September 14, 2023 • 38 mins
Joysee Cartagena's coworkers at JetBlue know something is awry when she fails to log in for work—a complete break from her reliable character. Soon after, her lifeless body is found in her home in Sanford, Florida, a zip tie around her neck igniting a slew of investigative questions. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack dissect the intricacies of Joysee's perplexing death, weaving together cutting-edge forensic science with real-world implications. The hosts explore everything from forensic markers like ligatures and Tardieu spots to the complex relationship dynamics between Joysee and her boyfriend, Joel Bauza. As they delve into the timeline, scrutinize the evidence, and discuss the eventual charges, their unwavering goal remains: to shed light on the truth behind Joysee's untimely death.
Time codes:
00:00:00 — Joseph Scott Morgan introduces the complexities of death investigation. The discussion opens with abnormal elements that investigators often encounter.
00:01:40 — Joe delves deeper into the relevance of zip ties in an ongoing case in Sanford, Florida. He details their significance in the overall forensic investigation.
00:03:20 — Dave Mack introduces the story of Joel Bauza and Joysee Cartagena. He portrays Joysee as a caring individual who always put others first, while Joel appears financially dependent on her.
00:04:40 — Joysee's work history and her job at JetBlue are discussed. Dave reveals how important her career was to her.
00:05:00 — The red flag goes up when Joysee misses work. Her coworkers' immediate concern sets the stage for the investigation.
00:05:40 — Emphasizing the importance of timelines in death investigations, Joseph Scott Morgan argues that every minute counts when piecing together the facts.
00:07:42 — Morgan brings up the uncommon circumstances surrounding Joysee’s death. The atypical nature of the case required extra attention from detectives and crime scene techs.
00:09:08 — Dave discusses the zip tie and signs of a struggle. He lays out potential scenarios that could explain Joysee’s untimely death.
00:10:39 — Suicide as a possible result of a domestic dispute is pondered. It’s a heartbreaking thought, yet critical to the investigation.
00:11:11 — Joe Scott instructs on letting the environment of a crime scene "speak" to the investigator. He warns against being influenced by others present.
00:16:00 — The importance of leaving a ligature in place at a crime scene is brought to light. It’s a detail that can have far-reaching implications.
00:17:40 — Morgan questions why the ligature was not removed in Joysee’s case. The unanswered action hints at a potential suspect.
00:19:00 — Joe Scott explains the process of proving a suicide and emphasizes the importance of treating all deaths as homicides until proven otherwise.
00:23:00 — Dave points out delays in the criminal justice process.
00:25:00 — The physical evidence, particularly multiple abrasions on Joysee’s body, is dissected. Joe Scott posits that these suggest a struggle.
00:30:13 — Joseph Scott Morgan introduces the topic of ligatures, which are often seen in hangings. He provides an insight into the presence of Tardieu spots, a specific type of petechiae, and how they appear in cases of strangulation.
00:33:21 — The hosts discuss the pressure points on a zip tie during strangulation and how they can be traced post-mortem.
00:37:20 — Addressing mental health, Joseph Scott Morgan acknowledges listeners struggling with suicidal thoughts, provides the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline number, and emphasizes the importance of seeking help.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. When it comes to
death investigation, there's things along the journey of an investigator
that you encounter as just a person that is put
(00:29):
into this crazy world where you're you're bearing witness to
the end of life, and those elements that you observe
in there, you know, go back to a statement I'm
fond of making, and that is observing the abnormal and
the context of the normal. And this applies, I think
also to items that we use daily for whatever reason.
(00:50):
You know. It can be everything from no paper that
maybe you're familiar with that you see that you have
possession of in your own home, that people have you
to scratch out a note, or it could be a
vehicle that you encounter that maybe you have a friend
that has one just like it, but yet it's involved
in a death. Today we're going to talk about something
(01:13):
that's rather innocuous. It's a little plastic strip that we're
all familiar with now, and I guess a few years
ago we weren't necessarily so aware of them. But I've
got a bunch of them around the house. I use
them for all manner of things. It's zip ties, little
bits of plastic with teeth that you can use to
(01:34):
bind and hold things in place. It plays a crucial
role in an ongoing death investigation in Sandford, Florida. I'm
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is bodybags, Dave. I've got
zip tiz ling all around the house. Some people call
them a cable ties. And my wife loves to travel,
(01:58):
so anytime or loading up the car, I always, you know,
feel the need to obsess over making sure that things
are secure and that they're in place. And I've been
known to use a zip tie to hold certain things
down on the luggage track on top of my truck,
say truck and I got an old SUV and you know,
just hold it in place. I'm terrified. I'm terrified of
things flying off, going down the middle of the road, say.
(02:21):
And most of the time, I view a zip tie
as something that is essentially it has this level of
security to it that not many other things have out there.
That is immediate. It's not like tying a rope or
something like that. Once you zip this baby, it's there
in place. It's easy to use.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
They're cheap, and it's like in your toolbox you have
duct tape, and zip ties. Those are the two guaranteed
things you're gonna have in there. If you need to
just be handy.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
You seem like a handy kind of guy. I am not,
and so zip ties for me are like lowest common denominator.
Even though I have a boat, I'm not good at
not so that's kind of scary. But with zip ties,
I know that if I put it in place, pretty
much unless something really catastrophic happens, that thing's gonna stay
in place.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
And that's why I use them too, same reason. Whether
I'm dealing with electronic wires or big stuff out by
the pool, doesn't matter. There's a zip tie for everyone.
And today we're actually going to be able to delve
into this a little bit because here's the scenario we have.
We have a couple. Joel bowsa fifty ish his girlfriend
(03:31):
a Joycey Cartagena. They have been together since about twenty sixteen.
That's when the pictures and things and the stories start
showing up on Joycey's Facebook page. Anyway, So starting in
twenty sixteen, this couple dated and ended up moving in together.
They were living together and had been again for a
(03:52):
couple of years. Joycey was one of those people that
everybody says, beautiful inside out, smart, always consumed with the
needs of others. That's the one thing that kept being
repeated by people who were friends with and knew or
worked with Joycey Cartagena was how she always looked at
other people first. Meanwhile, her boyfriend, Joel Boutza, actually pretty
(04:18):
much the opposite of that. He didn't really have much
of a career. He was a handyman, worked as an
inconsistent working handyman. They'd been living together. Joel was pretty
much dependent financially on Joycey to provide the day in
and out. And by the way, joyce Cartagana spent years
working for their school board and the worked as the
secretary of one of the schools there in Central Florida,
(04:39):
and had for a number of years before she began
working for Jet Blue, working in customer service. With jet Blue,
she could actually log on to her computer and everything
right from the house in a virtual setting, and that
worked out really well for her. And again, she was
so well thought of and so consistent in her performance
show that when she didn't log in for her day,
(05:03):
it wasn't something they just blew off at work. When
Joyce Krktahana didn't log in to do her job, people
immediately knew there was a problem and they did not
wait very long. Matter of fact, after trying all the
normal ways of getting up with her and getting no reply,
they actually they being her co workers, they call the
police and said, hey, we had a coworkerho didn't show up.
(05:24):
She always does, would you do a well being checked
on her.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
One of the things that we do as death investigators
is that you have to go back and check your timeline.
And I'm always kind of preaching about postmortum interval where
we measure changes after death. But more importantly, you can
have that data. However, if you don't have an additional
data set which goes to where they were expected to be,
(05:50):
you don't have anything really a baseline to compare it
to when they were last seen and when they are
expected to be at a location. And it's important to
try to understand context was when were they supposed to
show up at a prescribed time or go online at
a prescribed time? And the world that we live in now,
particularly in this era of COVID and lockdowns and post
(06:12):
COVID and kind of the world that we in dwell.
Now people have gotten used to this remote working environment.
People know when you go live on air, I say
on air, I'm using in our context, but when you
go live on a system that you're supposed to be
working on, and certainly with a system like Jed.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Blue, right, well they're going to log in and see
who's working. And that's why I bothered him. So it
was here's a little confusion for me, Joe, And it's
not that big of a deal, but again going back
to the timeline, it does mess with me a little bit.
So we know that her co workers actually called to
have a well being checked done, and we know that
her boyfriend, Joel Boutza arrived at the home at about
(06:51):
two ten, and that's when all of this begins for us.
The clock started ticking about two ten in the afternoon.
Police arrived and they are told by Joel Bouza that
when he got home that afternoon from his handyman job,
he found Joycey Cartahena laying on the floor, face down,
a zip tie around her neck and he immediately Joel
(07:15):
Boutze starts telling police, oh, it was a suicide. She
took her own life from the very beginning, from the
very first minutes, he is telling them it's a suicide. Joe,
as a death investigator, when you come to this meeting
of the minds, I know that the police are first
on hand. Well, when you find a body that is
(07:36):
obviously dead and you know it's that the person is
no longer here, what does the first call police make.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Well, certainly when they find somebody in these conditions like this,
because this would be quite striking when they roll up
on the scene and they see this woman in this state.
Every death that is that doesn't have some kind of
pre existing natural ideology, you're going to roll a detective
(08:05):
out there more than likely. And I have to remind
people this case is taking place in Sanford, Florida. And
I don't know if you recall this, but David, this
is you know, associated with that town, is actually associated
with one of the most infamous cases, probably in the
last twenty years, and that's the Trayvon Martin case. It's
one of those places where we know that they have
a detective bureau, and so the detectives are going to
(08:28):
roll out there. It's not just going to be the
bee cop that's there. They'll probably call for crime scene
text as well to take photographs, because that's going to
be essential. You want to freeze this moment in time,
because this is an atypical case. Certainly, if you've got
someone who has allegedly taken their own life, and you've
got somebody an intimate there someone this bowsa fellow who
(08:52):
is stating he's lived with her now for a number
of years, so they have a very intimate relationship. He
exists in this domestic environment with her. He would have
an awareness, Whitney Dave if she's got some kind of
suicidal adiation or anything like that. But it's super bizarre.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
But everybody that knew her, everybody that worked with her,
the suicide last thing on their mind, and a couple
other things come into play, and it's amazing to me
how police work through things. I know that there's no
statute of limitations on murder, and so when you have
a person who is dead under I guess the suspicious
(09:30):
circumstances would be the proper term. Because she's found alone
in her house, face down on the floor. Is zip time.
They've got the boyfriend saying she committed suicide, and they're
going to make a few calls, say well, does anybody
else close to her think suicide is a real thing?
Because in reality, they got to figure out more of
what's going on here. And what they first see on
(09:51):
her body besides the zip tie around her neck, well
they see like carpet burns and drag marks. They can
tell that he was involved in some kind of a
scuffle before this happened. And so I'm thinking in my head,
Joe immediately jumping to conclusions because I'm an idiot. She
got into a fight and he killed her, and now
(10:12):
he's covering it and make it look like a suicide.
But the other side of me said, okay, wait a minute,
what if they did have an argument, what if they
did get a little rough and tumble. But old handyman
Joel Boutza, he says, I'm out, I'm going to go
to work. I got a handyman job to do. You
do whatever. And she sits there and she is a
little bit bruised, a little bit, some scrapes and decides
(10:33):
I just can't take it anymore. I'm going to have
to check out. That's a realistic possibility, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yeah, And I've had cases like that where people have
taken their own life in the wake of a domestic
dispute and it's almost like I'm going to show you
kind of event, and of course it ends up like
all suicides, very tragically in this case.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
I'm just curious, when you have this scenario and you're
the forensic person coming to the scene, are you going
to listen to what the boyfriend says? Are you just
going to kind of block it out and just go,
here's the body. I've got to figure out everything went
on without having all this other distraction.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
In my ear, it's important as the forensics person at
the scene that you look at the environment and let
the environment, as new age as it sounds, speak to
you without any static Doctor Tom Degucci, who is the
chief hemme in La many many years ago, stated early
on in his career that he learned to look at
(11:31):
the ceiling when he walked into a crime scene because
he didn't want to be distracted at other things. And
he would work his way down from the ceiling until
he got to the body, and he wouldn't talk to
anybody else. He wouldn't talk to cops, he wouldn't talk
to other Principles that were involved in it until after
he had done his initial assessment. And in a case
like JOYSS, it's important to understand that the body is
(11:54):
probably going to tell you more than any witness at
the scene. I've seen people choke to death either manually,
(12:21):
that is, with bare hands. I've seen people that have
been choked with items which involves most of the time
a ligature, which is a fine rope or something like
this that can incclude the airway or certainly block blood
flow to the brain. I don't know that I have
ever encountered a case involving a zip tie, and that's
(12:44):
what really stuck out to me in this particular case,
because you have an individual that is stating that this
is a self inflicted event, and it would take a
tremendous day amount of willpower in order to licked this
upon yourself, in order to take your own life. They
are certainly far more simpler and less uncomfortable ways to
(13:07):
do this.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
I would think a zip tie in and of itself
would be a fairly painful way to go because of
the sharp you know, most zip ties, they're kind of sharp,
you know, the plastic on the ends, and that beyond
the fact that you're choking the life out of yourself.
If that's what's happening, you've got a lot of pain
going on from that side that you wouldn't have if,
say you used a belt or something along those lines.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah, And it is difficult because the way the zip
tie is actually designed is that it has little teeth.
Imagine like almost as if this is an old fashioned jack,
which I don't know if people nowadays can identify with
that would go up. It's kind of graduated like this,
and the higher you go, the more tension you get,
and it increases elevation with a car in that sense,
(13:52):
but with this you're actually constricting. It's working the opposite,
but it's got teeth that you can't back up. The
only way to remove a zip tie, if you've never
used one, and I think everyone I've ever encountered is
made out of some kind of plastic, is to actually
take a sharp instrument and cut it away. Now, there
are a number of demonstrations and I kind of look
(14:13):
them up in advance out there of people that there's
one infamously out there with some former CIA agent that's
talking about how you break loose from zip ties if
your hands are bound with them, and police actually use
zip tie or they call them plastic cuffs to cuff
people on mass So if you have like a big
riot or something like that, you'll see these guys with
(14:34):
these things hooked to their belts and those are zip ties,
a form of zip ties that they're using to restrain
people instead of handcuffs. And you can't get those things
off unless you actually cut them, and so there's a
tremendous amount of tension, and right you are about the
pain that would be involved. One of the things that
we really look at when it comes to ligatures. And
(14:55):
just imagine this just for a second. The less surface
space that has on it, whether it's a rope or
a belt or in this case is zip time, the
more narrow it is, the deeper the furrow. Okay, so
the furrow is actually that crease that is created by
this particular item, and it goes deeper and deeper and
(15:17):
deeper into the tissue the tighter you make it. And
that applies to someone that might hang themselves or someone
that's killed with what we refer to as a groat,
which people may have seen in the movies, which is
this item that's essentially a literature that has two handles
on it traditionally, and you see people assassins that will
use them and they'll choke people out with these things
(15:38):
come up behind them in a stealthy like manner and
take the individual's life. So you have those that are
out there. But the more narrow these things are, the
deeper the furrow. And so we begin to kind of
appreciate this at autopsy when we're examining these these bodies
that have literatures, and most of the time when we
(15:59):
have one that is in fact deceased at the scene,
we don't rush to cut a ligature off at the scene.
We don't if we have confirmed that the individual is
deceased there, We're gonna leave it in place, because that
tells us a lot at the morgue about the dynamic
of the event, the placement of the item. Has it
(16:21):
been moved or removed and then placed over an area,
And we can actually appreciate that as a result of
some of the trauma that's left behind by these things.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Dave, and you're also I was wondering at that earlier,
and I was hoping you were going to cover it,
because my first thought if it was me and I
found my loved one on the floor. My first thought
would be to cut it off, would be to cut
the zip tie off the neck, just because if there's
any chance that I can save this individual, I'm not
gonna be able to do it with that zip tie
(16:51):
around her neck.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
No, listen, that's an excellent point, I gotta say, man,
that just goes to basic human compassion, doesn't it.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Yes, You've got a loved one who if she did
it to herself, then you don't want this to happen.
So you're going to do everything in your power to
say for life. First thing, zip tie is coming off.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah, I don't care if I've got to go to
the kitchen and get a butter knife. If I don't
have a knife on my person, the thing's coming off,
or I'm trying to rip it off with my bare hands,
anything that I can to bring this person back to life,
to reanimate them, if you will. And I think that
that speaks volumes about this particular case. If you've got
a circumstance where this is left in place by the
(17:32):
person who found her, that there's no effort, there's as
they say, no heroic measures were taken in order to
bring them back around. I mean, what do you do?
You stand over the body and just kind of shrug
your shoulders and say, oh, oh, well, well, I think
I've got a suicide. I think that she took her
own life. That does I mean, that goes to the
heart of this.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
I think one thing that strikes me here is that
while the forensic people take over you, it's your job
to figure out what happened and is it murder or suicide.
You've got to help figure that out forensically. But the
police are also doing their work, and I'm wondering how
much their efforts in trying to find out what led
up to it. And you talk about timeline, but when
(18:13):
the police are trying to figure out what was going
on in this couple's life prior to her body being found,
and if it has any impact whatsoever forensically, after you've
already done your examination, if there's any questions, does the
police investigation help you to determine what might have happened
with the body.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Oh my gosh, yeah, it's key because let me throw
this out to you, Dave. You've got a person that
is putting forth an idea, the finder, and you have
a finder who is an intimate and as I stated earlier,
they're going to have the most knowledge of what's going
on in this person's life at that particular time. If
(18:54):
they're putting out the idea that this is in fact
a suicide, going to have to prove that from an
investigative standpoint. That's the problem. We need to be able
to prove this. And if you look at it from
a scientific perspective, So what do we have as part
of this equation that's going to lead us down this
path logically where we arrive at a potential manner of suicide. Well,
(19:20):
some of the things that come about are prior suicide attempts.
Has this individual ever attempted suicide? Are they under the
care of someone for mental health issues, and that can
be anybody from a licensed professional counselor to a psychiatrist.
Are they taking medications that might help them reduce anxiety
(19:42):
or depression or alleviate depression in their life. So you're
going down this checklist, right and at the end of
this profile that you're building as an investigator relative to
the victim, when you add on what this individual the
finder is saying, you begin to think, well, is there
enough evidence here that I can move forward and safely
(20:03):
say that this is in fact a suicide. Our one
supposition as death investigators, I can't say it enough, is
that all deaths, not some, but all deaths are homicides
until proven otherwise. So I have to exclude as a
death investigator all other possibilities, and if I have someone
that has, if I've worked suicides, and just so that
(20:24):
you understand and our listeners understand, death and medical legal
death investigators work far more suicides and you ever do homicides.
It's something that we're very good at. You just don't
ever hear about it because you have this ratio that's,
you know, sometimes two to one, three to one, depended
upon where you are geographically, you've got more people. You
just don't hear about it unless it's a celebrity, for instance,
(20:45):
that has taken their life. We're skilled at this, and
police are skilled at it too, because they're coming at
it from a different perspective, and certainly when they see
someone laying on the floor with a zip tie around
their neck, this is atypical. So you can imagine we're
going to take a long, hard look at this to
try to understand and essentially check the boxes here to
(21:07):
see if it fits within this construct. And also just
so you know, not every case of suicide involves a
suicide note. They don't always involve a recording. So just
because there's not a note there necessarily doesn't mean that
it's not a suicide. Some people just make that decision
to go ahead and do it, and in a case
(21:27):
like this, you're left with more questions than your answers,
(21:52):
Brother Dave, I got to tell you, man, we have
to wait sometimes for the dead to speak to us,
and they do their best to reveal information in the morgue.
Most of the time. That's kind of where we that's
where we dance as medical legal death investigators. What can
the body tell us? And in this particular case, boy,
did this poor woman have a tale to tell?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Joe. Whenever there's a death and you have a significant
other involved, their investigation is immediately going to be multifaceted.
They're going to have to focus on the boyfriend's slash
husband as well as other possibilities. But they have to
look at that and eliminate that individual. That's just a given.
In this particular case, though they found Joycey Cartagena based
(22:39):
down zip tie around her neck. Boyfriend is right there.
It's two ten in the afternoon. He's seeing suicide. That
shows up in all the police paperwork, Chief of police
that he was leading us down this path. He was
directing on the scene that it was a suicide. But
they had to look at everything. It took time. Now
(22:59):
we're going to roll this out there and say he
has been charged. But it didn't happen right away. It
actually took some time and Joe, they had to find
out that first of all, that while Josie Kartagena and
Joel Boutze had lived together for a number of years
and had been a couple since probably twenty sixteen, that
(23:20):
there were issues. Joycey had a lot of debt. That
is something kind of an underlying financial issue. She also
supported Joel Boutze financially. He didn't actually support himself. He
depended on her financially and she was in big time debt.
We also have from her son, who, by the way,
(23:41):
this young man is so broken hearted. Oh my goodness,
it just it hurts your heart to hear him talk
about his mother. But he is actually studying to become
a doctor and he was talking about how the day of,
according to Joel Bouts of the boyfriend there of the death,
(24:01):
they coupled Joyce Cartahana angel A Bounce, I had an
argument that morning about money, about finances, and he went
off to do his handyman job, and she didn't show up.
She did not log on. Nothing happened after he left.
In terms of her being alive. We don't know when
she died, but we know that as soon as he
went to work, she was not actually doing anything that
(24:23):
we can prove. We've got rug burns and other signs
of physical altercation on her body, and the police are
putting all this together along with the idea that he
is pushing as a suicide. So we know now he
has been charged with murder. But why, Joe, would it
take two months nearly to get that charge. Why did
(24:47):
it take so long?
Speaker 1 (24:48):
They're testing every possible outcome here and trying to examine it,
and also they're waiting for information to come back from
the m's office, this assessment of the trauma that she
had sustained. Look, it's one thing if I'm glad you
brought up this idea of rug burns or carpet burns.
That's an abraided area on the skin, and if you've
never suffered one or had one, they are markedly painful.
(25:12):
So let me just break this down to you. If
an individual impacts on a carpeted surface and they get
this abraided area on their skin, it's not something that
they're going to do over and over and over again. Okay,
it's like sticking your hand in fire. Once you burn
your hand, you're not going to do it again. So
the question is why in the world would you have
(25:33):
multiple braided areas on your body. They are opining, at
least at this point, that these are related to a
carpeted surface.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Perhaps, so if there was only one marking like that,
it could be explained or maybe dismissed. But having more
than one, no.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
That's something that you sit back and you think, Okay,
I've got that bit to deal with. And then you've
got the atypical nature of this modality of death with
the zip tipe, which is super bizarre. But you know
something that you said just a moment ago that the
police spokesman was saying, and I get the idea that
this individual has had a certain amount of training in
(26:09):
an area that we death investigators really have to be
careful in, and that is staged stage deaths. You made
the comment, and I love this that he said they
were being steered, and the steering is taking place initially
by this boyfriend, So he's steering and directing. You want
(26:31):
an explanation, and rightly so from the finder. You want
this individual to give you information relative to what they
know about the person. But when they continue constantly to
interject themselves into the conversation or into the investigator's kind
of purpose here in order to assess what's going on,
(26:51):
you get kind of an odd feeling about them. Why
do you keep suggesting this? Why is it that it
couldn't be something other than this? And all of the
data points along the way. You're collecting these as you
go along, and you're doing this assessment of what this
person knows about this intimate that they're involved with. You
(27:13):
look at the injuries that are there, the atypical nature
of this thing around her neck, this zip tie, which
you may have never seen before as a modality of suicide.
Let me tell you one of the phone calls that
they made after they left the scene. They called her doctor.
I can almost guarantee it. They would have called her
(27:35):
treating physician. They would have assessed that information at the scene.
You're saying that suicide. Okay, Now, if she doesn't have
a psychiatrist, we're going to call or a counselor we're
immediately going to call her treating physician. Are you currently
treating her for depression? Because an attending physician, even if
it's an internal medicine doc, can sit there and say well,
I'll give you this for depression, or i'll give you
(27:57):
this for anxiety, and again your check in a box.
If you call that person, they say, no, she's got
this kind of bright affect. She's never talked about. One
of the things they say is she doesn't have any
suicidal ideation with vocalization. None of that stuff is going on.
She doesn't have a history of suicide, and so that's
one of the things that you're kind of checking off,
and it doesn't It just doesn't add up, Dave.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
When you get to the part of a ziptie being
around her neck, do you immediately go with, well, that's
obviously how she was choked, or is it possible maybe
that she was choked in a different way, hands around
the neck and the zip tie was then put on
it because they said it's a large zipti that the
zip tie was then added on actor she had already passed,
and that was to cover up fingerprint marks.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Let's talk about the dynamics of a ligature strangulation as
opposed to say, a manual strangulation. When I say manual,
what I mean is like manual labor. That means to
work with your hands. You're going to place your hands
if you were the perpetrator, around the neck of one
or get them in a choke hold where they're in
(29:02):
the crook of your arm and you're going to choke
down on them. You're going to apply pressure, external pressure
that is going to impact the internal structures of the neck.
Now that can be the trichia, you know, the airway,
or it can be the vessels that are supplying the
brain with oxygenated blood. So that's going to leave a
significant marker for you at autopsy. So when the autopsy
(29:28):
is conducted, first off, you're going to photograph this area
very very carefully, and if the zip tie is still
in place, which it sounds like it probably was, you'll
take images of the zip tie. What we refer to
as insight to which means in place, then away from
probably one hundred and eighty degrees around the circumference of
(29:52):
the tie itself, the mid range, away from where the
thing is actually tied off, where it kind of pull
it tight. You're going to clip it right there, you'll
set it aside, you'll take a photograph of the actual
ligature or the zip tie itself, and you'll take a
photograph of this furrow that's left behind. Now one of
the things that you see, and this is kind of
(30:14):
interesting that you'll see with ligature as many times you
see it in hanging these sorts of things. You'll see
these things refer to as Tardou spots, which are they're
like petiki and they're all over. They'll just kind of
blast all around that area, particularly if you've got this
kind of focal area that has been tied down very
very tightly, like you see with the news, so it
(30:35):
looks like PETIKII. But there'll be like a little storm
of them, and you'll get them kind of all over
the surface of the skin. You can appreciate and you
would take note of that they don't appear every single time,
but it's something you would look for externally before you
open the body. If you've got a ligature that is
this tight, and buddy, it would be tight man, and
you don't have any signs of hemorrhage in that area
(30:58):
that that ligature or zip tie in this case was
in place. Over you got a problem and it's going
to be revealed once you do what's called the neck reflection.
So we go into these cases where we actually reflect
back the tissue of the neck, the external tissue, so
the skin. You get down into the layer of the
muscle around the neck and you begin to examine those areas.
(31:22):
You look for something that they're the structures within the
neck called the strap muscles, and there are these muscles
that kind of intertwine with one another that on our
own either side of the trachea that kind of cross
over the trachea in this area, and this is the
way there were engineered. And you look for soft tissue
hemorrhage in the muscles, in the overlying tissue, the SubQ fat,
(31:43):
all those areas you look for hemorrhage in there. If
you have got a ligature that's as tight, you're going
to have a very focalized area you can even appreciate
it internally, you'll see like this line that goes across
if you're absent that. But yet you have this kind
of broad, expansive hand hemorrhage that is not quite as deep,
but it is there that there is a high probability
(32:06):
that if you have associated hemorrhage that may perhaps be
brought about as someone having the life choked out of them.
You look at the ligature that you have and you
don't see any kind of associated demarcation with the ligature itself.
You know that this is something other than as advertised,
that perhaps they were choked out or manually strangled, and
(32:29):
then the zip tide was put on as just an
afterthought to kind of put this forward. She took her
own life, She had access to a zip tide and
she put her around her neck and she tightened the
thing down. Can you imagine? And so science is going
to trump every single time, it's going to trump whatever
you might be speaking. You're trying to speak this into existence, right.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
You got this guy from the very beginning, He's already
in there saying this is what it is. Again, I
am still stuck with Joe, this person that you have
had an intimate relationship with for years, is dead on
your floor and you didn't try to do anything to
help except tell the police I have a suicide. It
just boggles the mind. But I'm wondering, Joe. You know,
(33:10):
when you put a zip tie and you pull it,
certain areas of the zip tie would have pressure on
them first. You know, as you're pulling back on it,
would you be able to trace that in post perhaps?
Speaker 1 (33:22):
I think that probably the most pressure is going to
be exerted, probably away from where it's actuated from where
you slip the tip of this thing in and then
pull it tight. So you're going to have initial pressure
that's applied again one hundred and eighty degrees away from
wherever that connective point is, and then latterly which would
(33:44):
be at the ninety degree marks on either side as
you're tightening it down. And then finally you'll have that
one place where you make that one final pull as
you tighten it down right there, and sometimes the skin
can get wrapped up in there, it'll pinch. We've seen
this happen with people that have had their hands zip tied.
You'll get these little pinched areas that'll have focal areas
(34:05):
of hemorrhis that are associated with that, and so there
are a number of things that you're going to look
for on their person and here's something else. And this
particularly happens with female victims, even if they're fully clothed.
In a case like this that has this kind of violence. Nowadays,
what will happen in the morgue even if she's fully clothed, Dave,
They're going to do a rape kit. There's a high
(34:26):
probability because you know, lots of times people can be
raped and they'll be redressed. For instance, I'm not saying
that that happened in this case, but I'm saying that,
just to be safe, this would have happened, they would
have also have done and this is kind of fascinating,
they would have also done examinations of her hands. You know,
we talked about the ubraided areas that she would have
(34:46):
relative to these friction abrasions that come about as a
result of contacting carpet, but we would look at the
nails and do the nail trimmings and the nail scrapings.
Nail scrapings and trimmings is the way it actually happens
to see if there is anything caught beneath those nails.
It seemed as though, I don't know what you think
about this day, but it seems as though the narrative
(35:08):
that we're being given, she fought back or resisted in
some way. And many times if an individual can, they're
going to try to, particularly if someone is putting pressure
on their neck and the individual is using their hands.
You would look at a suspect, if you can get
them early enough, you would look at the wrists right
to see if there's nail marks, and they're going to
look like little half moons where the nails kind of
(35:31):
penetrate into the skin of the perpetrator and also scratch
marks on the face because you're trying to do the
victim is trying to do anything that can to get away.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
And in this particular case, we haven't heard no, you
know what, Joe, we have. They did say that they
could tell a struggle had taken place. You've got the
other marks with the rugburns and things like that. They
alluded to other things that they witnessed on at the
crime scene. You mentioned a rape kit, even though she's
fully clothed, and that's the other part of this to
believe his story is to just be wacko and looking
(36:03):
at it from every other way possible. Joe, if not him,
somebody just came in there after he left for work
and killed her for no reason and went on about
their mary away without taking anything.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Yeah, you're right. And the police or the DA at
least have enough that they felt secure enough in charging Boosa.
They did, in fact charge him with homicide.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
First degree premeditated murder.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Yeah, and they premeditated, which is a boy. That's a
certain element there, particularly in Florida. You have this knowledge
in advance that you're planning to do this, and so
premeditation is certainly something that's very chilling. This is not
a reactive event in the opinion of the police. He
has been charged, he hasn't been convicted, He hasn't even
(36:47):
been tried. But from what I understand, the judge didn't
feel secure enough apparently, or the magistrate didn't feel secure
enough to offer bond for him. He's being held without bond, Dave.
So that gives you an idea to where prosecutor's mind
is and certainly the police's minds are. I think that
it's very important though, that we understand that even though
(37:10):
he's saying that this is a suicide and the police
believe that it is a homicide, it's important to know, Dave,
that we have people out all across this country and
within the sound of our voices that are struggling with
things right now. And if you are someone you love
and you care about is struggling with thoughts of self harm, police,
(37:30):
know that there is help. You can simply dial nine
eight eight for suicide and Crisis Lifeline. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. When it comes to
death investigation, there's things along the journey of an investigator
that you encounter as just a person that is put
(00:29):
into this crazy world where you're you're bearing witness to
the end of life, and those elements that you observe
in there, you know, go back to a statement I'm
fond of making, and that is observing the abnormal and
the context of the normal. And this applies, I think
also to items that we use daily for whatever reason.
(00:50):
You know. It can be everything from no paper that
maybe you're familiar with that you see that you have
possession of in your own home, that people have you
to scratch out a note, or it could be a
vehicle that you encounter that maybe you have a friend
that has one just like it, but yet it's involved
in a death. Today we're going to talk about something
(01:13):
that's rather innocuous. It's a little plastic strip that we're
all familiar with now, and I guess a few years
ago we weren't necessarily so aware of them. But I've
got a bunch of them around the house. I use
them for all manner of things. It's zip ties, little
bits of plastic with teeth that you can use to
(01:34):
bind and hold things in place. It plays a crucial
role in an ongoing death investigation in Sandford, Florida. I'm
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is bodybags, Dave. I've got
zip tiz ling all around the house. Some people call
them a cable ties. And my wife loves to travel,
(01:58):
so anytime or loading up the car, I always, you know,
feel the need to obsess over making sure that things
are secure and that they're in place. And I've been
known to use a zip tie to hold certain things
down on the luggage track on top of my truck,
say truck and I got an old SUV and you know,
just hold it in place. I'm terrified. I'm terrified of
things flying off, going down the middle of the road, say.
(02:21):
And most of the time, I view a zip tie
as something that is essentially it has this level of
security to it that not many other things have out there.
That is immediate. It's not like tying a rope or
something like that. Once you zip this baby, it's there
in place. It's easy to use.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
They're cheap, and it's like in your toolbox you have
duct tape, and zip ties. Those are the two guaranteed
things you're gonna have in there. If you need to
just be handy.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
You seem like a handy kind of guy. I am not,
and so zip ties for me are like lowest common denominator.
Even though I have a boat, I'm not good at
not so that's kind of scary. But with zip ties,
I know that if I put it in place, pretty
much unless something really catastrophic happens, that thing's gonna stay
in place.
Speaker 2 (03:10):
And that's why I use them too, same reason. Whether
I'm dealing with electronic wires or big stuff out by
the pool, doesn't matter. There's a zip tie for everyone.
And today we're actually going to be able to delve
into this a little bit because here's the scenario we have.
We have a couple. Joel bowsa fifty ish his girlfriend
(03:31):
a Joycey Cartagena. They have been together since about twenty sixteen.
That's when the pictures and things and the stories start
showing up on Joycey's Facebook page. Anyway, So starting in
twenty sixteen, this couple dated and ended up moving in together.
They were living together and had been again for a
(03:52):
couple of years. Joycey was one of those people that
everybody says, beautiful inside out, smart, always consumed with the
needs of others. That's the one thing that kept being
repeated by people who were friends with and knew or
worked with Joycey Cartagena was how she always looked at
other people first. Meanwhile, her boyfriend, Joel Boutza, actually pretty
(04:18):
much the opposite of that. He didn't really have much
of a career. He was a handyman, worked as an
inconsistent working handyman. They'd been living together. Joel was pretty
much dependent financially on Joycey to provide the day in
and out. And by the way, joyce Cartagana spent years
working for their school board and the worked as the
secretary of one of the schools there in Central Florida,
(04:39):
and had for a number of years before she began
working for Jet Blue, working in customer service. With jet Blue,
she could actually log on to her computer and everything
right from the house in a virtual setting, and that
worked out really well for her. And again, she was
so well thought of and so consistent in her performance
show that when she didn't log in for her day,
(05:03):
it wasn't something they just blew off at work. When
Joyce Krktahana didn't log in to do her job, people
immediately knew there was a problem and they did not
wait very long. Matter of fact, after trying all the
normal ways of getting up with her and getting no reply,
they actually they being her co workers, they call the
police and said, hey, we had a coworkerho didn't show up.
(05:24):
She always does, would you do a well being checked
on her.
Speaker 1 (05:27):
One of the things that we do as death investigators
is that you have to go back and check your timeline.
And I'm always kind of preaching about postmortum interval where
we measure changes after death. But more importantly, you can
have that data. However, if you don't have an additional
data set which goes to where they were expected to be,
(05:50):
you don't have anything really a baseline to compare it
to when they were last seen and when they are
expected to be at a location. And it's important to
try to understand context was when were they supposed to
show up at a prescribed time or go online at
a prescribed time? And the world that we live in now,
particularly in this era of COVID and lockdowns and post
(06:12):
COVID and kind of the world that we in dwell.
Now people have gotten used to this remote working environment.
People know when you go live on air, I say
on air, I'm using in our context, but when you
go live on a system that you're supposed to be
working on, and certainly with a system like Jed.
Speaker 2 (06:28):
Blue, right, well they're going to log in and see
who's working. And that's why I bothered him. So it
was here's a little confusion for me, Joe, And it's
not that big of a deal, but again going back
to the timeline, it does mess with me a little bit.
So we know that her co workers actually called to
have a well being checked done, and we know that
her boyfriend, Joel Boutza arrived at the home at about
(06:51):
two ten, and that's when all of this begins for us.
The clock started ticking about two ten in the afternoon.
Police arrived and they are told by Joel Bouza that
when he got home that afternoon from his handyman job,
he found Joycey Cartahena laying on the floor, face down,
a zip tie around her neck and he immediately Joel
(07:15):
Boutze starts telling police, oh, it was a suicide. She
took her own life from the very beginning, from the
very first minutes, he is telling them it's a suicide. Joe,
as a death investigator, when you come to this meeting
of the minds, I know that the police are first
on hand. Well, when you find a body that is
(07:36):
obviously dead and you know it's that the person is
no longer here, what does the first call police make.
Speaker 1 (07:42):
Well, certainly when they find somebody in these conditions like this,
because this would be quite striking when they roll up
on the scene and they see this woman in this state.
Every death that is that doesn't have some kind of
pre existing natural ideology, you're going to roll a detective
(08:05):
out there more than likely. And I have to remind
people this case is taking place in Sanford, Florida. And
I don't know if you recall this, but David, this
is you know, associated with that town, is actually associated
with one of the most infamous cases, probably in the
last twenty years, and that's the Trayvon Martin case. It's
one of those places where we know that they have
a detective bureau, and so the detectives are going to
(08:28):
roll out there. It's not just going to be the
bee cop that's there. They'll probably call for crime scene
text as well to take photographs, because that's going to
be essential. You want to freeze this moment in time,
because this is an atypical case. Certainly, if you've got
someone who has allegedly taken their own life, and you've
got somebody an intimate there someone this bowsa fellow who
(08:52):
is stating he's lived with her now for a number
of years, so they have a very intimate relationship. He
exists in this domestic environment with her. He would have
an awareness, Whitney Dave if she's got some kind of
suicidal adiation or anything like that. But it's super bizarre.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
But everybody that knew her, everybody that worked with her,
the suicide last thing on their mind, and a couple
other things come into play, and it's amazing to me
how police work through things. I know that there's no
statute of limitations on murder, and so when you have
a person who is dead under I guess the suspicious
(09:30):
circumstances would be the proper term. Because she's found alone
in her house, face down on the floor. Is zip time.
They've got the boyfriend saying she committed suicide, and they're
going to make a few calls, say well, does anybody
else close to her think suicide is a real thing?
Because in reality, they got to figure out more of
what's going on here. And what they first see on
(09:51):
her body besides the zip tie around her neck, well
they see like carpet burns and drag marks. They can
tell that he was involved in some kind of a
scuffle before this happened. And so I'm thinking in my head,
Joe immediately jumping to conclusions because I'm an idiot. She
got into a fight and he killed her, and now
(10:12):
he's covering it and make it look like a suicide.
But the other side of me said, okay, wait a minute,
what if they did have an argument, what if they
did get a little rough and tumble. But old handyman
Joel Boutza, he says, I'm out, I'm going to go
to work. I got a handyman job to do. You
do whatever. And she sits there and she is a
little bit bruised, a little bit, some scrapes and decides
(10:33):
I just can't take it anymore. I'm going to have
to check out. That's a realistic possibility, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (10:39):
Yeah, And I've had cases like that where people have
taken their own life in the wake of a domestic
dispute and it's almost like I'm going to show you
kind of event, and of course it ends up like
all suicides, very tragically in this case.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
I'm just curious, when you have this scenario and you're
the forensic person coming to the scene, are you going
to listen to what the boyfriend says? Are you just
going to kind of block it out and just go,
here's the body. I've got to figure out everything went
on without having all this other distraction.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
In my ear, it's important as the forensics person at
the scene that you look at the environment and let
the environment, as new age as it sounds, speak to
you without any static Doctor Tom Degucci, who is the
chief hemme in La many many years ago, stated early
on in his career that he learned to look at
(11:31):
the ceiling when he walked into a crime scene because
he didn't want to be distracted at other things. And
he would work his way down from the ceiling until
he got to the body, and he wouldn't talk to
anybody else. He wouldn't talk to cops, he wouldn't talk
to other Principles that were involved in it until after
he had done his initial assessment. And in a case
like JOYSS, it's important to understand that the body is
(11:54):
probably going to tell you more than any witness at
the scene. I've seen people choke to death either manually,
(12:21):
that is, with bare hands. I've seen people that have
been choked with items which involves most of the time
a ligature, which is a fine rope or something like
this that can incclude the airway or certainly block blood
flow to the brain. I don't know that I have
ever encountered a case involving a zip tie, and that's
(12:44):
what really stuck out to me in this particular case,
because you have an individual that is stating that this
is a self inflicted event, and it would take a
tremendous day amount of willpower in order to licked this
upon yourself, in order to take your own life. They
are certainly far more simpler and less uncomfortable ways to
(13:07):
do this.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
I would think a zip tie in and of itself
would be a fairly painful way to go because of
the sharp you know, most zip ties, they're kind of sharp,
you know, the plastic on the ends, and that beyond
the fact that you're choking the life out of yourself.
If that's what's happening, you've got a lot of pain
going on from that side that you wouldn't have if,
say you used a belt or something along those lines.
Speaker 1 (13:30):
Yeah, And it is difficult because the way the zip
tie is actually designed is that it has little teeth.
Imagine like almost as if this is an old fashioned jack,
which I don't know if people nowadays can identify with
that would go up. It's kind of graduated like this,
and the higher you go, the more tension you get,
and it increases elevation with a car in that sense,
(13:52):
but with this you're actually constricting. It's working the opposite,
but it's got teeth that you can't back up. The
only way to remove a zip tie, if you've never
used one, and I think everyone I've ever encountered is
made out of some kind of plastic, is to actually
take a sharp instrument and cut it away. Now, there
are a number of demonstrations and I kind of look
(14:13):
them up in advance out there of people that there's
one infamously out there with some former CIA agent that's
talking about how you break loose from zip ties if
your hands are bound with them, and police actually use
zip tie or they call them plastic cuffs to cuff
people on mass So if you have like a big
riot or something like that, you'll see these guys with
(14:34):
these things hooked to their belts and those are zip ties,
a form of zip ties that they're using to restrain
people instead of handcuffs. And you can't get those things
off unless you actually cut them, and so there's a
tremendous amount of tension, and right you are about the
pain that would be involved. One of the things that
we really look at when it comes to ligatures. And
(14:55):
just imagine this just for a second. The less surface
space that has on it, whether it's a rope or
a belt or in this case is zip time, the
more narrow it is, the deeper the furrow. Okay, so
the furrow is actually that crease that is created by
this particular item, and it goes deeper and deeper and
(15:17):
deeper into the tissue the tighter you make it. And
that applies to someone that might hang themselves or someone
that's killed with what we refer to as a groat,
which people may have seen in the movies, which is
this item that's essentially a literature that has two handles
on it traditionally, and you see people assassins that will
use them and they'll choke people out with these things
(15:38):
come up behind them in a stealthy like manner and
take the individual's life. So you have those that are
out there. But the more narrow these things are, the
deeper the furrow. And so we begin to kind of
appreciate this at autopsy when we're examining these these bodies
that have literatures, and most of the time when we
(15:59):
have one that is in fact deceased at the scene,
we don't rush to cut a ligature off at the scene.
We don't if we have confirmed that the individual is
deceased there, We're gonna leave it in place, because that
tells us a lot at the morgue about the dynamic
of the event, the placement of the item. Has it
(16:21):
been moved or removed and then placed over an area,
And we can actually appreciate that as a result of
some of the trauma that's left behind by these things.
Speaker 2 (16:30):
Dave, and you're also I was wondering at that earlier,
and I was hoping you were going to cover it,
because my first thought if it was me and I
found my loved one on the floor. My first thought
would be to cut it off, would be to cut
the zip tie off the neck, just because if there's
any chance that I can save this individual, I'm not
gonna be able to do it with that zip tie
(16:51):
around her neck.
Speaker 1 (16:52):
No, listen, that's an excellent point, I gotta say, man,
that just goes to basic human compassion, doesn't it.
Speaker 2 (16:59):
Yes, You've got a loved one who if she did
it to herself, then you don't want this to happen.
So you're going to do everything in your power to
say for life. First thing, zip tie is coming off.
Speaker 1 (17:09):
Yeah, I don't care if I've got to go to
the kitchen and get a butter knife. If I don't
have a knife on my person, the thing's coming off,
or I'm trying to rip it off with my bare hands,
anything that I can to bring this person back to life,
to reanimate them, if you will. And I think that
that speaks volumes about this particular case. If you've got
a circumstance where this is left in place by the
(17:32):
person who found her, that there's no effort, there's as
they say, no heroic measures were taken in order to
bring them back around. I mean, what do you do?
You stand over the body and just kind of shrug
your shoulders and say, oh, oh, well, well, I think
I've got a suicide. I think that she took her
own life. That does I mean, that goes to the
heart of this.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
I think one thing that strikes me here is that
while the forensic people take over you, it's your job
to figure out what happened and is it murder or suicide.
You've got to help figure that out forensically. But the
police are also doing their work, and I'm wondering how
much their efforts in trying to find out what led
up to it. And you talk about timeline, but when
(18:13):
the police are trying to figure out what was going
on in this couple's life prior to her body being found,
and if it has any impact whatsoever forensically, after you've
already done your examination, if there's any questions, does the
police investigation help you to determine what might have happened
with the body.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
Oh my gosh, yeah, it's key because let me throw
this out to you, Dave. You've got a person that
is putting forth an idea, the finder, and you have
a finder who is an intimate and as I stated earlier,
they're going to have the most knowledge of what's going
on in this person's life at that particular time. If
(18:54):
they're putting out the idea that this is in fact
a suicide, going to have to prove that from an
investigative standpoint. That's the problem. We need to be able
to prove this. And if you look at it from
a scientific perspective, So what do we have as part
of this equation that's going to lead us down this
path logically where we arrive at a potential manner of suicide. Well,
(19:20):
some of the things that come about are prior suicide attempts.
Has this individual ever attempted suicide? Are they under the
care of someone for mental health issues, and that can
be anybody from a licensed professional counselor to a psychiatrist.
Are they taking medications that might help them reduce anxiety
(19:42):
or depression or alleviate depression in their life. So you're
going down this checklist, right and at the end of
this profile that you're building as an investigator relative to
the victim, when you add on what this individual the
finder is saying, you begin to think, well, is there
enough evidence here that I can move forward and safely
(20:03):
say that this is in fact a suicide. Our one
supposition as death investigators, I can't say it enough, is
that all deaths, not some, but all deaths are homicides
until proven otherwise. So I have to exclude as a
death investigator all other possibilities, and if I have someone
that has, if I've worked suicides, and just so that
(20:24):
you understand and our listeners understand, death and medical legal
death investigators work far more suicides and you ever do homicides.
It's something that we're very good at. You just don't
ever hear about it because you have this ratio that's,
you know, sometimes two to one, three to one, depended
upon where you are geographically, you've got more people. You
just don't hear about it unless it's a celebrity, for instance,
(20:45):
that has taken their life. We're skilled at this, and
police are skilled at it too, because they're coming at
it from a different perspective, and certainly when they see
someone laying on the floor with a zip tie around
their neck, this is atypical. So you can imagine we're
going to take a long, hard look at this to
try to understand and essentially check the boxes here to
(21:07):
see if it fits within this construct. And also just
so you know, not every case of suicide involves a
suicide note. They don't always involve a recording. So just
because there's not a note there necessarily doesn't mean that
it's not a suicide. Some people just make that decision
to go ahead and do it, and in a case
(21:27):
like this, you're left with more questions than your answers,
(21:52):
Brother Dave, I got to tell you, man, we have
to wait sometimes for the dead to speak to us,
and they do their best to reveal information in the morgue.
Most of the time. That's kind of where we that's
where we dance as medical legal death investigators. What can
the body tell us? And in this particular case, boy,
did this poor woman have a tale to tell?
Speaker 2 (22:14):
Joe. Whenever there's a death and you have a significant
other involved, their investigation is immediately going to be multifaceted.
They're going to have to focus on the boyfriend's slash
husband as well as other possibilities. But they have to
look at that and eliminate that individual. That's just a given.
In this particular case, though they found Joycey Cartagena based
(22:39):
down zip tie around her neck. Boyfriend is right there.
It's two ten in the afternoon. He's seeing suicide. That
shows up in all the police paperwork, Chief of police
that he was leading us down this path. He was
directing on the scene that it was a suicide. But
they had to look at everything. It took time. Now
(22:59):
we're going to roll this out there and say he
has been charged. But it didn't happen right away. It
actually took some time and Joe, they had to find
out that first of all, that while Josie Kartagena and
Joel Boutze had lived together for a number of years
and had been a couple since probably twenty sixteen, that
(23:20):
there were issues. Joycey had a lot of debt. That
is something kind of an underlying financial issue. She also
supported Joel Boutze financially. He didn't actually support himself. He
depended on her financially and she was in big time debt.
We also have from her son, who, by the way,
(23:41):
this young man is so broken hearted. Oh my goodness,
it just it hurts your heart to hear him talk
about his mother. But he is actually studying to become
a doctor and he was talking about how the day of,
according to Joel Bouts of the boyfriend there of the death,
(24:01):
they coupled Joyce Cartahana angel A Bounce, I had an
argument that morning about money, about finances, and he went
off to do his handyman job, and she didn't show up.
She did not log on. Nothing happened after he left.
In terms of her being alive. We don't know when
she died, but we know that as soon as he
went to work, she was not actually doing anything that
(24:23):
we can prove. We've got rug burns and other signs
of physical altercation on her body, and the police are
putting all this together along with the idea that he
is pushing as a suicide. So we know now he
has been charged with murder. But why, Joe, would it
take two months nearly to get that charge. Why did
(24:47):
it take so long?
Speaker 1 (24:48):
They're testing every possible outcome here and trying to examine it,
and also they're waiting for information to come back from
the m's office, this assessment of the trauma that she
had sustained. Look, it's one thing if I'm glad you
brought up this idea of rug burns or carpet burns.
That's an abraided area on the skin, and if you've
never suffered one or had one, they are markedly painful.
(25:12):
So let me just break this down to you. If
an individual impacts on a carpeted surface and they get
this abraided area on their skin, it's not something that
they're going to do over and over and over again. Okay,
it's like sticking your hand in fire. Once you burn
your hand, you're not going to do it again. So
the question is why in the world would you have
(25:33):
multiple braided areas on your body. They are opining, at
least at this point, that these are related to a
carpeted surface.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
Perhaps, so if there was only one marking like that,
it could be explained or maybe dismissed. But having more
than one, no.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
That's something that you sit back and you think, Okay,
I've got that bit to deal with. And then you've
got the atypical nature of this modality of death with
the zip tipe, which is super bizarre. But you know
something that you said just a moment ago that the
police spokesman was saying, and I get the idea that
this individual has had a certain amount of training in
(26:09):
an area that we death investigators really have to be
careful in, and that is staged stage deaths. You made
the comment, and I love this that he said they
were being steered, and the steering is taking place initially
by this boyfriend, So he's steering and directing. You want
(26:31):
an explanation, and rightly so from the finder. You want
this individual to give you information relative to what they
know about the person. But when they continue constantly to
interject themselves into the conversation or into the investigator's kind
of purpose here in order to assess what's going on,
(26:51):
you get kind of an odd feeling about them. Why
do you keep suggesting this? Why is it that it
couldn't be something other than this? And all of the
data points along the way. You're collecting these as you
go along, and you're doing this assessment of what this
person knows about this intimate that they're involved with. You
(27:13):
look at the injuries that are there, the atypical nature
of this thing around her neck, this zip tie, which
you may have never seen before as a modality of suicide.
Let me tell you one of the phone calls that
they made after they left the scene. They called her doctor.
I can almost guarantee it. They would have called her
(27:35):
treating physician. They would have assessed that information at the scene.
You're saying that suicide. Okay, Now, if she doesn't have
a psychiatrist, we're going to call or a counselor we're
immediately going to call her treating physician. Are you currently
treating her for depression? Because an attending physician, even if
it's an internal medicine doc, can sit there and say well,
I'll give you this for depression, or i'll give you
(27:57):
this for anxiety, and again your check in a box.
If you call that person, they say, no, she's got
this kind of bright affect. She's never talked about. One
of the things they say is she doesn't have any
suicidal ideation with vocalization. None of that stuff is going on.
She doesn't have a history of suicide, and so that's
one of the things that you're kind of checking off,
and it doesn't It just doesn't add up, Dave.
Speaker 2 (28:20):
When you get to the part of a ziptie being
around her neck, do you immediately go with, well, that's
obviously how she was choked, or is it possible maybe
that she was choked in a different way, hands around
the neck and the zip tie was then put on
it because they said it's a large zipti that the
zip tie was then added on actor she had already passed,
and that was to cover up fingerprint marks.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Let's talk about the dynamics of a ligature strangulation as
opposed to say, a manual strangulation. When I say manual,
what I mean is like manual labor. That means to
work with your hands. You're going to place your hands
if you were the perpetrator, around the neck of one
or get them in a choke hold where they're in
(29:02):
the crook of your arm and you're going to choke
down on them. You're going to apply pressure, external pressure
that is going to impact the internal structures of the neck.
Now that can be the trichia, you know, the airway,
or it can be the vessels that are supplying the
brain with oxygenated blood. So that's going to leave a
significant marker for you at autopsy. So when the autopsy
(29:28):
is conducted, first off, you're going to photograph this area
very very carefully, and if the zip tie is still
in place, which it sounds like it probably was, you'll
take images of the zip tie. What we refer to
as insight to which means in place, then away from
probably one hundred and eighty degrees around the circumference of
(29:52):
the tie itself, the mid range, away from where the
thing is actually tied off, where it kind of pull
it tight. You're going to clip it right there, you'll
set it aside, you'll take a photograph of the actual
ligature or the zip tie itself, and you'll take a
photograph of this furrow that's left behind. Now one of
the things that you see, and this is kind of
(30:14):
interesting that you'll see with ligature as many times you
see it in hanging these sorts of things. You'll see
these things refer to as Tardou spots, which are they're
like petiki and they're all over. They'll just kind of
blast all around that area, particularly if you've got this
kind of focal area that has been tied down very
very tightly, like you see with the news, so it
(30:35):
looks like PETIKII. But there'll be like a little storm
of them, and you'll get them kind of all over
the surface of the skin. You can appreciate and you
would take note of that they don't appear every single time,
but it's something you would look for externally before you
open the body. If you've got a ligature that is
this tight, and buddy, it would be tight man, and
you don't have any signs of hemorrhage in that area
(30:58):
that that ligature or zip tie in this case was
in place. Over you got a problem and it's going
to be revealed once you do what's called the neck reflection.
So we go into these cases where we actually reflect
back the tissue of the neck, the external tissue, so
the skin. You get down into the layer of the
muscle around the neck and you begin to examine those areas.
(31:22):
You look for something that they're the structures within the
neck called the strap muscles, and there are these muscles
that kind of intertwine with one another that on our
own either side of the trachea that kind of cross
over the trachea in this area, and this is the
way there were engineered. And you look for soft tissue
hemorrhage in the muscles, in the overlying tissue, the SubQ fat,
(31:43):
all those areas you look for hemorrhage in there. If
you have got a ligature that's as tight, you're going
to have a very focalized area you can even appreciate
it internally, you'll see like this line that goes across
if you're absent that. But yet you have this kind
of broad, expansive hand hemorrhage that is not quite as deep,
but it is there that there is a high probability
(32:06):
that if you have associated hemorrhage that may perhaps be
brought about as someone having the life choked out of them.
You look at the ligature that you have and you
don't see any kind of associated demarcation with the ligature itself.
You know that this is something other than as advertised,
that perhaps they were choked out or manually strangled, and
(32:29):
then the zip tide was put on as just an
afterthought to kind of put this forward. She took her
own life, She had access to a zip tide and
she put her around her neck and she tightened the
thing down. Can you imagine? And so science is going
to trump every single time, it's going to trump whatever
you might be speaking. You're trying to speak this into existence, right.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
You got this guy from the very beginning, He's already
in there saying this is what it is. Again, I
am still stuck with Joe, this person that you have
had an intimate relationship with for years, is dead on
your floor and you didn't try to do anything to
help except tell the police I have a suicide. It
just boggles the mind. But I'm wondering, Joe. You know,
(33:10):
when you put a zip tie and you pull it,
certain areas of the zip tie would have pressure on
them first. You know, as you're pulling back on it,
would you be able to trace that in post perhaps?
Speaker 1 (33:22):
I think that probably the most pressure is going to
be exerted, probably away from where it's actuated from where
you slip the tip of this thing in and then
pull it tight. So you're going to have initial pressure
that's applied again one hundred and eighty degrees away from
wherever that connective point is, and then latterly which would
(33:44):
be at the ninety degree marks on either side as
you're tightening it down. And then finally you'll have that
one place where you make that one final pull as
you tighten it down right there, and sometimes the skin
can get wrapped up in there, it'll pinch. We've seen
this happen with people that have had their hands zip tied.
You'll get these little pinched areas that'll have focal areas
(34:05):
of hemorrhis that are associated with that, and so there
are a number of things that you're going to look
for on their person and here's something else. And this
particularly happens with female victims, even if they're fully clothed.
In a case like this that has this kind of violence. Nowadays,
what will happen in the morgue even if she's fully clothed, Dave,
They're going to do a rape kit. There's a high
(34:26):
probability because you know, lots of times people can be
raped and they'll be redressed. For instance, I'm not saying
that that happened in this case, but I'm saying that,
just to be safe, this would have happened, they would
have also have done and this is kind of fascinating,
they would have also done examinations of her hands. You know,
we talked about the ubraided areas that she would have
(34:46):
relative to these friction abrasions that come about as a
result of contacting carpet, but we would look at the
nails and do the nail trimmings and the nail scrapings.
Nail scrapings and trimmings is the way it actually happens
to see if there is anything caught beneath those nails.
It seemed as though, I don't know what you think
about this day, but it seems as though the narrative
(35:08):
that we're being given, she fought back or resisted in
some way. And many times if an individual can, they're
going to try to, particularly if someone is putting pressure
on their neck and the individual is using their hands.
You would look at a suspect, if you can get
them early enough, you would look at the wrists right
to see if there's nail marks, and they're going to
look like little half moons where the nails kind of
(35:31):
penetrate into the skin of the perpetrator and also scratch
marks on the face because you're trying to do the
victim is trying to do anything that can to get away.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
And in this particular case, we haven't heard no, you
know what, Joe, we have. They did say that they
could tell a struggle had taken place. You've got the
other marks with the rugburns and things like that. They
alluded to other things that they witnessed on at the
crime scene. You mentioned a rape kit, even though she's
fully clothed, and that's the other part of this to
believe his story is to just be wacko and looking
(36:03):
at it from every other way possible. Joe, if not him,
somebody just came in there after he left for work
and killed her for no reason and went on about
their mary away without taking anything.
Speaker 1 (36:12):
Yeah, you're right. And the police or the DA at
least have enough that they felt secure enough in charging Boosa.
They did, in fact charge him with homicide.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
First degree premeditated murder.
Speaker 1 (36:26):
Yeah, and they premeditated, which is a boy. That's a
certain element there, particularly in Florida. You have this knowledge
in advance that you're planning to do this, and so
premeditation is certainly something that's very chilling. This is not
a reactive event in the opinion of the police. He
has been charged, he hasn't been convicted, He hasn't even
(36:47):
been tried. But from what I understand, the judge didn't
feel secure enough apparently, or the magistrate didn't feel secure
enough to offer bond for him. He's being held without bond, Dave.
So that gives you an idea to where prosecutor's mind
is and certainly the police's minds are. I think that
it's very important though, that we understand that even though
(37:10):
he's saying that this is a suicide and the police
believe that it is a homicide, it's important to know, Dave,
that we have people out all across this country and
within the sound of our voices that are struggling with
things right now. And if you are someone you love
and you care about is struggling with thoughts of self harm, police,
(37:30):
know that there is help. You can simply dial nine
eight eight for suicide and Crisis Lifeline. I'm Joseph Scott
Morgan and this is Bodybacks
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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