
that's a that's a fallacy that people are suspended. Let's
go ahead and eradicate that to begin with. That's that's
not um, that's untrue. As a matter of fact, I've
had probably more people that are not totally suspended as
opposed to having been suspended. That mean, when I say suspended,
(33:51):
I mean their feet are not on the floor at all,
that their body essentially is floating in air. Again, we're
at the mercy of the entertainment world because that's how
it's portrayed. That's very dramatic, isn't it when you think
about it. You know, how many times have we seen
a movie where a person opens the door and there's
two feet dangling in the air and that's just not
the case. I've when we begin to think about the
(34:13):
length of the ligature. You talked about the USB cord.
You haven't seen one. It's longer than than ten feet.
You know, you can go into a truck stop. I
think about this in trips I take. You can go
in the truck stop and get a replacement USB cord.
And you're right, they are very long. You know. You
plug it in the in the charger in the front
of the car and you can hand it over you
(34:33):
over your shoulder to your kids in the backseat because
they're complaining they can't charge their phone. And yeah, that's
that's the greatest length. But you don't really need that much.
I've actually had people that have hung themselves with hair
dryer cords where the hair dryer, the actual body of
the hair dryer, is hanging beneath the neck. It doesn't
require much. But people do not need to be and
just hear me right, do not need to be suspended
(34:54):
in order to hang themselves. They can be. I've had
them in a kneeling position. I've had them in the
seeded position as well. How does your fight or flight
instinct if you are trying to hang yourself, not go ah,
wait a minute, I don't want to do this. If
you are able to touch the ground and save yourself,
how do you keep from doing that. I've always been
(35:16):
fascinated by this, and I think that a lot of
it has to do not with the occlusion of the airway,
that is, where the airway is being blocked, where it's
clamping down, because you know, you begin to think about, well,
I mean, any of us that have been in an
environment where we lose our breath. Say when you're a
kid and you're you know, there's an old game people
would play a pigpile. You know, everybody piles on top
(35:36):
of one another, and you're gasping for air and you're
fighting because you can't breathe. It's not the same mechanism.
It's not the same mechanism at all. Remember when you're
talking about a literature. The airway, yeah, is compromised to
a great degree. But the other thing that is even
more compromised, it's more greatly compromised, is your blood flow.
(35:57):
What happens when those areas are blocked. You know, you've
got your crodded vessels that are supplying your brain with
oxygenated blood. Well, I'll tell you what happens. There's a
sleepiness that sets in. There's a sleepiness that sets in,
and people will set themselves in these positions and slowly
(36:19):
sink to the floor. There's a lack of oxygen saturation
going to the brain. Okay, visa to be the blood,
not the airway. The airway is the uptake. You know,
you're supplying through your lungs and none. That's not what
I'm talking about. I'm talking about oxygenated blood making its
way to the brain. You having a noxic event where
(36:41):
the flow of oxygenated blood is being shut down to
the brain and people become sleepy at that point in time.
That's the only way I've ever been able to explain this,
because it's fascinating to me when I see someone that
is not totally suspended. They're either sitting on their backside
or on their knees and they've hung themselves this way.
You know, we have this with auto erotic cases many
(37:02):
times where people will hang themselves intentionally and it's ruled
of course, those are ruled as accidental death, and it
is because the blood flow has been cut off to
the brain, not the oxygen itself, not the airway, and
the airway if you're being smothered or choked or something
like that, that does initiate that fight or flight. When
we look at the injuries that Emi linked Noble add
(37:27):
we find that she was strangled, yet she also had
some severe injuries to her face and neck. Yeah, we do.
And that is what has led authorities to begin to
question as to whether or not this case was in
(37:48):
fact a suicide. And they've come to the conclusion that
Emily's death was actually a staged suicide. That means it
is something that is made to look as though this
was a hanging, a self inflicted hanging, as opposed to
something much more nefarious and dark. And let me give
you the evidence that I have for this. If you
(38:09):
think about the base of your tongue, and how many
times have we talked about this, you know, over our
time together, jacking not just a body back. Yeah, yeah,
that's what we're going to talk about. The highoid bone
sits so high up in the neck. And again I'll
refresh everybody that doesn't remember. If the highoid bone is
not only non articulated bone in the human body, that
(38:29):
means it's not connected to any other bone, and its
sole purpose is to anchor the tongue in the back
of the throat. You begin to think about how high
up in your throat the back of your tongue is.
It doesn't go all the way down, you know, all
the way down your throat. It's anchored in the back,
and it's anchored by the highoid, very very high up.
So you begin to couple that, and you look at
(38:50):
the diameter, which is, I don't know, cord of an
inch maybe for a USB cord. How's the USB cord
going to break? It would have to be so high,
and you would have to fall with such force, and
it would have to be specifically targeted. And here's the
thing about her fractures. And I say fracture, Notice I
say fracturedres plural. The highway bone is shaped like a
(39:15):
horse shoe or some people say. You'll hear forensic pathologists
talk about it as a bird like structure. That means
it's got wings. You've got the left greater horn and
the right greater horn, which are the end tips of
this thing. Okay, Like just think about the tips of
the wings of a bird. All right, Both of those
(39:37):
both of those wings in Emily's case, are fractured. You
know what that requires. That requires a specific targeted pressure
to those areas for a sustained period of time. The
only way you achieve that is by either a sea
clamp or a throttling. Sea clamp is a single hand
(39:59):
that goes up high a neck and you begin to
squeeze down like you're squeezing an orange, or throttling where
you've got your thumbs crossed over and that kind of
classic theatrical choking. Somebody out and you're high up on
the neck and you're squeezing. But not only was Emily's
highwoid fractured in multiple locations, but also her thyroid cartilage,
(40:23):
which sits inferior, which is just a fancy word for
below below the highwoid. It's a cartilaginous body that kind
of contains you know, where our airway is and everything.
It was fractured as well. So you've got cartilage that
was fractured. That's how much pressure was applied. You're not
just talking about a bone, which we think about fracturing
(40:45):
with bones. We don't think about cartilage being fractured. In
her case, her thyroid cartilage was actually fractured, was fractured
and snapped along the way. There's evidence that she's got
damage to her maxilla. If everybody will ascend, actually take
their index finger and touch above their upper teeth that
hard area where your teeth are implanted or set that
(41:09):
that's your maxilla. That's the hard palette up there that
was damaged as well. You say, well, how are those
two things associated. Well, in my opinion, if you get
trauma to the maxillary area, that's submission, that's you're going
to submit. You're putting your hand forcefully over their mouth,
(41:31):
for instance, or you're punching them in that area, and
you're directly causing trauma to that hard area above their
upper teeth to get them to submit. And then a
hand or some other item that you can direct force
with this placed over their throat that you know, and
she's she's not a very large woman. She's very delicate looking,
(41:51):
you know in life, you see her, she's very slightly built.
It wouldn't take much and you begin to apply that
direct pressure, you begin to squeeze like that, and essentially
what happened is that the highway was fractured during all
of this, which led to her death. And also her
airway at the top end was compromised because the thyroid
(42:12):
cordleitge was fractured. No, no, no, no, wait a minute,
let me play Devil's advocate for just a second. Could
those injuries have happened after her death if she was
suspended by this usp chord. Could that have happened as
her body decomposed and it changed the angle of how
her body was resting. I might agree with you if
(42:36):
if we said that the USB cord was overlying one
specific area and it gave way the structural continuity, just
it gave in to this time that her body spent
spent decomposing, But two specific areas. You're talking about a
bone that's very isolated and with two bony prominences that
(43:00):
are several that are probably two to three inches, and
with a part well, let's just say an inch and
a half to two inches, and both of those features
of that singular bone were fractured. I find that highly unlikely.
It would tell me that you had to have direct
pressure applied for a protracted period of time, and it
(43:23):
would have to be an increasing pressure to get this
bone and these two separate locations anatomically to snap. That's
what would have to take place. And one of the
things that we look for with and I'm going to
kind of tell everybody, you know, kind of how we
differentiate between a stage suicide and a real suicide. When
(43:48):
you're looking at a literature that is around somebody's neck
that has been used to kill themselves with a noose,
if you will, because of the suspension, because of the
weight of the body, the body hanging down and it's
being supported by this news on the exterior of the neck,
say the tissue that's left behind. You'll have this interesting
(44:10):
feature that will present itself. That's called tinting. And I
like the tinting on your car windows, tinting like we're
going tinting tonight, like pup tent t E n T
I n G tinting feature that literally travels upward in
an acute angle so that the news forms kind of
(44:30):
the top of the pup tent at the back side
of the head. And so you'll have this deep furrow.
And remember a USB cord is not very robust, it's
very very thin. So the rule of thumb for us
as death investigators, the more narrow the literature the deeper
the furrow because you've got a smaller surface area to
(44:51):
support the body weight. So if someone used, say, for instance,
a belt, say a three h wide belt, the furrow
is going to be shallow. Okay, it's not gonna be
real deep because you've got that wide surface area to
support the body weight. With a USB cord, However, it's
going to dig in. It'll be very very deep. Now,
if a person has been hanging for a protracted period
(45:15):
of time, they'll have this tinting feature. However, if there
if there was other pressure that was applied below that,
say like a broad area where you have hemorrhage that's
not running say acutely upward, that's associated with the tinting feature.
But yet you have hemorrhage that's running kind of parallel
(45:36):
to the shoulders, which is going straight back in the
soft tissues of the neck. That's an indication that someone
has applied direct pressure downward as opposed to acutely upward.
In the pattern would not match. And so you've got
these two things that are staring at you you're trying
to make heads or tails of And that's one of
(45:56):
the big indicators that we look for specifically in this area.
There are other things you look for in stage suicide,
but specifically in this area, this is one of the
things that you look for to try to determine if
an event was staged or not. One of the other issues,
Joe that came up in looking at this being staged.
Let me say now that Emily's husband, Matthew Moore was
(46:18):
arrested and charged with Emily's death, and one of the
facts that came into play was that Moore's son Joey,
committed suicide be hung himself. Yeah, and that you know,
certainly as an investigator that you have to look into that. Okay,
(46:40):
that's something you're gonna have to dig into because once
you have an individual in a family and listen, understand
this very important point here, many times you will have
copycat events in families where they's suicide or history of suicide.
People will witness this happened in their family and then
(47:01):
they'll fall suit. Okay, and I think that that's the
first thing you're going to check off, you know, check
off the list Who're gonna look at this and say, well,
is there any indication here? You have to explore that
as an investigator, you have to look into that and say, well,
is there any similarity here between what has happened to
Emily and compare that with what happened to Matt's son, Joey.
(47:25):
You know, many months before when he died, and you know,
according to the press, you know, Joey had a tremendous
amount of psychological illness that he was dealing with. And
you know what kind of really makes this quite quite
sad is the fact that Emily loved this kid. He
became part of her family. From what we are understanding,
(47:48):
Emily took over quite a bit of the parental role
in Joey's life. I mean, he was really debilitated psychologically,
and she would tend to him, she would watch after him,
and really apparently loved him deeply. And so you could
see how his death would impact someone. And not only that,
but you begin to look at Emily's history as well,
(48:10):
and you know that her first husband, who people have
stated that she regarded as the love of her life,
he had taken his life. There are not a lot
of specifics as to how that first husband took his life,
but her life's been touched. I mean, it's certainly been
touched by suicide like many of us you know that
are out there in public, but in hers in particular,
(48:32):
two people that she truly cared for had lost their lives,
and as investigators, as unpleasant as it is, you have
to exhaust every possibility because at the end of the day,
you want to look at these cases and make sure
that not only are they thoroughly investigated, but if there
is evidence, they are thoroughly prosecuted as well. Matthew Moore
(48:54):
has been arrested and charged with Emily's death, although let
us do point out this case has not yet been adjudicated,
and everyone who's innocent until proven guilty. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is body Backs
Bodybacks with Joseph Scott Morgan. You know certain people in
this life that just have an inclination toward helping those
that are less fortunate. Emily Noble is such a person.
She particularly had a heart for those that were aged,
(00:31):
those that had lost loved ones that were up in
age and we're in declining health. And she had spent
her entire adult life taking care of individuals like this,
and people said that she would just light up a
room when she came in, and she was tenacious as well.
She worked in a medicare office and she would go
(00:51):
to bat for people and she would look out for them,
and she still to this day is remembered for that
specific trait. However, the one thing that sticks in my
mind about Emily is that Emily was found all alone
in a wooded area, deceased in a very unusual way. Today,
(01:15):
we're going to talk about the death of Emily Noble
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybags. Joining me is
Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie,
you know she actually went missing on her birthday. That
(01:39):
day that we celebrate a life of an individual. I
can't even imagine how this impacted the world in which
she inhabited. You're absolutely right, Joe. We do know that,
as you pointed out, Emily was very highly thought of
by her friends and family. And let's look a little
bit at her life before we talk about her death.
(02:00):
Emily was in her second marriage. Her first husband had died,
he committed suicide, and then Emily met a new person
to share her wife with. Her second husband is Matthew Moore,
and he brought children into the marriage, a seventeen year
old son, and the son had some emotional difficulties, but Emily,
(02:21):
as you said, had experience with that, so bringing this
dynamic into their marriage was really not a hardship for Emily.
She went out with her husband again, Matthew Moore, to
celebrate her fifty second birthday in twenty twenty. That was
the Memorial Day weekend holiday. They went out, had a
(02:42):
nice evening already a little bit, had a few dreams,
had dinner with friends, and then they went home. That night.
After going to bed, Matthew Moore says he got up
and instead of returning to the bedroom after using the restroom,
he decided to go into a spare guest for him
so that he would not disturb his wife's sleep. When
(03:05):
he gets up the next morning, Emily's gone, what do
you do at that moment? You know, as an investigator,
a lot of people would ask me, you know, some
of the things that you're going to be looking for.
You know, when you show up at a scene like this,
where it seems as though the individual is just like
vanished into thin air, you know, those remnants of their life,
and you know, you think about the world that we
(03:26):
live in. You think about car keys and id and
pocketbooks and wallets and vehicles, you know, all these sorts
of things that give you an indication that someone has
actually left. And you know, when we come onto a scene,
as an investigator, will look for those little points of
(03:48):
evidentiary consideration along the way, just to try to try
to get an ideas to what was happening. Because understand this,
anytime you're talking about a missing person's case into a
great degree of death investigation, you've got nothing to work
with other than those physical things that are either present
or absent. My old adage is this, and I teach
(04:09):
my students this in the classes, is that you know,
negative findings are just as valuable as positive findings along
the way, because you know, if you create this huge
mental checklist in your mind, you're essentially knocking things off
that are going to probably block or clude your view
as an investigator. So you can begin to eliminate things.
(04:30):
So if you've got a person that lives at a
particular resonance, their keys are still there, their wallets still there,
their vehicles, their money, all those sort of things that
you need to kind of get by outside of the home,
then that begins to narrow your focus down quite a bit.
And then of course, the next thing you're going to
jump to or things like, you know, signs of struggle.
And we've all heard this before. There's no signs of
(04:52):
forced entry or struggle at the scene. And it's kind
of it's almost a boilerplate statement that we make, but
there's a lot of depth there, you know, when you
think about it, signs a forest entry, Well, we'll look
around the doorframe to see if it's been pressed in
any way. One of the things that I have been
witnessed to where you have somebody that comes into a
(05:12):
home and actually commits some kind of horrible crime in
this environment, I've seen any number of times where there
is a clear footprint on the door, generally near the
latch externally, where people have kicked it in, and it
really that tells a lot, doesn't it. Or maybe a
location where somebody's put their shoulder into the door and
you've got broken glass and the frame is kind of
(05:35):
caved in, and then when you get inside of the home,
if someone is resistant, for instance, you kind of surprise them.
You might have upturned furniture where they're struggling to get
away from the stranger. But none of that stuff existed.
And kimon Man chiefs in dwelling this residence with her husband,
even though he's not in the same room with her.
(05:55):
According to him, he's gone off and slept in a
separate area in order to avoid waking her up. He
would think that if something like that had occurred, he
could have been alerted, you know, a high pitched scream
or the crashing of furniture and all that sort of thing.
None of that really existed in this environment. Emiley just
(06:16):
kind of vaporized, just disappeared. You brought up being able
to hear if something happened. So you're talking eyewitness and
ear witness. So did the husband hear anything? Did he
hear someone trying to get into the home? And then
we want to look at the eyewitness not just did
anybody in the neighborhood see something going on? But looking
(06:38):
at what was found in the bedroom? Was anything missing?
Was the bed awry? Was there blood? Was there anything broken?
And those are all the things that you're talking about, Joe.
So how do the investigators perceived since at this point
there doesn't seem to be anything wrong? Yeah, there's not.
(07:00):
I think that one really salient point here that would
really you know, from an investigative standpoint, that would really
raise my red flags is what do we know about
what was occurring that evening? Well, we know that there
was a birthday celebration, and anytime you have as an
death investigator in particular, I've always had these kind of markers.
(07:20):
They involved anniversaries, birthdays, maybe anniversaries in your mind, where
their benchmarks in your own life, where people have passed
away that you greatly love. And sometimes those are indications
of an individual maybe going off to do some kind
of self harm, Aren't it because they're sad about getting older,
or they're sad because they're missing somebody in their life,
or you know, they've gone through a divorce or something
(07:41):
that happened on that particular day. And then you couple
that with the fact that she and her husband had
gone out that night to celebrate her birthday. And it's
not like they just stopped off at a local watering
hole and just kind of sat there and just you know,
talked and you know, had a few drinks. That they
went to multiple locations. And when you begin to talk
(08:04):
about something as weighty as this adult woman that just
vanishes off of the face the planet, you know, what
is it that she's engaging in at that moment time
or approximating that moment time that's different than any other
time in her normal day to day life. Well, she's
going out to these multiple locations. There's an opportunity if
(08:25):
you have a predator out there, for instance, that will
have spotted these two together or maybe had spotted her
and they were going to target her. So you're going
to multiple locations and you're kind of following them along
as an investigator. That's one of the things that we
pick up on. You know, you're going to do a
deep dive into this, go back look at CCTV captures
(08:47):
if you can, from local bars, also from anything that's
out on the street, street pewcams, those sorts of things
to see if anybody was shadowing them as they're kind
of walking around and moving back and forth to their
car and that sort of thing, because you have to eliminate,
like I said, you have to eliminate all of the
possibilities moving forward. You know, you only get really one
(09:09):
shot at this. And how a case like this will
vary from a say, a static death investigation where you
have a body and you're going out there and you're
kind of tracing back from that primary scene location back
to where they were living or where they had been
that sort of thing. This is still very dynamic because
(09:31):
your working assumption is that at this point in time,
she is still alive. So you throw in this idea
that you're you know, you're calling in missing person squad,
you might be calling in federal marshals or state police
that are going to be on the lookout, and so
you've got all this other data that's coming in, and
you know that's all fine and good, but what happens
(09:52):
is a lot of the stuff that you're looking at
forensically that a death investigator would look at. It's kind
of being lost. It's been last because your focus has
shifted in this type of investigation. I know that there's
not a printed list Joe of things that investigators go through.
It's probably a list in their mind of you know,
what they're looking for in a house or in a location.
(10:17):
Rather when someone goes missing. But here you have the evidence,
her phone, her keys, Emily's wallet are still in the home.
So you've got this checklist that you go by in
your mind that you're checking as anybody seen, or is
their cameras in the house, or their footprints outside, so
(10:38):
many things. But if there is, as you pointed out earlier,
negative findings, how do you go about setting yourself up
for a successful investigation. Well, it comes down to probability.
At that point in time, you begin to think, well,
if she is not here in this location and there's
no evidence that something has happen happened that is indicative
(11:02):
of a horrific event like broken furniture, blood trails, blood spots,
attempts to clean up blood, all those sorts of things.
Then you have to think, well, what are going to
be my highest probabilities for what happened to her, And
you have to follow kind of that line of logic.
And you know, if the car is still there, you think, well,
(11:23):
she's walking, she's ambulatory. At that point in time, she
has wandered away from the house. I don't know. Maybe
she came home that night, they'd had a lot to drink.
She's in the bedroom by herself, admittedly according to her husband.
Remember he said he wouldn't slept in the other bedroom.
She wakes up, she's disoriented, she walks out of the door,
closes the door behind her, and wanders off, maybe in
(11:45):
her bare feet. If you can't find her shoes around
the house, then you assume that she put them on.
But if she didn't, maybe she's got a pair of
house shoes. She walked out in those What are the
possibilities And it's from that central point, that central point,
which would be her bedroom where she was ass known
to be alive according to her husband, you would begin
to use that as your investigative hub, that's the hub
(12:08):
of the wheel. And then radiating out from that, you're
going to follow every type of physical path that she
could have potentially tried. If you will to get as
much distance between her and the central hub and an
ending location. You know, you begin to think about things, well,
is there a wooded area that she could have wandered
(12:28):
off into. If there is a wooded area, of what
kind of hazards are in there? Are we talking about
that there's some kind of gulture, you know, a cliff
that she could have stepped off on. If she's in
a rugged territory. Is there a river or body of
water nearby that she could have wandered off into and
became helpless and maybe drowned in that location? Is there
a major roadway if she was disoriented and she walked
(12:50):
out into the roadway where somebody could have snatched her up,
or even worse, she could have been struck as a pedestrian.
She's laying dead on the side of the road. And
you know, to your point, you know, we talk a
lot about these checklists that we kind of run through
in our mind. I've got to tell you, in my
time as a death investigator, and when I first started
as a very young death investigator, we didn't have a
(13:14):
bunch of checklists that you know, we could download off
of something. These things were literally handed down to us
verbally many times, and we would try to codify them
in some way and write them down. But after a
period of time, you begin to check these things off
in your brain as you're working these cases, because you
reflect back to earlier cases that you had handled, and
(13:36):
hopefully you don't do it every time, but hopefully you're
thinking back, you know, how did I screw up an
earlier case, or what did I'm miss in an earlier
case where I can go back and try to do
this one a little bit better. Now. They do have
checklists that will that they will run down, and I've
heard a couple of people say this kind of a
very interesting point. It's great to have a checklist, but
(13:57):
when you marry yourself to a checklist, there's a certain
amount of creativity that goes into an investigation, and you
kind of handicap yourself at that point in time because
you're doing this thing, as they say, by rote, and
you're not thinking outside the box at that point in time,
and that can be detrimental to the investigation as well.
(14:37):
You've got someone in your life that you just absolutely
dearly love. I cannot even begin to fathom fathom the
depths of pain and anguished that an individual goes through
when you wake up and that person is not there anythink,
what in the world am I going to do? Who
is there to help me? Because I can only imagine
that is probably as alone as you ever feel as
(15:01):
a spouse. So with that said, Jackie, you know the
search has got to start somewhere and you have got
to call and help at this point in time, and
helped came. Joe helped aim in droves Emily's family, Emily's
friends started searching. Now their home. There was a lot
of wooded areas around her home, so thought was knowing
(15:23):
that Emily liked being out in nature. Her friends said
she often would take photos and that she liked to
take an early morning qualt. So that was the first
place that her friends and family started looking, the nature
areas surrounding their home. They even brought in cadaver dogs,
(15:45):
drones and divers for those areas near them. Obviously they
were looking for a body or for her. What kind
of clues would these three things give you, Joe, Look,
you introduced canaan into this environment, and we all know
that when we see things, we're visualizing things. We kind
of have a visual spectrum that we work on where
(16:07):
we sense different types of light shading, all those sorts
of things. And dogs, by their nature have great eyesight
there you know, they're natural hunters. But if you think
their site is fantastic, you begin to think about and
I've worked with cadaver dogs before you begin to think
about this kind of all factory spectrum that they have
that sense of smell. It is beyond anything that we
(16:31):
can actually fathom as humans and so and it's very
finely tuned. And these dogs, when you're talking about a
cadaver dog as opposed to say, for instance, a tracking dog,
we have this old image of a bluetick hound dog
that they use and where prisoners have escaped and they
put these dogs on the trail. The cadaver dog is
specifically trained to go out and pick up scent of
(16:56):
the dead because it dead have a very specific odor
that dogs can pick up on. And you know, and
interestingly enough with you know, over the years when I
worked at the Corners offices and medical Examiner's offices I
worked for in the past, you know, daver dog trainers
would actually come to our facility and they would many
times grab a rag with our permission, bring a rag
(17:18):
with them that's uncontaminated, or an old sock, and they
would essentially sent that item with the scent of the dead.
It can come in a variety of choices. Here you
have the freshly dead to decompose, severely decomposed, which we
would have at the morgue, to something as benign as
(17:39):
skelptal remains, which you wouldn't think would have a scent,
but it does. And they would have samples from each
one of these. And they would take these dogs out
and train them on this all factory spectrum, if you will.
And so it's quite fascinating to see these animals work.
And so I think again you get when an investigator
is in the presence of a cadaver dog, it can
(18:03):
I think that on one level, it can make it
kind of lazy because you're you're sitting there and you're thinking, well,
if the dog doesn't hit out here, then there's nothing
to be found. Well, as great as these dogs are,
they don't always find everything that there is out there.
And you know you have to couple that with common
sense as well. The dog. The whole thing is not
on the dog itself. It's on how the handler manages
(18:25):
the animal, and then all of the peripheral people. Let's
think about you know, she had friends that were out
there there. There were people that really loved this woman,
cared about her because she had cared for so many
other people, and so yeah, people that would go out
day after day looking for her because they all knew,
you know, like we'd said earlier, her her wallet, her keys, money, everything.
We're the other vehicles still there. Where could she have
(18:47):
gone to? You know, she just didn't you know, kind
of ascend up in the air and float off. She
had to have left that location very specifically, probably walking
away or having been walked away from that location. So
you begin to look at this and you know some
of the other factors that come into play, Well, do
you have a person that tracks humans that's out there,
(19:11):
that can look for sign you know, things like cloth
caught in trees, threads reading sign of say, footprints, disturbed vegetation,
which you would look forward, things that are broken, things
that are pressed away. Because if you have somebody, let's
just say you have somebody that is in an altered state,
that altered state is going to impede their ability to
(19:32):
find a standard path to walk down. So they're going
to walk through overgrown brush areas, and a person that's
keen to this, that can look at this, can understand, well,
this area of vegetation has been penetrated by somebody or something.
You can see these broken branches, you can see the
ground is pressed down, all the vegetation is pressed down.
(19:54):
They're going to be really keen to follow that and
see that. One of the things that you're hoping is
not going to happen though, that you'll have a volunteer
that might walk through the same area and contaminate the
area or disrupt it from its original pristine composition. You
mentioned something that I found absolutely fascinating and talking about
the cadaver dogs. They can smell bones even when there
(20:19):
is no organic matter remaining. Well, yeah, and you know,
bone itself is in fact organic. But kind of what
you will have the problem is we're influenced so much
by by media. You know, the things that we see
on television, all the sorts of things that you think.
You know, people when they think skeleton or skeletonized remains,
they see some whitewashed collection of bones that have been
(20:43):
created on a set somewhere that's not the reality. These
bones are going to be. First off, unless they're sitting
out in the desert somewhere, they're not going to be
bleached white. They're going to have kind of a yellow
appearance to them, and there will still be remnant of
tissue that's left behind, but that remnantive tissue is not
going to be as robust as it would have been
(21:05):
in the earlier stages. And here's another thing that occurs
with skeletal remains, is that as bodies are left out
in nature and you have all of the local fauna,
which you know, when we're talking about forensic biology talking
about flora and fauna, flora being the plants, and in
fauna being the local animal kingdom that inhabits that particular area.
(21:29):
The fauna whether it's raccoons or possums, or even squirrels, yes, squirrels,
or certainly dogs or hogs. If you live in an
area where there's wild hogs, they will root around bodies
and they will drag things off. So many times you
can take a cadaver dog out in these areas and
they will have multiple hits on decomposing remains, even if
(21:50):
it is bone. Because these animals will take them to
their burrows and place them in these locations. So you're
getting hits, multiple hits, all over the place, as opposed
to say something that is what's referred to as concentrically located.
We've heard the term eccentrically well. As the body is
essentially taken apart, these remains become eccentric to the initial location,
(22:14):
the primary scene, and so you'll have them dispersed all
over the place, and this can be very very confusing.
That's why it's very important as to when you find
those elements that are separate from what you believe is
the primary scene, you mark those elements and you secure
them in place. And that does first off, it helps
you as you begin to document the location of that
(22:38):
gives you an idea. You can look at it and
you know you can kind of surmise what had happened.
Is this a post mortem event? As this something where
you have a remain, a skeletal remain, an element. Let's say,
for instance, it's a vertebral body, a bone from the spine,
where an animal is taken at that location, maybe buried
it or maybe simply gnawd on it and then walked
away and left that behind, or is this something more
(23:01):
sinister even than that, where you have somebody that has, say,
for instance, dismembered a body and left that portion there.
It may have never been touched by an animal, but
you document in that location. An Animal behaviorists also look
at these kinds of things to see what locations these
animals trapes off with. And if you have say two
competing animal groups, they're not necessarily going to go in
(23:23):
the same location with that remain that they find. You
can even see this behavior in dogs. If you have
a bunch of dogs around and you give elements for
them to chew on and that sort of thing, they're
going to take them off in different directions many times
because that is theirs. They possess that thing, they're going
to take it off. It's no different with human remains,
they do the same. You'll see the same behavior. And
(23:45):
particularly in the animal kingdom, there's a pecking order. That's
why they talk about animals that are out there like
bears and alligators and all sorts of things that are
apex predators. Well, the smaller animals don't want to have
anything to do with the bigger animals. They want to
take that little piece they have and go to their location.
So those are some of the things that you began
to look for out in this environment. A couple of
(24:06):
months went by, and the investigation into Emily Noble's disappearance continues.
But then, as Nancy would say, a twist, a group
of Emily's friends were out searching. What did they find? Joe,
we're talking four months for count them, four months down
(24:27):
range since her birthday. You began to look at this
and her friends have been searching high and low for
her had not been able to find her. I'm sure
that they're just broken hearted. But what before I'd dig
too deep into this, just understand what these friends have
been doing. They have stayed committed through this entire exercise.
(24:48):
You know, it's real easy for people to say, yeah,
we're going to gather together and go look for somebody,
but you're still doing a four months down range. That
gives you an idea as to how much they loved well,
four months, four months, they just didn't quit. They just
kept on. And what is so striking about this is
(25:10):
that when these four friends were purposefully outlooking for their friend,
they were out there with purpose to find her. They did,
(25:42):
you know, being a death investigator by trade, it wasn't
me that generally found bodies. I think maybe in the
entire course of my career I found actually found maybe
three bodies. You're the one that has always summoned out
after the body has been found. And I've always wondered
about a civilian that's out wandering about, particularly an individual
(26:04):
it might be vested, and they come across a body,
It's got to be one of the most shocking things
that anyone could be subjected to. It would have to
be a horrifying experience, especially to find your friend in
the position and the state that the body was in.
As Emily's friends were out searching, they came across a
(26:27):
decomposing body that was found in a kneeling position near
a tree, and there was a rope what appeared to
be a rope suspended from the tree. It actually turned
out that it was a USB cord around Emily's neck.
They had to use dental records to identify Emily Noble. Yeah,
(26:53):
you're talking four months down range, as I'd previously mentioned,
and during that period of tom and in this environment,
remember we've gone through the entire summer here remember, let's
let's reflect back just for a second. She went missing
back in May, all right. She was not found until September.
So regardless of what geographic location you may live in
(27:16):
in our country, in the United States, temperatures are going
to begin to rise, you know, going into well starting
in April, they begin to rise, and then you know
they'll gradually fall off. But with heat, with heat, as
we've previously discussed on body bags, with heat comes more
rapid decomposition. The colder it is, the slower decompositions, the
(27:38):
hotter it is, the quicker it happens. And the fact
that they were able to find her body still intact,
and to say that the body is intact is in
air quotes here because it's it's one of the most
bizarre things I've heard of in some time. They did
find her remains there, and this is not like you
(28:00):
can walk up to Emily's mortal remains and say, yeah,
that's Emily, all right. I've never been a fan of that.
I'm not a fan of showing family's bodies. You know
the old idea where you pull the sheet back and
they look at the face, say yeah, that's my loved one.
I like scientific verification. And as you had mentioned Jackie
just a moment ago, they did to use dental anti
(28:22):
mortem dental records. You know, you have to track down
to dentist because you suspect that it might be her,
but you have to have a forensic odentologist who is
a forensic dentist that will come in and actually do
a dental chart. Just think about going to your dentist
and the dentist charting your teeth in life. Forensic odentologists,
though many times they're known for bite mark examination, where
(28:44):
they really make them money is identifying bodies because the
teeth are so static, you know they're there. It's not
like other things in the body. It's as accurate as
you can be without getting into the area of DNA,
which they eventually did with Emily. But you compare the
anti mortem, which means prior to death, with post mortem
(29:04):
dental charting. So you're looking for missing teeth which may
have been missing in life. Say if somebody had had
I'm giving an example, if someone has had their wisdom
teeth extracted in life. Well, if you've come across a
body and they still have their wisdom teeth automatically, that
person doesn't qualify that chart that you have that you
suspect that it might be that person's out of the
(29:24):
bedding at that point in time. But if you see
that their wisdom teeth are missing in the anti mortem
chart that you have indicates those wisdom teeth, that's one
box you can check. And then you go and look
at fillings to see what teeth are filled. Did she
have any cavitations and her teeth, did she have any replacements?
Was there a bridge there? Did she have caps on
(29:45):
her teeth? You know some people will get porcelain caps
covering their teeth, crowns, those sorts of things, any kind
of manifestations. Teeth are absolutely fascinating in this sense as
for their utility to identify a body, and not just that,
but the position of teeth because teeth they have multiple
(30:05):
planes of identifications. It's the basis why people get correct
if things done to their teeth all the time. You know,
when where kids, people get bracest placed on the teeth,
because teeth will rotate, you know, along the compass phase
three hundred and sixty degrees. Along those points, they can
rotate in any number of degrees, and people want to
get those shifted back so that they look quote unquote normal,
(30:27):
you know, whatever that means relative to teeth. So they
can be pitched forward, pitched back, that can pitch sideways,
and they can rotate. So those are unique to each individual.
And so what makes it even more unique is that
there are thirty two teeth in the adult mouth. So
it's that's what makes it so fascinating. When you begin
(30:50):
to do the math on this, that the opportunity becomes
exponential in order to identify. So that's why they rely
upon this. But once they got her identified, because you
could not look at her body and say that that
is in fact her, then the assessment begins to, well
what actually happened to her? You talk about this ligature
(31:15):
that was found in place around her neck or her
neck area. You know, at first, I'm sure that they
thought that it probably was a rope or some kind
of chord. Turned out to be a USB chord, which
is not something that's very robust, you know, you think
about it. I mean, how many of us out there
have had to replace a USB chord because it just
(31:36):
craps out on so you can't use it any longer.
It becomes fraid or fragile, that sorre thing a USB
chord's going to be used in order to hang yourself with,
because that's what they were saying. They were saying that
this appeared to be at first a suicide, and the
fact that she was down for this period of time
(31:59):
and in a knee lean position when she was found
fully closed, her skeletal remains were still intact. Jackie, this
is mind blowing. In a kneeling position beneath this tree
with this USB cord around her neck and then anchor
to the tree somehow the authorities had not been very
specific about it, but this was entirely supporting her weight
(32:21):
at this moment in time. And you want to know
something else, what's really fascinating about this. She had decomposed
so much, huh that when they got her remains back
to the coroner's office, her total her total body weight
including clothing was nineteen pounds nineteen pounds, but yet the
(32:47):
body had remained intact, which is absolutely fascinating to me
in this case. There's so much about this case fascinating.
I am in tree fascinated and perplexed by the fact
that her body was in a kneeling position and remained there.
Now looking at the USB cord, I have never seen
(33:08):
a USB cord longer than ten feet. So yeah, if
she's in a kneeling position, and if it's a ten
feet you know, a USB cord that's only ten feet,
then you're looking at a trade branch that's really not
very by off the ground. So most people, when you
think of hanging yourself, you think, okay, my feet doesn't
(33:30):
touch the ground, right, So how is that possible? Yeah,
that's a that's a fallacy that people are suspended. Let's
go ahead and eradicate that to begin with. That's that's
not um, that's untrue. As a matter of fact, I've
had probably more people that are not totally suspended as
opposed to having been suspended. That mean, when I say suspended,
(33:51):
I mean their feet are not on the floor at all,
that their body essentially is floating in air. Again, we're
at the mercy of the entertainment world because that's how
it's portrayed. That's very dramatic, isn't it when you think
about it. You know, how many times have we seen
a movie where a person opens the door and there's
two feet dangling in the air and that's just not
the case. I've when we begin to think about the
(34:13):
length of the ligature. You talked about the USB cord.
You haven't seen one. It's longer than than ten feet.
You know, you can go into a truck stop. I
think about this in trips I take. You can go
in the truck stop and get a replacement USB cord.
And you're right, they are very long. You know. You
plug it in the in the charger in the front
of the car and you can hand it over you
(34:33):
over your shoulder to your kids in the backseat because
they're complaining they can't charge their phone. And yeah, that's
that's the greatest length. But you don't really need that much.
I've actually had people that have hung themselves with hair
dryer cords where the hair dryer, the actual body of
the hair dryer, is hanging beneath the neck. It doesn't
require much. But people do not need to be and
just hear me right, do not need to be suspended
(34:54):
in order to hang themselves. They can be. I've had
them in a kneeling position. I've had them in the
seeded position as well. How does your fight or flight
instinct if you are trying to hang yourself, not go ah,
wait a minute, I don't want to do this. If
you are able to touch the ground and save yourself,
how do you keep from doing that. I've always been
(35:16):
fascinated by this, and I think that a lot of
it has to do not with the occlusion of the airway,
that is, where the airway is being blocked, where it's
clamping down, because you know, you begin to think about, well,
I mean, any of us that have been in an
environment where we lose our breath. Say when you're a
kid and you're you know, there's an old game people
would play a pigpile. You know, everybody piles on top
(35:36):
of one another, and you're gasping for air and you're
fighting because you can't breathe. It's not the same mechanism.
It's not the same mechanism at all. Remember when you're
talking about a literature. The airway, yeah, is compromised to
a great degree. But the other thing that is even
more compromised, it's more greatly compromised, is your blood flow.
(35:57):
What happens when those areas are blocked. You know, you've
got your crodded vessels that are supplying your brain with
oxygenated blood. Well, I'll tell you what happens. There's a
sleepiness that sets in. There's a sleepiness that sets in,
and people will set themselves in these positions and slowly
(36:19):
sink to the floor. There's a lack of oxygen saturation
going to the brain. Okay, visa to be the blood,
not the airway. The airway is the uptake. You know,
you're supplying through your lungs and none. That's not what
I'm talking about. I'm talking about oxygenated blood making its
way to the brain. You having a noxic event where
(36:41):
the flow of oxygenated blood is being shut down to
the brain and people become sleepy at that point in time.
That's the only way I've ever been able to explain this,
because it's fascinating to me when I see someone that
is not totally suspended. They're either sitting on their backside
or on their knees and they've hung themselves this way.
You know, we have this with auto erotic cases many
(37:02):
times where people will hang themselves intentionally and it's ruled
of course, those are ruled as accidental death, and it
is because the blood flow has been cut off to
the brain, not the oxygen itself, not the airway, and
the airway if you're being smothered or choked or something
like that, that does initiate that fight or flight. When
we look at the injuries that Emi linked Noble add
(37:27):
we find that she was strangled, yet she also had
some severe injuries to her face and neck. Yeah, we do.
And that is what has led authorities to begin to
question as to whether or not this case was in
(37:48):
fact a suicide. And they've come to the conclusion that
Emily's death was actually a staged suicide. That means it
is something that is made to look as though this
was a hanging, a self inflicted hanging, as opposed to
something much more nefarious and dark. And let me give
you the evidence that I have for this. If you
(38:09):
think about the base of your tongue, and how many
times have we talked about this, you know, over our
time together, jacking not just a body back. Yeah, yeah,
that's what we're going to talk about. The highoid bone
sits so high up in the neck. And again I'll
refresh everybody that doesn't remember. If the highoid bone is
not only non articulated bone in the human body, that
(38:29):
means it's not connected to any other bone, and its
sole purpose is to anchor the tongue in the back
of the throat. You begin to think about how high
up in your throat the back of your tongue is.
It doesn't go all the way down, you know, all
the way down your throat. It's anchored in the back,
and it's anchored by the highoid, very very high up.
So you begin to couple that, and you look at
(38:50):
the diameter, which is, I don't know, cord of an
inch maybe for a USB cord. How's the USB cord
going to break? It would have to be so high,
and you would have to fall with such force, and
it would have to be specifically targeted. And here's the
thing about her fractures. And I say fracture, Notice I
say fracturedres plural. The highway bone is shaped like a
(39:15):
horse shoe or some people say. You'll hear forensic pathologists
talk about it as a bird like structure. That means
it's got wings. You've got the left greater horn and
the right greater horn, which are the end tips of
this thing. Okay, Like just think about the tips of
the wings of a bird. All right, Both of those
(39:37):
both of those wings in Emily's case, are fractured. You
know what that requires. That requires a specific targeted pressure
to those areas for a sustained period of time. The
only way you achieve that is by either a sea
clamp or a throttling. Sea clamp is a single hand
(39:59):
that goes up high a neck and you begin to
squeeze down like you're squeezing an orange, or throttling where
you've got your thumbs crossed over and that kind of
classic theatrical choking. Somebody out and you're high up on
the neck and you're squeezing. But not only was Emily's
highwoid fractured in multiple locations, but also her thyroid cartilage,
(40:23):
which sits inferior, which is just a fancy word for
below below the highwoid. It's a cartilaginous body that kind
of contains you know, where our airway is and everything.
It was fractured as well. So you've got cartilage that
was fractured. That's how much pressure was applied. You're not
just talking about a bone, which we think about fracturing
(40:45):
with bones. We don't think about cartilage being fractured. In
her case, her thyroid cartilage was actually fractured, was fractured
and snapped along the way. There's evidence that she's got
damage to her maxilla. If everybody will ascend, actually take
their index finger and touch above their upper teeth that
hard area where your teeth are implanted or set that
(41:09):
that's your maxilla. That's the hard palette up there that
was damaged as well. You say, well, how are those
two things associated. Well, in my opinion, if you get
trauma to the maxillary area, that's submission, that's you're going
to submit. You're putting your hand forcefully over their mouth,
(41:31):
for instance, or you're punching them in that area, and
you're directly causing trauma to that hard area above their
upper teeth to get them to submit. And then a
hand or some other item that you can direct force
with this placed over their throat that you know, and
she's she's not a very large woman. She's very delicate looking,
(41:51):
you know in life, you see her, she's very slightly built.
It wouldn't take much and you begin to apply that
direct pressure, you begin to squeeze like that, and essentially
what happened is that the highway was fractured during all
of this, which led to her death. And also her
airway at the top end was compromised because the thyroid
(42:12):
cordleitge was fractured. No, no, no, no, wait a minute,
let me play Devil's advocate for just a second. Could
those injuries have happened after her death if she was
suspended by this usp chord. Could that have happened as
her body decomposed and it changed the angle of how
her body was resting. I might agree with you if
(42:36):
if we said that the USB cord was overlying one
specific area and it gave way the structural continuity, just
it gave in to this time that her body spent
spent decomposing, But two specific areas. You're talking about a
bone that's very isolated and with two bony prominences that
(43:00):
are several that are probably two to three inches, and
with a part well, let's just say an inch and
a half to two inches, and both of those features
of that singular bone were fractured. I find that highly unlikely.
It would tell me that you had to have direct
pressure applied for a protracted period of time, and it
(43:23):
would have to be an increasing pressure to get this
bone and these two separate locations anatomically to snap. That's
what would have to take place. And one of the
things that we look for with and I'm going to
kind of tell everybody, you know, kind of how we
differentiate between a stage suicide and a real suicide. When
(43:48):
you're looking at a literature that is around somebody's neck
that has been used to kill themselves with a noose,
if you will, because of the suspension, because of the
weight of the body, the body hanging down and it's
being supported by this news on the exterior of the neck,
say the tissue that's left behind. You'll have this interesting
(44:10):
feature that will present itself. That's called tinting. And I
like the tinting on your car windows, tinting like we're
going tinting tonight, like pup tent t E n T
I n G tinting feature that literally travels upward in
an acute angle so that the news forms kind of
(44:30):
the top of the pup tent at the back side
of the head. And so you'll have this deep furrow.
And remember a USB cord is not very robust, it's
very very thin. So the rule of thumb for us
as death investigators, the more narrow the literature the deeper
the furrow because you've got a smaller surface area to
(44:51):
support the body weight. So if someone used, say, for instance,
a belt, say a three h wide belt, the furrow
is going to be shallow. Okay, it's not gonna be
real deep because you've got that wide surface area to
support the body weight. With a USB cord, However, it's
going to dig in. It'll be very very deep. Now,
if a person has been hanging for a protracted period
(45:15):
of time, they'll have this tinting feature. However, if there
if there was other pressure that was applied below that,
say like a broad area where you have hemorrhage that's
not running say acutely upward, that's associated with the tinting feature.
But yet you have hemorrhage that's running kind of parallel
(45:36):
to the shoulders, which is going straight back in the
soft tissues of the neck. That's an indication that someone
has applied direct pressure downward as opposed to acutely upward.
In the pattern would not match. And so you've got
these two things that are staring at you you're trying
to make heads or tails of And that's one of
(45:56):
the big indicators that we look for specifically in this area.
There are other things you look for in stage suicide,
but specifically in this area, this is one of the
things that you look for to try to determine if
an event was staged or not. One of the other issues,
Joe that came up in looking at this being staged.
Let me say now that Emily's husband, Matthew Moore was
(46:18):
arrested and charged with Emily's death, and one of the
facts that came into play was that Moore's son Joey,
committed suicide be hung himself. Yeah, and that you know,
certainly as an investigator that you have to look into that. Okay,
(46:40):
that's something you're gonna have to dig into because once
you have an individual in a family and listen, understand
this very important point here, many times you will have
copycat events in families where they's suicide or history of suicide.
People will witness this happened in their family and then
(47:01):
they'll fall suit. Okay, and I think that that's the
first thing you're going to check off, you know, check
off the list Who're gonna look at this and say, well,
is there any indication here? You have to explore that
as an investigator, you have to look into that and say, well,
is there any similarity here between what has happened to
Emily and compare that with what happened to Matt's son, Joey.
(47:25):
You know, many months before when he died, and you know,
according to the press, you know, Joey had a tremendous
amount of psychological illness that he was dealing with. And
you know what kind of really makes this quite quite
sad is the fact that Emily loved this kid. He
became part of her family. From what we are understanding,
(47:48):
Emily took over quite a bit of the parental role
in Joey's life. I mean, he was really debilitated psychologically,
and she would tend to him, she would watch after him,
and really apparently loved him deeply. And so you could
see how his death would impact someone. And not only that,
but you begin to look at Emily's history as well,
(48:10):
and you know that her first husband, who people have
stated that she regarded as the love of her life,
he had taken his life. There are not a lot
of specifics as to how that first husband took his life,
but her life's been touched. I mean, it's certainly been
touched by suicide like many of us you know that
are out there in public, but in hers in particular,
(48:32):
two people that she truly cared for had lost their lives,
and as investigators, as unpleasant as it is, you have
to exhaust every possibility because at the end of the day,
you want to look at these cases and make sure
that not only are they thoroughly investigated, but if there
is evidence, they are thoroughly prosecuted as well. Matthew Moore
(48:54):
has been arrested and charged with Emily's death, although let
us do point out this case has not yet been adjudicated,
and everyone who's innocent until proven guilty. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is body Backs
Host
Nancy Grace
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.