May 17, 2022 • 60 mins
Teacher and former beauty queen Tara Grinstead vanishes from her Georgia home. There is no sign of forced entry. There is no sign of a struggle, but some things were out of place. Grinstead's bedside clock was found under her bed, and a broken lamp was propped against the wall on her nightstand.
The 30-year-old attended a beauty pageant and a cookout with co-workers before going home. Friends and family called Grinstead the next day, but couldn't reach her. When Grinstead did not show up to teach at Irwin County High school, co-workers called police.
Some 12 years later, Grinstead's remains are found in a pecan orchard and two of her past students charged with her murder. Today on Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan looks at what details may have been overlooked at the time of Tara's disappearance.
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. You know, there are
a lot of terms that people use for tiny rural towns.
I've heard them all at this point in my life.
One that comes to mind is a fleece back of
(00:28):
a town that means tiny, out of the way, forgotten.
But you know, for the people that live in these
tiny little towns, it's home and there's a sense of security.
Many times, that's what kind of separates Oscilla, Georgia from
many other locations. Folks felt secure, they felt safe. That
(00:56):
is until two thousand five, Tera grinst It vanished off
to face the planet. Today we're gonna talk about the
disappearance and the destruction of the remains of Tera Grinstead.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags. My
(01:22):
good buddy Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories. When
Nancy Grace is here with me, Jackie, what can you
tell us about Tera Grinstead. This is a case that
captivated America because this beloved teacher and former beauty queen
truly seemed to disappear off of the face of the earth.
(01:44):
Tera Grin's dad was a teacher. She taught history and
as I said she was a former beauty queen. She
was just thirty years old when she went missing after
an evening with friends and co workers. She had been
earlier in a day working with pageant participants, and then
(02:04):
she attended a bonfire a cookout with fellow teachers. Witnesses
at the cookout said Tara left early and went home.
Tara had plans the next day. When the next day
rolled around, no tera, her mother and best friend thought
something came up. They weren't really worried about it at
(02:25):
that time because this was before cell phone use that
we see today. On Monday, when Tara did not show
up for work, a missing person report was made by
her neighbors and her coworkers. Police are called in and
that's where our timeline and investigations start, Joe. When police
(02:46):
go into the house, they don't find a body, and
the investigation begins. Let's talk about the beginnings of an investigation.
What did the police do when they got there to
determine what happened to Well, you know, it's it's almost
wrote now, you know, in the genre of true crime
where you hear what we talked about. When investigators show
(03:09):
up at seeing Jack, they'll they'll say, there's no signs
of forced entry struggle, and and that is true, you know,
that's one of the things that you look for. And
and plus you know, let's go back a little bit
and think about when Tara did disappear, because this this
case from the beginning was treated as a disappearance. It
(03:30):
was not treated necessarily as um as some kind of
horrific event like a homicide had taken place. So what
they're trying to determine, the big question before them at
that moment time is you know, where is this woman?
And reflectively you think about you think about what her
(03:51):
friends are saying. You know, her her skin folks, and
they're talking about this is completely out of the norm
for her. Um that it's not it's not standard practice
for her. You know, when she didn't show it for
work on that Monday, that that was a big red
flag for the folks at work with it, because you know,
she's not gonna just disappear. You know, maybe she would
(04:13):
call off sick if she were in fact sick, but
it's not like her not to show up for work.
She's a public school teacher. You know, he's going to
cover the class. There's a lot that goes into that.
You know, so people were really concerned about her whereabouts,
but you know, you don't I think that's it's even
within human nature. The first thing that your mind goes
(04:33):
to is generally not has she been murdered? It's where
is she? And it didn't fit with what they were
seeing at the scene because there was really no sign
of forced entry in the house. I think adjacent to
her bed, there's a bedside and lamp that's slightly askew. Uh,
(04:55):
you've got a candle that's overturned. The phone, which is uh,
a cordless phone was found on the floor. But you
it's not like you go through and you've got broken
furniture everywhere, and there's a sign of struggle, and also
there's there's a sign of people rifling or a person
(05:15):
having rifle through all of her personal belongings. And you know,
the biggest thing is there's nothing missing at that point
in time, valuables and that sort of thing. It was
even noted that there were still costume jewelry laying about
that someone would use in a in a pageant performance,
So nothing had been taken from the residents at this
(05:38):
point in time. You know, terror just appears to you know,
kind of vaporized, uh, into thin air, and no one
knew what exactly had happened to her. So, Joe, as
this missing person case got underway, as you were saying,
nothing was really missing from the home. It did not
appear to be a robbery. So at that point it
(05:58):
makes you consider the fact that Arra has been taken.
Her car is still in her driveway, it's a little
muddy on the outside, her house was locked when the
police got there, and the only items that appear to
be missing are her purse and her keys. Yet again,
her car was still in the driveway. Police did find, however,
(06:22):
that the seat had been moved. What does that tell us, Well,
you know, if you if you look at a vehicle. Listen,
we all understand everybody can identify with getting into your
own personal vehicle and someone having been in there, say
that they were shorter than you and they've adjusted seat,
moved it forward. You're gonna understand that. And people would
(06:45):
know just from observations of Terra, they're gonna know what
her height is, Okay, And so when you try to
factor that in, if your police officer and you're looking,
well this seems a bit long legged. If you would
for some one of Tara stature to be uh driving
this vehicle, it seems um incompatible with her size. It
(07:08):
gives you an indication at least that maybe somebody else
had been utilizing the vehicle at that point in time.
But you know, here's here's one of the big problems
with that vehicle. Um. The fact is is that that
vehicle was not thoroughly examined. It just wasn't. And I
(07:30):
look at vehicles as what we refer to many times
as secondary scenes, um, because they contain They're like this
bubble that contains many times of a wealth of evidence,
and even more so than say a home, for instance,
because you don't have a lot of people passing through.
The area's kind of self contained. It turned out later
(07:53):
that you know, I think that the neighbor had taken
terrorists vehicle and had a d tailed. Now just imagine
that that, and I guess that it was out of
good will. You know, Terry was missing at the time
that took the vehicle and had it clean for her
thoroughly and had it brought back to her home. And
(08:13):
so by the time that that the crime scene investigators
actually made it to her car in order to inspect it,
to check it out even further, maybe give it the
once over. Um, anything that had been in there was gone,
because you know, when cars get detailed, you use things
(08:34):
like solvents inside of them, You wipe things down, you
vacuum things, um, So any kind of evidence that's there
is going to be greatly compromised at that point in time.
Not to mention, the individuals that are entering the vehicle
to clean it are leaving behind traces of themselves. Okay, say,
(08:55):
for instance, you've got a guy that's that is vacuuming, okay,
the carpet inside of terrorist vehicle. Well, you don't know,
but if he's been detailing three and four other cars
that same day, he's gonna drag all of that particulate
evidence from those other vehicles he's meen in in the
(09:16):
world in which he inhabits into her vehicle and deposited there.
Just imagine you can begin to kind of do the
calculus on this, and you understand why anything that might
be found in there is gonna essentially be kind of
invalid from an evidentiary standpoint, because this goes to cross contamination.
And it goes back to what was said over a
(09:37):
century ago by Edmond Lekard, and that is every contact
leaves a trace. So that's one of the defining principles
in forensics that we work under. So you know, what
you're saying is you're introducing yourself into the environment, even
as a crime scene investigator, um, but so much more
for somebody that's going in and cleaning, they're essentially wipe
(10:00):
in a way all evidence. You're not going to have
anything that is going to be usable within this vehicle.
So if this vehicle was used, say for instance, to
transport terra um, if there was evidence blood evidence in there,
if there was any kind of other bodily fluids that
were in there, there's a good chance they would be
greatly compromised. And even more so, you would expect to
(10:22):
find her DNA in the vehicle because she operates the vehicle.
But what if you're looking for that one person that
essentially has no contact with her whatsoever in her normal
workaday life, and their evidence may have been deposited in
that vehicle was gone now because now it's been cleaned
and all of that is eradicated. I'm sure most of
(10:44):
our listeners, Joe, when you talk about this car being detailed,
it raised so many red flags because number one, what
neighbor has the keys to somebody else's car and just
does this? To me, this is like, wait a minute,
you're gonna take my car and clean it without telling me,
you're gonna take my car and clean it. And when
(11:05):
you couldn't tell me you were gonna take my car
and clean it, that didn't raise any red flags for
this person. Yeah, and I think again, you've got you've
got a couple of things that work here. First off,
you've got a community that is that's that's just wringing
in hand, that's just en its hands and grieving. Okay, Um,
(11:27):
you've got people that want to extend goodwill and help out. Remember,
Oscilla is a is a just a tiny little town
out in rural South Georgia. Stuff like this just doesn't happen.
I mean, it just does not happen. So people are
kind of working through this thing, trying to do something
for people, just trying to you know, um, soothe themselves
(11:50):
and maybe soothe other members of her family or just
make up some you know, let me rephrase that, just
kind of offer up something that they can do as
a gesture of kindness, and I think that probably that
was the motivation behind here. Now you can look at
it from a more skeptical view and say, well, with
(12:11):
this person, and I certainly look at it this way
as an investigator, if I wasn't one on the ground, Uh,
did this person have some kind of nefarious reason for
doing this? Were they trying to cover tracks at this
point in time? And I don't think that that really
lead anywhere as far as the police were concerned. But
at at the at the end, this falls squarely on
(12:34):
the shoulders of law enforcement, okay, because it doesn't rest
on the on the neighbor who did this act of
you know, being a good samaritan. This rest you know
from Jump Street that car, that car should have been
impounded at that moment in time. You know, you we've
already talked about how the seat was, I was adjusted
(12:57):
all right, that it seemed askew or are out of
the normal it was at that point in time you
got this missing, uh person that that just it's outside
of her normal behavior. That car should have been taken
by the police at that moment time. It's questered somewhere
so that no one else had access to it. And
(13:18):
I think that if that had occurred, looking back at
this retrospectively, there would be far fewer questions and a
lot more answers. I think one of the other pieces
of evidence that came from the home actually came from
outside the home. Police found a latex glove. Now, today,
(13:39):
with all of our knowledge about forensics, we would think,
or you would think that finding that latex glove outside
the home would have been a game changer for this investigation,
but that ended up not being the case. Joe, you know,
you've got a couple of folks that had borne witness
to that club. Famously, the next neighbor, elderly gentleman had
(14:02):
come over uh to look for terror at that at
that point in time, and that gentleman, who was up
in age, had stated that he saw a glove, a
let x glove on the ground in the yard to
tear his home. And you know, we're thinking about this
is back in two thousand five, and so we had
(14:25):
not quite gotten to the point from a technology standpoint
where we were going to use touch DNA. However, what
is significant, I think in this particular case is that um,
the analysts that examined the glove did an external sampling
(14:47):
on the outside of the glove, okay, and also within
the glove. So you're talking about swabbing all the surfaces
because you don't know what you're gonna get. And and
as it turned out, they they were able to develop
a couple of profiles off of off of what they
had recovered from the glove. And keep in mind again
(15:08):
this is prior to the days of us actually having
touched DNA, and just so are our listeners understand and
remember touch DNA comes about as a result of deposition
of essentially dead cells, like dead skin cells. We sluck
thousands and thousands of these per day. You're not aware
(15:28):
of it, Lord knows, you know lotion companies have made
uh tons of money off of dry skin treatments, all right, Well,
that the reason is is that we we sluve skin cells,
and in those skin cells there are particular pieces of
DNA that we can essentially replicate, make a make a
(15:52):
profile off of. Back in two thousand five, we weren't
quite there yet. You still, most of the DNA sample
back then required uh some kind of bodily fluid. You know,
you're thinking about blood, you're thinking about uh semen, saliva,
those sorts of things, wet samples, if you will. And
as we move forward in time, now we're beginning to
(16:17):
be able to take fragmentary DNA and create this, you know,
this kind of replicant uh DNA pattern and develop a
profile off of that. So going back, this was very
significant that she had taken samples off of both aspects
of the glove, both the interior and the exterior. And
(16:37):
you know, at the end that I think that it's
important because if if that had not been done, um,
then you would still have many questions that have since
been answered relative to who was involved in terrorists appearance.
(17:13):
You know, unlike children that disappear, you're not going to
have a bunch of alerts that go up when an
adult disappears. And that was one of the problems that
existed in terrorist case from Jump Street. And she's thirty
years old, she's christ your free will. She can make
a decision to go and UH and disappear or go
(17:37):
somewhere else, and she doesn't have to report to anybody,
And that was the problem all along with this case, Jackie.
It was Joe the level of disinformation, for lack of
a better way to put it, between state agents and
local authorities, really buggled down this investigation. It was more
than ten years before an arrest were made in this case.
(18:01):
But what we find is that the arrest in this
case of Ryan Duke and bo Dukes was a long
time incoming. Investigators said that this pair was on their
radar early in the investigation. Information came to the agents
(18:24):
about the investigation, but they didn't follow up the information
that was relayed to them. Appeared as if this pair
had been cleared by local authorities. That never happened. They
weren't cleared by local authorities. They weren't cleared by state authorities.
(18:46):
Ryan Duke and bou Duke were former students of Tera Grinstead.
Remember she was a history teacher. So how did that
fall through the cracks? Joe? Sometimes these things happened in
that way. Remember when Tara first vanished, Um, you you
(19:06):
had the locals that were the first responders on the scene.
This would be you know, the Ascilla Police department that
had showed up and they they're they're kind of the
initial point of contact. And uh. One one of the
problems that happens is that you lose you lose information
you're when you have an assisting agency that comes in.
(19:30):
In this case, it was the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
And most of the time, because people might not understand
how this happens, the g b I and most state
investigative agencies, they don't come into a local investigation of
their own free will, if you will, they have to
(19:52):
be summoned or requested to come in. And you know,
I think early on Ocilla, though, Sila p D saw
that there was a need to have someone that had
greater resources, so they invited the g b I to
come in. And of course this is after the fact,
when you've got essentially to investigations going on. The assumption
(20:13):
I think by the g b I was that, um,
the Oscilla Police Department had already cleared this pair. Uh,
You've got bow Duke's and that's with an S, and
it's kind of confusing. And then you have Ryan Duke
and these guys are friends, but you know there's they're
(20:33):
not related anyway. As a matter of fact, the names
are completely different. One is d u K E and
the other's d u K S. But they were friends
and they were on the radar according to the g
b I, but their assumption was these two had been
cleared by the Oscilla Police Department, so they didn't pursue
(20:53):
the lead. The one thing that kind of turned this
entire case was the fact that uh Bo Dukes, who
arguably has very trouble passed. You know, he had been
in the military, UM, he had been had served Tom
in federal prison. UM. For I think it was like
a hundred fifty thousand dollars in theft from the federal government. UM.
(21:19):
While he was in the military, served Tom in federal prison. UM.
He had been accused of some really bad things in
other cases. One case in particular was a rape case
which he was indicted for UM. But he had, you know,
kind of slipped under the radar, and that in and
(21:42):
of itself was crushing to the investigation early on. I
think that there may have been answers that were gleaned
far sooner had they had an eye on these pair.
So what ultimately became the big break in this case, Joe,
I think that the genesis of it came as a
(22:03):
result of Bo Duke's um imbibing, drinking and uh then
uh running his mouth and he began to you know,
kind of hold forth on how he had been involved
in the disappearance of Terra Grinstead UM. And there were
(22:24):
a couple of people along the way that he had
mentioned this to, namely an old army buddy of his
UM who he had stated plainly to him that he
had had a hand in terrace disappearance. Fellow come in
to visit uh Duke's family at at Christmas time during
(22:46):
the holidays, and he had been invited in he had
mentioned it to him then and and then UM, and
then he had mentioned to a couple of other folks
as well that that you know, he had information relative
to Terrance and and connection was never really made early
on UM by the police to this. And finally, you know,
(23:07):
folks came forward and actually connected the two UM. And
when bou Dukes was finally arrested, Uh, he made a
confession at that point in time kind of laid out
exactly what had happened. And to say the very least,
it was it was very chilling, you know, UM kind
(23:29):
of scenario that he laid out what happened on that
that faithful night and the following days. UM. Back in
two thousand five. Ultimately, Joe Ryan Duke is charged with
five counts burglary, aggravated assault, malice, murder, felony murder, and
concealing a death. Bou Dukes is charged with helping him
(23:52):
to dispose of the body. What did we find out
that happened to her? Joe? In this testimony? We know
that Ryan Duke gained access to the home using a
credit card, which is why we saw no signs of
forced entry, right, And but when it comes to her death,
(24:14):
what do we know? Yeah, you know, bow Dukes made
made a couple of statements relative to what had been
related to him allegedly by Ryan Duke. And this is
kind of how it lays out from what Duke's bow
Dukes had stated. He stated that he was told um
(24:35):
by uh by Ryan that uh he had entered the
house using a credit card and he was able to
jimmy the lock essentially, and this can be easily done.
And when this is done, you're talking about taking a
plastic credit card and applying it to um to a
door jam that's not very secure and kind of slipping it,
(24:58):
slipping it into the non much there where uh where.
Actually the blocking mechanism meets the door jam itself, and
you can disengage the lock and quietly gain entrance into
the house. So there's no forcing, there's no kicking, there's
no prime um of the door, so you're not gonna
(25:18):
have things like tool marks, you know. So when the
cops would look at that, they'd be scratching their heads saying,
you know, well, we don't have any signs of forced
entry here. Uh, no one has forced this door open,
because it's not going to leave any evidence behind. And
then Bow went on to say that Ryan related to
(25:40):
him that he had climbed into the bed with Terra
and strangled her. And you know, of the course of
my career, I've worked, you know, I've worked quite a
few um strangulations and people that are in kind of
a symmetrical positions where you've got the dominant individual the
(26:03):
attacker who is in fact dominant. That's that asymmetry. And
now you're talking about a grown man that is hovering
um over a slightly built woman lying in her bed. Um,
why did he feel the need to climb into the
bed with her? And the fact that he stated that
(26:25):
he climbed into the bed with her implies something else.
To me, it does, at least as an investigator, that
that gives it almost an air of some kind of Um,
there's a sexual element there to me, in in in
to my way of thinking. Um. And then he he
strangles her. And in the meantime Bow has stated that
(26:48):
um uh that Ryan had acquired uh Bow's truck because
Bo was drunk the night that this occurred and had
passed out. Ryan goes back, gets Ryan's truck, places tear
his body into the truck, and takes her body off
some distance to a pecan orchard that he was very
(27:10):
familiar with, and essentially dumps this woman's body out in
a in a debris area. Uh there on this on
this property at pecan orchard. Um. And all of this
is being related by bou Do, who you know, agreed
for whatever reason to go with Ryan out to this
(27:30):
location and to verify to help him. It's it kind
of remained unclear until Bo finally said yet he agreed
to help Ryan dispose of Tera Grinstead's body. Now Here.
Here's the key thing, you know, going back to what
I stated about the bed and in him climbing into
(27:53):
the bed with her. When Bo first observed tears by
he made. He made several observations in this. The most glaring,
I think is the fact that he stated that her
body was nude. Well, as investigators when we look at
a crime scene and we see a female, um, well
(28:17):
for any any person in particular, but you know, when
you're investigating death like this and you see the body
of a female that is nude. Has said that that
has heavy sexual overtones. Assuming that Terr Grinstead did not
sleep nude, that she wore some type of bedclothing, you know,
like the pajamas or you know, gym shorts or something
(28:38):
to bed. Why while her or her clothes removed from
her or body, It just you know that that's that's
a big question. Then he stated that her body was discolored,
and I think that probably what he was observing at
that point in time was the fact that she had
already started to go into decomposational changes and the body,
(29:00):
the body during this period of time will take on
kind of a dark color um as as the body
becomes progressively more dehydrated. This is a process of desiccation,
if you will. And then one other thing, uh kind
of the final the final thing here, um he stated
that she had what appeared to be marks on her
(29:22):
neck or injuries to her neck, and this goes back
confirmed as a confirmation based upon what Ryan had allegedly
stated the boat that he had gotten into the bed
with her and strangled her. You know, strangulation is a
very intimate event. It's probably from uh, commission of a
homicide is probably the most intimate because you you're placing
(29:44):
flesh on flesh at that moment time. It's not like
beating Somebody's not like stabbing somebody. It's not like certainly
not like shooting somebody. You're literally placing your hands on
this person, flesh on flesh and squeezing the life out
of them. You're in a dominant position over them. And
so for for that, you know, he is the only
(30:05):
essentially linkage back to physical evidence or well, let's don't
say physical evidence, but he is the only source at
this point in time that we have for what actually
happened to Tara, because after that he begins to assist
with the destruction of our remains in the concealment of
her death. Tara's body was cremated by this pair Joe.
(30:29):
We know this because that's what they have admitted to
in court taking the body to the pecan orchard. And
as we have discussed before on body bags, we know
that it takes a long time, that it takes a
high temperature to cremate a body. What does it tell us, Joe,
(30:53):
that they took Taras body to this area to burn
it to get rid of the evidence of their crime.
There there's one other element here relative to fire. What
else do you need? You need concealment and and I'm
not just talking about just kind of you know, doing
(31:13):
things in a dark space. I'm talking about you need
an out of the way place. You need a place
that is not going to draw attention, someplace that off
the beaten path. And that gives you an idea that
whoever did this, you know, bo Is is certainly taking
responsibility for his participation in this. You would have to
(31:37):
have an awareness with you. You'd have to have an
awareness of where you could go in order to facilitate this.
Because there's all kinds of things that you're gonna need
in order to set this up. Concealment is the biggest thing,
so that you're not going to draw attention, because as
you mentioned, this is not something that happens in a flash.
(31:57):
This is something that takes a tremendous amount of time.
But not just time, it takes attention. Check. There's an attempt,
(32:27):
I think, with tears death of what I refer to
as the humanization where you take this beautiful, vital young
lady that love folks, loved her family, and you just
absolutely ripper to shreds and then, you know, it's kind
of the exclamation point on it. You reduce her down
(32:50):
to absolutely nothing, down to her base elements as a
human being. As we were just talking about Joe, it
takes a long time time to cremate a body. Before
we get to that, let's start with how they found
what was left of the body. Because there wasn't much left,
was there? No, No, there wasn't And the investigators were
(33:15):
actually led out to the scene, um bye bye duke.
Uh and when they got there that there was still
an approximation of the area, uh where the cremation had
had taken place. And keep in mind, we're we're years
down the road, you know, from from where this actually happened. Um.
(33:41):
You know the thing about burning wood and these organic
substances is that it can uh it changes the nature
of the soil, It changes the nature of of the
plant growth that's in the area. As a matter of fact,
it will kind of enrich the soil, if you will,
relative to the remnant of the fire. So that what
(34:05):
we refer to as the topography and also the taffonomy.
Taffonomy is a term that's used in UH forensic anthropology,
and it goes to the distribution of remains, skeletal remains
in particular, are cremated remains in regards to the topography
and how water impacts it and how UH plant growth
(34:26):
and all these things affect what you're looking at as
an investigator, And so when you go out, you're relying
on information coming from an individual that has perpetrated this horrible,
horrible deed and basing your investigation upon that. At least
(34:46):
that's that's the point of where you you know, kind
of uh start the investigation, the physical investigation that's seen
and begin to process it. And at first, you know,
I can only imagine the investor skaters being out there
and you know, kind of scratching their head and thinking, well,
how how exactly are we going to start off here?
(35:06):
You know, how are we gonna begin to try to
put together what exactly happened. Are we going to be
able to establish some kind of some kind of boundaries
for where this this cremation took place. It's a dawning task,
to say the very least as fullye started the investigation
in that orchard. They found bone fragments. They found pieces
(35:32):
of her backbone, bone fragments of her fingers and toes,
and some of her skull. How did they find that, Joe?
You know, they found remains of what they're would have
been referred to as the small bones of the hand.
But what stands out to me the most are these
three elements. The fact that they found some of the skull,
(35:56):
some of the spinal process, which are the vertebral body,
and also they found a single tooth. Now, when you
take all of that in its totality, aside from the handbones,
when you begin to think about the spine um, the skull,
and the tooth, those those are arguably, uh, some of
(36:19):
the most robust elements of the body. Um. That means
that they will they will last uh even in the
face of a fire, uh, far longer than some of
the other elements that will be essentially um essentially disintegrated
(36:39):
UH as a result of exposure to prolonged exposure to heat.
And it's not necessarily surprising that they were able to
find vertebral body UH and part of the skull and
the tooth UM. And I like for the listeners to understand,
and you might think this is kind of an obvious statement,
but teeth or you know, arguably some of those resilient
(37:02):
elements of the human body, and they are not bone,
they're not bone. But it's key here, Jackie, to understand
that they found not teeth but a tooth, a tooth.
Why is that significant? Well, the fact is is that
it is a tooth, not the teeth that gives you
(37:24):
an ideas to how hot this fire was. Because um
in in the process of cremation or rendering down remains
through heat, UH, teeth will will last longer than just
about any other element in in the human body. And
let's say, for instance, you you have a body UM
and we can kind of explain maybe and I'll take
(37:45):
a staff at it. We can kind of explain why, uh, say,
some of the spinal processes might have been found or
part of the skull. And if you would imagine somebody
laying in a supine position or face up, um, those
areas that are on the back side are going to
be protected. So if you've got a shot at at
(38:06):
any element surviving, it's going to be those that are protected. Say, uh,
they're making contact with the dirt. I suspect it probably
uh if she had been in an attitude uh supine attitude,
which is face up, lying on her back, then maybe
(38:27):
that portion of the skull that was recovered would have
been one of the more robust areas of the skull.
And that there's two areas that are particularly very very
uh dense, and that's going to be the frontal bone,
which is where your forehead is, and the back of
your head um the accipital region, which is that kind
of bony prominence that you have on the back of
(38:47):
your skull. That the areas of the skull are very
very thick in those locations. And then you know the
catebral bodies, if she's in a supine position, are going
to be more resistant I think, to exposure of the heat.
And they are in and of themselves as far as
bone goes, um, they are more resilient. They're very thick
(39:09):
um kind of robust and then of course you have
this tooth that is left behind. UH. And teeth are
highly heat resistant. UH for a protracted period of time, UM,
they'll last longer. And that's one of the reasons when
you have an actual cremation that's done in a crematory. UM.
(39:32):
Most of the time, the the cremains, those remains that
have been rendered down will come out of a conveyor
belt and they will pass through an augur which is
this kind of giant screw, and it further renders down
the remains by crushing, because when those remains have turned
to family, it's essentially dust that that's left behind. But
(39:55):
there's still those elements that are so robust that they
have to be you know, kind of rendered down for there.
That's not the case with terrors remains. Not everything was
completely rendered down. But that came very very close, Jackie,
very close. Okay, I'm gonna sound really intelligent here, Joe,
You're gonna be really proud of me. Done some research
(40:17):
and we know that bone is made up of protein collagen. Okay,
teeth are made of enamel and calcium. Teeth can be
destroyed by sugar. By decay, bone cannot. So you're telling
(40:39):
me that fire is not as damaging as sugar to
a tooth. I mean, what I'm trying to understand is
if we have this substance in our body that is
as hard or maybe harder than our bones, how can
we end up with this result? Yeah, Yeah, that's that's
that's actually a very uh intriguing question, Jackie. Um, You're
(41:03):
you're talking about a physiological reaction the teeth to exposure,
long term exposure to something like a sugar, and and
more people are susceptible to it than than others, you know,
as far as decay, dental decay goes. But you know,
we're talking about two different types of chemical reactions here. Uh,
(41:26):
fire in fact, is a chemical reaction. Uh, It's a
sustained chemical reaction. There's several elements that are involved in it,
and it happens in a very short order. And because
of the density and the structure of the teeth, they
are heat resistant. Um. When it when exposed, even long
(41:47):
term exposure to heat, one bodies are being rendered down.
Bone not so much, it's it's not made that way.
The matrices of the bone begins to break down and
it's It's fascinating because you know, one of the ways
that that forensic anthropologists will verify in court, for instance,
that bone has been exposed to fire. One of the
(42:08):
things that they will actually say, Jackie, is that it
weighs less and didn't not a fascinating, fascinating observation, because
as bone is exposed to heat, it begins to bleed
off these various elements, you know, and including things like
water um. The collagen is burned away, so that all
(42:32):
you're left with is essentially the bone becomes calcific and
it takes on a white white appearance, and you can
look at it's got kind of a honeycomb formation. That's
kind of the matrices the bones that you can see exposed.
And so the longer exposed to heat, the lighter the
bone becomes. And that's one of the scientific ways in
(42:52):
legal ways that you verify if if a bone has
been exposed to heat. And I've heard many times that
forensic anthropologies, when asked that question underdirect you know, how
do you know that this body was burned based upon
the skeletal remains that you examine, and that's one of
the things they'll say, the bone is lighter teeth are
not necessarily going to lose that weight. They won't lose
(43:13):
it as quickly because there there they act as kind
of like a shield. And one of the things I
teach my students when it comes to DNA, for instance,
if you imagine, you know, we can extract DNA from bone, um,
but you can also get it from teeth. You go
into the pulp of the tooth, and the teeth are
much more resilient, you know. Uh, they can hold onto
(43:33):
things a lot longer. You know, you look at you know,
remains that have been in the ground for years and years.
You can do a DNA extraction on those remains. And
I tell them that bone is like a leather briefcase
and uh for retaining things. But teeth are like a
titanium briefcase. They just they're more resilient. They hang onto
things longer. And in this case and terrorist case in particularly,
(43:56):
they found this single tooth. And the fact that they
found a single tooth me is that they weren't at
least able to identify the other teeth or the teeth
were so affected by the level of heat that this
body was exposed to that they became rendered down. Until
you know, out of the thirty two, there was only
(44:16):
one remaining. Okay, so let's talk about how they managed
to cremate this body so that there's very little remaining.
They are in a pecan orchard, so you would imagine
since they're planning to start a fire, they're going to
use what they easily have on hand, which is pecan wood. Yeah. Yeah, pecan.
(44:37):
Pecan's an interesting wood. Um it's a hardwood, and it's
comparable actually to hickory, and um wood is ranked as
far as like its ability to burn things or to
maintain heat um as it's rated as one of the highest. Uh.
It's rated as a wood that can produce the most
(44:59):
heat all right, Hickory. It's in the same family as hickory.
The only level above pecan is oak. All right. So
if you're going to choose a wood to generate heat, with,
pecans a good choice. And obviously, as you well stated that, uh,
that's a fuel source that you would have access to. Um.
(45:24):
You know, the thing about pecan orchards is that many times,
you know, as you and we have them all over
the South, um limbs fall away. If people are tending
their pecan orchards. What they will do is they'll grab
that wood and they'll create these kind of debris piles. Okay,
And so you've got wood that's not just laying there
and is available to use as a fuel source. But
(45:48):
it's seasoned wood, Jackie, which means that it burns even
better after it's been laying out for a while exposure
to the elements. It's no longer vital. It's not green.
You know, it's not gonna smoke a lot. It's just
gonna you're gonna get right to the point where it
if you can get this thing ignited and set off,
you're gonna have really a really hot fire. And to
give you an idea as to how hot the con
(46:12):
wood burns, uh is quite notable. Um and UH for
folks that don't know, you know, heat is measured UM
in many times and B two use it's a British
thermal unit. And that's just so folks understand a B
to you, a British thermal unit is equates to the
(46:37):
amount of heat that it takes to raise one pound
and yes I said pound of water one degree fahrenheit.
And if you look at pecan wood and just hold
onto your hat. Here if you look at thee con wood,
the con would if you take a cord of wood,
(46:57):
and that's the standard measured UH for UH firewood, which
is some people, you know, particularly down here in South,
they say I got a whole truckload of wood, and
many times it's a uh. They're saying that they mean accord,
and accord turns out to be about a cubic feet
of wood. Cubic feet of pecan wood will generate right
(47:22):
about twenty eight million b two use. Now keep that
in mind by what I just said, so it will
take one b tu raises the temperature of one pound
of water one degree fahrenheigh. So it's not necessarily how
(47:46):
hot it was at one particular time relative to the
disposal of terrors remains. It's to protracted time. It's the
piling on the wood. It's created a pire, if you will,
you know, pires is something that is created an underpinning
of wood where you have this fuel source. You lay
(48:07):
a body on top of a pire, and then you
continue to put fuel onto it. It's the the continued exposure. So,
out of all of the woods that could have been chosen,
becan is the one that's going to generate the most heat.
It's going to create an environment that is going to
be very very hostile to a body. Uh, that will
cause it at an elemental level to literally become uh disintegrated. Um.
(48:33):
But it requires constant attention. And you know when bo
Duke's talks about what he claims that he did in
assisting Ryan do, he actually stated that it took them
about two days to render down terrors remains. And what
does that mean, Well that this goes to the tending
(48:55):
of fire. It's it's not you know, and this is
this as part of the dehumanization factor when it comes
to terra. It's not like you you poured an accelerant
like gasoline like you see arsonists do many times, and
strike a match and walk off and everything. You people
have this perception everything disappears. It doesn't. A matter of fact,
(49:16):
you create more evidence when you do that. They stood
out there for a protracted period of time, according to
Bow for two days intended to fire. So what what
went into that, Well, any time the fire started to
die down, they would go get more wood and pilot on.
Any time that the flame reduced, they would turn the fire.
(49:37):
Sai that they would turn the coals over and the
entire time, and this is quite gruesome, but the entire
time there lay what remained of Terra, and they're constantly
adding more fuel to this area surrounding her body, and
they're trying to render her down further and further and further,
until at least in their perception, everything was gone. But
(49:59):
they missed a few elements, and at the end that's
how they were able to presumptively determined that this was
in fact Terrogrind states remains. How does what you described
with the b t us of the pecan would compare
to a crematory, you know, and again I think this
(50:20):
is a big, big part of this. You know, with
a crematory, you have a contained oven that is it's
got it's got four walls, man, you know, it's a
it's a box. It's like a big metal box that
you're you're putting a human remain on, essentially a conveyor belt,
and it goes in and these metal door shut and
(50:43):
you've got these little jets that are in there that
are fueled by natural gas. And it's a constant natural
gas source. And it's not just the direct burning of
the flame. It is the heat within the oven that
creates this kind of uh convex. This this heat convection
(51:06):
that's going on in this In this environment, the heat
is whipping around the remains and so it's not just
direct burning, it's it's the air itself is so hot,
and so you're talking about a constant burning roughly and
it's variable. You'll hear people say, you know, wellt fIF
hundred degrees of exposure. You know, intercreminatory is going to
(51:28):
render down a body. Well, a lot of that's depended
upon the body that you're burning, you know, the mass,
you know, and how long will it take and how
much heat is required and all that sort of thing.
When you look at terrorist body though, this was not
a contained area. This is an open air area. So
you look at at this factor that's brought into this.
(51:51):
And again this goes back to what had to happen
at the hand of bow Dukes and according to him them,
at the hand of Ryan Duke. Um, they had to
stand there and maintain this heat because they don't have
a cap on this. They're losing heat as a result
of applying this firewood or this pecan would to be
(52:14):
burned as fuel. Uh a lot of it is disappearing
up into the air. So that's why they're always having
to turn the fire, turn the fire and add fuel.
Turn the fire and add fuel. And when I say
turned the fire, if you've ever seen a camp fire,
you'll notice those those coals that glow red hot. But
they don't glow red hot forever and ever, Amen, because
(52:35):
there is not a sustaining fuel source, they will eventually
burn out. They were aware of this. They knew this.
They knew that they had to continue to apply heat
because they're bleeding off heat all along. Because it's outdoors,
it's not like it's in a crematory. This would have
been long, dirty work. They would have had to set
there for a protracted period of time searching out firewood.
(52:56):
If they didn't come prepared for it, they had to
go dry I get from other brush piles. Perhaps maybe
they cut wood. I don't know, but I do know this.
They applied enough heat and constant heat. You know, according
to Bo Dukes that it took them two days to
eventually render down her body. So this takes us back
(53:17):
Joe to the search for what remained. You've basically got
regrowth of the area you're gonna have ash in the soil.
I would assume that remains. How did the investigators find
the bone fragment and the tooth. You've got individuals that
(53:37):
are directing you to the area in which they perpetrated that.
That's your source of information, if you can imagine this. So,
once once the team, the crime scene investigative team would
have shown up out there, um, there's a high likelihood
that they would call in a forensic anthropologist to show
up at the scene as well. Because the friends anthropologists
(54:01):
they have a skill set that is not possessed by
very many other people. They spend all of their time
looking at things that we it just as uh workaday
people walking along about our lives. That they their their
worldview of things on the ground and as they see
things is completely different than the way we see them.
They can pick up on fine detail, that's what they're
(54:23):
trained to do. So when they have identified a specific area,
the forensic anthropologists will go back and essentially attempt through
their knowledge to validate the information that's coming to the police.
Visa B bodus. You know, is this a potential area
where something like this could have happened? Well, what do
(54:44):
they look at. They look at the distribution of any
kind of debris on the ground. They try to determine
if that's new debris, if that's like broken wood that
may have just recently fallen, our falling within the last
half decade, or is there something else that's different about
(55:04):
the soil, because they also have to be in tune
to things like like local soil. You know, down in
South Georgia, for instance, you've got soil that's very sandy,
Whereas if you go up to you know, like the
North Georgia Mountains, uh, that soil is completely different in
that region of the state. So they have to be
very attuned to the type of soil that is um
(55:29):
that is native to that particular area. Then they're gonna
have to understand something about plant life too, understand um,
you know what they're looking at the items that are
growing there, because you know, lots of times when people
try to cover up, um, cover up crimes like this,
they'll go in and they will plant things. UM. Now,
(55:52):
I don't necessarily think that that's the case here, but
they would go back. And that's just the general assessment
they're going to do in the beginning. Is there any
type of what we call flora. Have flora which talks
about plant life, and you have fauna, which talks about
animal life. It's the flora that I'm seeing here. Is
it native to this area? Is is something that was
brought in and kind of implanted into this area to
(56:13):
give it a different appearance. They're gonna want to know
if the soil has been recently upturned or does it
look like it's settled and it has been this way
forever and ever amen um. And then they're gonna look
for items that may give them an indication that's something
that's happened here even in the distant past. Because they
(56:34):
can look at a wood shard that you and I
could look at and it might not mean anything to us,
but they can look at the edges of the wood
to see if, in fact, this is indicative of something
that may have been exposed to high heat. Once they've
identified this area, they're gonna break it down into grids
and we you know, in crime State Investigation, we talked
(56:56):
about things like grid searches and all these sorts of
things where we break down SPECEI cific areas. But for them,
this is gonna be more in a more condensed area,
so they'll break it down into grids. If you just imagine,
uh say, across the top of the grid, you've got uh,
you know, a through m okay a a through m,
(57:18):
and then running down one side you might have you know,
one through I don't know, seventeen. And if you go
to block B five, you're going to excavate Block B
five specifically and nothing else, and you're gonna take out
every layer of soil, remove it from there, and take
(57:38):
it over to what's called a sifting station. And you've
seen these big sifters that people use where they'll shake
it back and forth and the debris will fall through
the screen or the loose turtle fall and everything that's
left in the screen is going to be examined by
the friends anthropologis to see if there's any skeletal remnant
that's in there, and they come again to kind of
(58:00):
read through that and understand what they're seeing and what's important.
The reason you want to grid it off is when
you go back and you're trying to explain this in court,
you can give an indication as to where that specific
item was recovered from. And suddenly, if you get it
in you know B five, and then of course in
(58:23):
uh C five and so forth and so on D five,
or you know, in close proximity, you can begin to
see how maybe a body will begin to kind of uh,
for lack of a better term, kind of rise up
before your eyes. In these gridge you can see the
distribution of the remains, and suddenly you get an ideas, okay,
(58:43):
we found a vertebral body here here here, this is
where we found the tooth. Um, we may have found
a handbone, a bone from the hand that's over here. Um.
And suddenly, uh, you begin to understand, well, maybe she
was in this position and as they burned her body
and rendered it down. It's very very painstaking work. This
(59:04):
is not something that is done just you know, leisurely
in an afternoon. It's very very intensive. And here's here's
the really tough thing. When you're talking about fire related cases,
these are some of the most difficult recoveries to do
because when you begin to look at everything at these scenes,
(59:24):
everything looks the same because it's all been exposed to heat.
And now after the fact, not only do you have
these items that have all been exposed to heat, now
over the passage of time, you've got dirt deposition that's
come on top, you've got plant growth that's come on top,
and any kind of impact. Remember I talked about the
term taffonomy earlier, where waters float over an area that's
(59:47):
going to come into play too. It is highly complex
and if you're not there when you're a game, you're
gonna lose and miss things. All of this work combines
Joe to bring hopefully some close sure to Tea Grandstad's
mother and her family and friends. Uh Bo Dukes is
in prison convicted for his participation in this. Ryan Duke
(01:00:11):
is currently standing trial for the murder of Tera Grinstead.
We do pray that closure in this case does bring
some comfort to the families. I've never been able to
understand if closure is a real thing in homicide cases
for families, but I do know this that after two decades,
almost two decades of pure hell that this family has endured, hopefully,
(01:00:37):
hopefully they're going to finally find peace. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is Body Backs
Body Backs with Joseph Scott Morgan. You know, there are
a lot of terms that people use for tiny rural towns.
I've heard them all at this point in my life.
One that comes to mind is a fleece back of
(00:28):
a town that means tiny, out of the way, forgotten.
But you know, for the people that live in these
tiny little towns, it's home and there's a sense of security.
Many times, that's what kind of separates Oscilla, Georgia from
many other locations. Folks felt secure, they felt safe. That
(00:56):
is until two thousand five, Tera grinst It vanished off
to face the planet. Today we're gonna talk about the
disappearance and the destruction of the remains of Tera Grinstead.
I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is body Bags. My
(01:22):
good buddy Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories. When
Nancy Grace is here with me, Jackie, what can you
tell us about Tera Grinstead. This is a case that
captivated America because this beloved teacher and former beauty queen
truly seemed to disappear off of the face of the earth.
(01:44):
Tera Grin's dad was a teacher. She taught history and
as I said she was a former beauty queen. She
was just thirty years old when she went missing after
an evening with friends and co workers. She had been
earlier in a day working with pageant participants, and then
(02:04):
she attended a bonfire a cookout with fellow teachers. Witnesses
at the cookout said Tara left early and went home.
Tara had plans the next day. When the next day
rolled around, no tera, her mother and best friend thought
something came up. They weren't really worried about it at
(02:25):
that time because this was before cell phone use that
we see today. On Monday, when Tara did not show
up for work, a missing person report was made by
her neighbors and her coworkers. Police are called in and
that's where our timeline and investigations start, Joe. When police
(02:46):
go into the house, they don't find a body, and
the investigation begins. Let's talk about the beginnings of an investigation.
What did the police do when they got there to
determine what happened to Well, you know, it's it's almost
wrote now, you know, in the genre of true crime
where you hear what we talked about. When investigators show
(03:09):
up at seeing Jack, they'll they'll say, there's no signs
of forced entry struggle, and and that is true, you know,
that's one of the things that you look for. And
and plus you know, let's go back a little bit
and think about when Tara did disappear, because this this
case from the beginning was treated as a disappearance. It
(03:30):
was not treated necessarily as um as some kind of
horrific event like a homicide had taken place. So what
they're trying to determine, the big question before them at
that moment time is you know, where is this woman?
And reflectively you think about you think about what her
(03:51):
friends are saying. You know, her her skin folks, and
they're talking about this is completely out of the norm
for her. Um that it's not it's not standard practice
for her. You know, when she didn't show it for
work on that Monday, that that was a big red
flag for the folks at work with it, because you know,
she's not gonna just disappear. You know, maybe she would
(04:13):
call off sick if she were in fact sick, but
it's not like her not to show up for work.
She's a public school teacher. You know, he's going to
cover the class. There's a lot that goes into that.
You know, so people were really concerned about her whereabouts,
but you know, you don't I think that's it's even
within human nature. The first thing that your mind goes
(04:33):
to is generally not has she been murdered? It's where
is she? And it didn't fit with what they were
seeing at the scene because there was really no sign
of forced entry in the house. I think adjacent to
her bed, there's a bedside and lamp that's slightly askew. Uh,
(04:55):
you've got a candle that's overturned. The phone, which is uh,
a cordless phone was found on the floor. But you
it's not like you go through and you've got broken
furniture everywhere, and there's a sign of struggle, and also
there's there's a sign of people rifling or a person
(05:15):
having rifle through all of her personal belongings. And you know,
the biggest thing is there's nothing missing at that point
in time, valuables and that sort of thing. It was
even noted that there were still costume jewelry laying about
that someone would use in a in a pageant performance,
So nothing had been taken from the residents at this
(05:38):
point in time. You know, terror just appears to you know,
kind of vaporized, uh, into thin air, and no one
knew what exactly had happened to her. So, Joe, as
this missing person case got underway, as you were saying,
nothing was really missing from the home. It did not
appear to be a robbery. So at that point it
(05:58):
makes you consider the fact that Arra has been taken.
Her car is still in her driveway, it's a little
muddy on the outside, her house was locked when the
police got there, and the only items that appear to
be missing are her purse and her keys. Yet again,
her car was still in the driveway. Police did find, however,
(06:22):
that the seat had been moved. What does that tell us, Well,
you know, if you if you look at a vehicle. Listen,
we all understand everybody can identify with getting into your
own personal vehicle and someone having been in there, say
that they were shorter than you and they've adjusted seat,
moved it forward. You're gonna understand that. And people would
(06:45):
know just from observations of Terra, they're gonna know what
her height is, Okay, And so when you try to
factor that in, if your police officer and you're looking,
well this seems a bit long legged. If you would
for some one of Tara stature to be uh driving
this vehicle, it seems um incompatible with her size. It
(07:08):
gives you an indication at least that maybe somebody else
had been utilizing the vehicle at that point in time.
But you know, here's here's one of the big problems
with that vehicle. Um. The fact is is that that
vehicle was not thoroughly examined. It just wasn't. And I
(07:30):
look at vehicles as what we refer to many times
as secondary scenes, um, because they contain They're like this
bubble that contains many times of a wealth of evidence,
and even more so than say a home, for instance,
because you don't have a lot of people passing through.
The area's kind of self contained. It turned out later
(07:53):
that you know, I think that the neighbor had taken
terrorists vehicle and had a d tailed. Now just imagine
that that, and I guess that it was out of
good will. You know, Terry was missing at the time
that took the vehicle and had it clean for her
thoroughly and had it brought back to her home. And
(08:13):
so by the time that that the crime scene investigators
actually made it to her car in order to inspect it,
to check it out even further, maybe give it the
once over. Um, anything that had been in there was gone,
because you know, when cars get detailed, you use things
(08:34):
like solvents inside of them, You wipe things down, you
vacuum things, um, So any kind of evidence that's there
is going to be greatly compromised at that point in time.
Not to mention, the individuals that are entering the vehicle
to clean it are leaving behind traces of themselves. Okay, say,
(08:55):
for instance, you've got a guy that's that is vacuuming, okay,
the carpet inside of terrorist vehicle. Well, you don't know,
but if he's been detailing three and four other cars
that same day, he's gonna drag all of that particulate
evidence from those other vehicles he's meen in in the
(09:16):
world in which he inhabits into her vehicle and deposited there.
Just imagine you can begin to kind of do the
calculus on this, and you understand why anything that might
be found in there is gonna essentially be kind of
invalid from an evidentiary standpoint, because this goes to cross contamination.
And it goes back to what was said over a
(09:37):
century ago by Edmond Lekard, and that is every contact
leaves a trace. So that's one of the defining principles
in forensics that we work under. So you know, what
you're saying is you're introducing yourself into the environment, even
as a crime scene investigator, um, but so much more
for somebody that's going in and cleaning, they're essentially wipe
(10:00):
in a way all evidence. You're not going to have
anything that is going to be usable within this vehicle.
So if this vehicle was used, say for instance, to
transport terra um, if there was evidence blood evidence in there,
if there was any kind of other bodily fluids that
were in there, there's a good chance they would be
greatly compromised. And even more so, you would expect to
(10:22):
find her DNA in the vehicle because she operates the vehicle.
But what if you're looking for that one person that
essentially has no contact with her whatsoever in her normal
workaday life, and their evidence may have been deposited in
that vehicle was gone now because now it's been cleaned
and all of that is eradicated. I'm sure most of
(10:44):
our listeners, Joe, when you talk about this car being detailed,
it raised so many red flags because number one, what
neighbor has the keys to somebody else's car and just
does this? To me, this is like, wait a minute,
you're gonna take my car and clean it without telling me,
you're gonna take my car and clean it. And when
(11:05):
you couldn't tell me you were gonna take my car
and clean it, that didn't raise any red flags for
this person. Yeah, and I think again, you've got you've
got a couple of things that work here. First off,
you've got a community that is that's that's just wringing
in hand, that's just en its hands and grieving. Okay, Um,
(11:27):
you've got people that want to extend goodwill and help out. Remember,
Oscilla is a is a just a tiny little town
out in rural South Georgia. Stuff like this just doesn't happen.
I mean, it just does not happen. So people are
kind of working through this thing, trying to do something
for people, just trying to you know, um, soothe themselves
(11:50):
and maybe soothe other members of her family or just
make up some you know, let me rephrase that, just
kind of offer up something that they can do as
a gesture of kindness, and I think that probably that
was the motivation behind here. Now you can look at
it from a more skeptical view and say, well, with
(12:11):
this person, and I certainly look at it this way
as an investigator, if I wasn't one on the ground, Uh,
did this person have some kind of nefarious reason for
doing this? Were they trying to cover tracks at this
point in time? And I don't think that that really
lead anywhere as far as the police were concerned. But
at at the at the end, this falls squarely on
(12:34):
the shoulders of law enforcement, okay, because it doesn't rest
on the on the neighbor who did this act of
you know, being a good samaritan. This rest you know
from Jump Street that car, that car should have been
impounded at that moment in time. You know, you we've
already talked about how the seat was, I was adjusted
(12:57):
all right, that it seemed askew or are out of
the normal it was at that point in time you
got this missing, uh person that that just it's outside
of her normal behavior. That car should have been taken
by the police at that moment time. It's questered somewhere
so that no one else had access to it. And
(13:18):
I think that if that had occurred, looking back at
this retrospectively, there would be far fewer questions and a
lot more answers. I think one of the other pieces
of evidence that came from the home actually came from
outside the home. Police found a latex glove. Now, today,
(13:39):
with all of our knowledge about forensics, we would think,
or you would think that finding that latex glove outside
the home would have been a game changer for this investigation,
but that ended up not being the case. Joe, you know,
you've got a couple of folks that had borne witness
to that club. Famously, the next neighbor, elderly gentleman had
(14:02):
come over uh to look for terror at that at
that point in time, and that gentleman, who was up
in age, had stated that he saw a glove, a
let x glove on the ground in the yard to
tear his home. And you know, we're thinking about this
is back in two thousand five, and so we had
(14:25):
not quite gotten to the point from a technology standpoint
where we were going to use touch DNA. However, what
is significant, I think in this particular case is that um,
the analysts that examined the glove did an external sampling
(14:47):
on the outside of the glove, okay, and also within
the glove. So you're talking about swabbing all the surfaces
because you don't know what you're gonna get. And and
as it turned out, they they were able to develop
a couple of profiles off of off of what they
had recovered from the glove. And keep in mind again
(15:08):
this is prior to the days of us actually having
touched DNA, and just so are our listeners understand and
remember touch DNA comes about as a result of deposition
of essentially dead cells, like dead skin cells. We sluck
thousands and thousands of these per day. You're not aware
(15:28):
of it, Lord knows, you know lotion companies have made
uh tons of money off of dry skin treatments, all right, Well,
that the reason is is that we we sluve skin cells,
and in those skin cells there are particular pieces of
DNA that we can essentially replicate, make a make a
(15:52):
profile off of. Back in two thousand five, we weren't
quite there yet. You still, most of the DNA sample
back then required uh some kind of bodily fluid. You know,
you're thinking about blood, you're thinking about uh semen, saliva,
those sorts of things, wet samples, if you will. And
as we move forward in time, now we're beginning to
(16:17):
be able to take fragmentary DNA and create this, you know,
this kind of replicant uh DNA pattern and develop a
profile off of that. So going back, this was very
significant that she had taken samples off of both aspects
of the glove, both the interior and the exterior. And
(16:37):
you know, at the end that I think that it's
important because if if that had not been done, um,
then you would still have many questions that have since
been answered relative to who was involved in terrorists appearance.
(17:13):
You know, unlike children that disappear, you're not going to
have a bunch of alerts that go up when an
adult disappears. And that was one of the problems that
existed in terrorist case from Jump Street. And she's thirty
years old, she's christ your free will. She can make
a decision to go and UH and disappear or go
(17:37):
somewhere else, and she doesn't have to report to anybody,
And that was the problem all along with this case, Jackie.
It was Joe the level of disinformation, for lack of
a better way to put it, between state agents and
local authorities, really buggled down this investigation. It was more
than ten years before an arrest were made in this case.
(18:01):
But what we find is that the arrest in this
case of Ryan Duke and bo Dukes was a long
time incoming. Investigators said that this pair was on their
radar early in the investigation. Information came to the agents
(18:24):
about the investigation, but they didn't follow up the information
that was relayed to them. Appeared as if this pair
had been cleared by local authorities. That never happened. They
weren't cleared by local authorities. They weren't cleared by state authorities.
(18:46):
Ryan Duke and bou Duke were former students of Tera Grinstead.
Remember she was a history teacher. So how did that
fall through the cracks? Joe? Sometimes these things happened in
that way. Remember when Tara first vanished, Um, you you
(19:06):
had the locals that were the first responders on the scene.
This would be you know, the Ascilla Police department that
had showed up and they they're they're kind of the
initial point of contact. And uh. One one of the
problems that happens is that you lose you lose information
you're when you have an assisting agency that comes in.
(19:30):
In this case, it was the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
And most of the time, because people might not understand
how this happens, the g b I and most state
investigative agencies, they don't come into a local investigation of
their own free will, if you will, they have to
(19:52):
be summoned or requested to come in. And you know,
I think early on Ocilla, though, Sila p D saw
that there was a need to have someone that had
greater resources, so they invited the g b I to
come in. And of course this is after the fact,
when you've got essentially to investigations going on. The assumption
(20:13):
I think by the g b I was that, um,
the Oscilla Police Department had already cleared this pair. Uh,
You've got bow Duke's and that's with an S, and
it's kind of confusing. And then you have Ryan Duke
and these guys are friends, but you know there's they're
(20:33):
not related anyway. As a matter of fact, the names
are completely different. One is d u K E and
the other's d u K S. But they were friends
and they were on the radar according to the g
b I, but their assumption was these two had been
cleared by the Oscilla Police Department, so they didn't pursue
(20:53):
the lead. The one thing that kind of turned this
entire case was the fact that uh Bo Dukes, who
arguably has very trouble passed. You know, he had been
in the military, UM, he had been had served Tom
in federal prison. UM. For I think it was like
a hundred fifty thousand dollars in theft from the federal government. UM.
(21:19):
While he was in the military, served Tom in federal prison. UM.
He had been accused of some really bad things in
other cases. One case in particular was a rape case
which he was indicted for UM. But he had, you know,
kind of slipped under the radar, and that in and
(21:42):
of itself was crushing to the investigation early on. I
think that there may have been answers that were gleaned
far sooner had they had an eye on these pair.
So what ultimately became the big break in this case, Joe,
I think that the genesis of it came as a
(22:03):
result of Bo Duke's um imbibing, drinking and uh then
uh running his mouth and he began to you know,
kind of hold forth on how he had been involved
in the disappearance of Terra Grinstead UM. And there were
(22:24):
a couple of people along the way that he had
mentioned this to, namely an old army buddy of his
UM who he had stated plainly to him that he
had had a hand in terrace disappearance. Fellow come in
to visit uh Duke's family at at Christmas time during
(22:46):
the holidays, and he had been invited in he had
mentioned it to him then and and then UM, and
then he had mentioned to a couple of other folks
as well that that you know, he had information relative
to Terrance and and connection was never really made early
on UM by the police to this. And finally, you know,
(23:07):
folks came forward and actually connected the two UM. And
when bou Dukes was finally arrested, Uh, he made a
confession at that point in time kind of laid out
exactly what had happened. And to say the very least,
it was it was very chilling, you know, UM kind
(23:29):
of scenario that he laid out what happened on that
that faithful night and the following days. UM. Back in
two thousand five. Ultimately, Joe Ryan Duke is charged with
five counts burglary, aggravated assault, malice, murder, felony murder, and
concealing a death. Bou Dukes is charged with helping him
(23:52):
to dispose of the body. What did we find out
that happened to her? Joe? In this testimony? We know
that Ryan Duke gained access to the home using a
credit card, which is why we saw no signs of
forced entry, right, And but when it comes to her death,
(24:14):
what do we know? Yeah, you know, bow Dukes made
made a couple of statements relative to what had been
related to him allegedly by Ryan Duke. And this is
kind of how it lays out from what Duke's bow
Dukes had stated. He stated that he was told um
(24:35):
by uh by Ryan that uh he had entered the
house using a credit card and he was able to
jimmy the lock essentially, and this can be easily done.
And when this is done, you're talking about taking a
plastic credit card and applying it to um to a
door jam that's not very secure and kind of slipping it,
(24:58):
slipping it into the non much there where uh where.
Actually the blocking mechanism meets the door jam itself, and
you can disengage the lock and quietly gain entrance into
the house. So there's no forcing, there's no kicking, there's
no prime um of the door, so you're not gonna
(25:18):
have things like tool marks, you know. So when the
cops would look at that, they'd be scratching their heads saying,
you know, well, we don't have any signs of forced
entry here. Uh, no one has forced this door open,
because it's not going to leave any evidence behind. And
then Bow went on to say that Ryan related to
(25:40):
him that he had climbed into the bed with Terra
and strangled her. And you know, of the course of
my career, I've worked, you know, I've worked quite a
few um strangulations and people that are in kind of
a symmetrical positions where you've got the dominant individual the
(26:03):
attacker who is in fact dominant. That's that asymmetry. And
now you're talking about a grown man that is hovering
um over a slightly built woman lying in her bed. Um,
why did he feel the need to climb into the
bed with her? And the fact that he stated that
(26:25):
he climbed into the bed with her implies something else.
To me, it does, at least as an investigator, that
that gives it almost an air of some kind of Um,
there's a sexual element there to me, in in in
to my way of thinking. Um. And then he he
strangles her. And in the meantime Bow has stated that
(26:48):
um uh that Ryan had acquired uh Bow's truck because
Bo was drunk the night that this occurred and had
passed out. Ryan goes back, gets Ryan's truck, places tear
his body into the truck, and takes her body off
some distance to a pecan orchard that he was very
(27:10):
familiar with, and essentially dumps this woman's body out in
a in a debris area. Uh there on this on
this property at pecan orchard. Um. And all of this
is being related by bou Do, who you know, agreed
for whatever reason to go with Ryan out to this
(27:30):
location and to verify to help him. It's it kind
of remained unclear until Bo finally said yet he agreed
to help Ryan dispose of Tera Grinstead's body. Now Here.
Here's the key thing, you know, going back to what
I stated about the bed and in him climbing into
(27:53):
the bed with her. When Bo first observed tears by
he made. He made several observations in this. The most glaring,
I think is the fact that he stated that her
body was nude. Well, as investigators when we look at
a crime scene and we see a female, um, well
(28:17):
for any any person in particular, but you know, when
you're investigating death like this and you see the body
of a female that is nude. Has said that that
has heavy sexual overtones. Assuming that Terr Grinstead did not
sleep nude, that she wore some type of bedclothing, you know,
like the pajamas or you know, gym shorts or something
(28:38):
to bed. Why while her or her clothes removed from
her or body, It just you know that that's that's
a big question. Then he stated that her body was discolored,
and I think that probably what he was observing at
that point in time was the fact that she had
already started to go into decomposational changes and the body,
(29:00):
the body during this period of time will take on
kind of a dark color um as as the body
becomes progressively more dehydrated. This is a process of desiccation,
if you will. And then one other thing, uh kind
of the final the final thing here, um he stated
that she had what appeared to be marks on her
(29:22):
neck or injuries to her neck, and this goes back
confirmed as a confirmation based upon what Ryan had allegedly
stated the boat that he had gotten into the bed
with her and strangled her. You know, strangulation is a
very intimate event. It's probably from uh, commission of a
homicide is probably the most intimate because you you're placing
(29:44):
flesh on flesh at that moment time. It's not like
beating Somebody's not like stabbing somebody. It's not like certainly
not like shooting somebody. You're literally placing your hands on
this person, flesh on flesh and squeezing the life out
of them. You're in a dominant position over them. And
so for for that, you know, he is the only
(30:05):
essentially linkage back to physical evidence or well, let's don't
say physical evidence, but he is the only source at
this point in time that we have for what actually
happened to Tara, because after that he begins to assist
with the destruction of our remains in the concealment of
her death. Tara's body was cremated by this pair Joe.
(30:29):
We know this because that's what they have admitted to
in court taking the body to the pecan orchard. And
as we have discussed before on body bags, we know
that it takes a long time, that it takes a
high temperature to cremate a body. What does it tell us, Joe,
(30:53):
that they took Taras body to this area to burn
it to get rid of the evidence of their crime.
There there's one other element here relative to fire. What
else do you need? You need concealment and and I'm
not just talking about just kind of you know, doing
(31:13):
things in a dark space. I'm talking about you need
an out of the way place. You need a place
that is not going to draw attention, someplace that off
the beaten path. And that gives you an idea that
whoever did this, you know, bo Is is certainly taking
responsibility for his participation in this. You would have to
(31:37):
have an awareness with you. You'd have to have an
awareness of where you could go in order to facilitate this.
Because there's all kinds of things that you're gonna need
in order to set this up. Concealment is the biggest thing,
so that you're not going to draw attention, because as
you mentioned, this is not something that happens in a flash.
(31:57):
This is something that takes a tremendous amount of time.
But not just time, it takes attention. Check. There's an attempt,
(32:27):
I think, with tears death of what I refer to
as the humanization where you take this beautiful, vital young
lady that love folks, loved her family, and you just
absolutely ripper to shreds and then, you know, it's kind
of the exclamation point on it. You reduce her down
(32:50):
to absolutely nothing, down to her base elements as a
human being. As we were just talking about Joe, it
takes a long time time to cremate a body. Before
we get to that, let's start with how they found
what was left of the body. Because there wasn't much left,
was there? No, No, there wasn't And the investigators were
(33:15):
actually led out to the scene, um bye bye duke.
Uh and when they got there that there was still
an approximation of the area, uh where the cremation had
had taken place. And keep in mind, we're we're years
down the road, you know, from from where this actually happened. Um.
(33:41):
You know the thing about burning wood and these organic
substances is that it can uh it changes the nature
of the soil, It changes the nature of of the
plant growth that's in the area. As a matter of fact,
it will kind of enrich the soil, if you will,
relative to the remnant of the fire. So that what
(34:05):
we refer to as the topography and also the taffonomy.
Taffonomy is a term that's used in UH forensic anthropology,
and it goes to the distribution of remains, skeletal remains
in particular, are cremated remains in regards to the topography
and how water impacts it and how UH plant growth
(34:26):
and all these things affect what you're looking at as
an investigator, And so when you go out, you're relying
on information coming from an individual that has perpetrated this horrible,
horrible deed and basing your investigation upon that. At least
(34:46):
that's that's the point of where you you know, kind
of uh start the investigation, the physical investigation that's seen
and begin to process it. And at first, you know,
I can only imagine the investor skaters being out there
and you know, kind of scratching their head and thinking, well,
how how exactly are we going to start off here?
(35:06):
You know, how are we gonna begin to try to
put together what exactly happened. Are we going to be
able to establish some kind of some kind of boundaries
for where this this cremation took place. It's a dawning task,
to say the very least as fullye started the investigation
in that orchard. They found bone fragments. They found pieces
(35:32):
of her backbone, bone fragments of her fingers and toes,
and some of her skull. How did they find that, Joe?
You know, they found remains of what they're would have
been referred to as the small bones of the hand.
But what stands out to me the most are these
three elements. The fact that they found some of the skull,
(35:56):
some of the spinal process, which are the vertebral body,
and also they found a single tooth. Now, when you
take all of that in its totality, aside from the handbones,
when you begin to think about the spine um, the skull,
and the tooth, those those are arguably, uh, some of
(36:19):
the most robust elements of the body. Um. That means
that they will they will last uh even in the
face of a fire, uh, far longer than some of
the other elements that will be essentially um essentially disintegrated
(36:39):
UH as a result of exposure to prolonged exposure to heat.
And it's not necessarily surprising that they were able to
find vertebral body UH and part of the skull and
the tooth UM. And I like for the listeners to understand,
and you might think this is kind of an obvious statement,
but teeth or you know, arguably some of those resilient
(37:02):
elements of the human body, and they are not bone,
they're not bone. But it's key here, Jackie, to understand
that they found not teeth but a tooth, a tooth.
Why is that significant? Well, the fact is is that
it is a tooth, not the teeth that gives you
(37:24):
an ideas to how hot this fire was. Because um
in in the process of cremation or rendering down remains
through heat, UH, teeth will will last longer than just
about any other element in in the human body. And
let's say, for instance, you you have a body UM
and we can kind of explain maybe and I'll take
(37:45):
a staff at it. We can kind of explain why, uh, say,
some of the spinal processes might have been found or
part of the skull. And if you would imagine somebody
laying in a supine position or face up, um, those
areas that are on the back side are going to
be protected. So if you've got a shot at at
(38:06):
any element surviving, it's going to be those that are protected. Say, uh,
they're making contact with the dirt. I suspect it probably
uh if she had been in an attitude uh supine attitude,
which is face up, lying on her back, then maybe
(38:27):
that portion of the skull that was recovered would have
been one of the more robust areas of the skull.
And that there's two areas that are particularly very very
uh dense, and that's going to be the frontal bone,
which is where your forehead is, and the back of
your head um the accipital region, which is that kind
of bony prominence that you have on the back of
(38:47):
your skull. That the areas of the skull are very
very thick in those locations. And then you know the
catebral bodies, if she's in a supine position, are going
to be more resistant I think, to exposure of the heat.
And they are in and of themselves as far as
bone goes, um, they are more resilient. They're very thick
(39:09):
um kind of robust and then of course you have
this tooth that is left behind. UH. And teeth are
highly heat resistant. UH for a protracted period of time, UM,
they'll last longer. And that's one of the reasons when
you have an actual cremation that's done in a crematory. UM.
(39:32):
Most of the time, the the cremains, those remains that
have been rendered down will come out of a conveyor
belt and they will pass through an augur which is
this kind of giant screw, and it further renders down
the remains by crushing, because when those remains have turned
to family, it's essentially dust that that's left behind. But
(39:55):
there's still those elements that are so robust that they
have to be you know, kind of rendered down for there.
That's not the case with terrors remains. Not everything was
completely rendered down. But that came very very close, Jackie,
very close. Okay, I'm gonna sound really intelligent here, Joe,
You're gonna be really proud of me. Done some research
(40:17):
and we know that bone is made up of protein collagen. Okay,
teeth are made of enamel and calcium. Teeth can be
destroyed by sugar. By decay, bone cannot. So you're telling
(40:39):
me that fire is not as damaging as sugar to
a tooth. I mean, what I'm trying to understand is
if we have this substance in our body that is
as hard or maybe harder than our bones, how can
we end up with this result? Yeah, Yeah, that's that's
that's actually a very uh intriguing question, Jackie. Um, You're
(41:03):
you're talking about a physiological reaction the teeth to exposure,
long term exposure to something like a sugar, and and
more people are susceptible to it than than others, you know,
as far as decay, dental decay goes. But you know,
we're talking about two different types of chemical reactions here. Uh,
(41:26):
fire in fact, is a chemical reaction. Uh, It's a
sustained chemical reaction. There's several elements that are involved in it,
and it happens in a very short order. And because
of the density and the structure of the teeth, they
are heat resistant. Um. When it when exposed, even long
(41:47):
term exposure to heat, one bodies are being rendered down.
Bone not so much, it's it's not made that way.
The matrices of the bone begins to break down and
it's It's fascinating because you know, one of the ways
that that forensic anthropologists will verify in court, for instance,
that bone has been exposed to fire. One of the
(42:08):
things that they will actually say, Jackie, is that it
weighs less and didn't not a fascinating, fascinating observation, because
as bone is exposed to heat, it begins to bleed
off these various elements, you know, and including things like
water um. The collagen is burned away, so that all
(42:32):
you're left with is essentially the bone becomes calcific and
it takes on a white white appearance, and you can
look at it's got kind of a honeycomb formation. That's
kind of the matrices the bones that you can see exposed.
And so the longer exposed to heat, the lighter the
bone becomes. And that's one of the scientific ways in
(42:52):
legal ways that you verify if if a bone has
been exposed to heat. And I've heard many times that
forensic anthropologies, when asked that question underdirect you know, how
do you know that this body was burned based upon
the skeletal remains that you examine, and that's one of
the things they'll say, the bone is lighter teeth are
not necessarily going to lose that weight. They won't lose
(43:13):
it as quickly because there there they act as kind
of like a shield. And one of the things I
teach my students when it comes to DNA, for instance,
if you imagine, you know, we can extract DNA from bone, um,
but you can also get it from teeth. You go
into the pulp of the tooth, and the teeth are
much more resilient, you know. Uh, they can hold onto
(43:33):
things a lot longer. You know, you look at you know,
remains that have been in the ground for years and years.
You can do a DNA extraction on those remains. And
I tell them that bone is like a leather briefcase
and uh for retaining things. But teeth are like a
titanium briefcase. They just they're more resilient. They hang onto
things longer. And in this case and terrorist case in particularly,
(43:56):
they found this single tooth. And the fact that they
found a single tooth me is that they weren't at
least able to identify the other teeth or the teeth
were so affected by the level of heat that this
body was exposed to that they became rendered down. Until
you know, out of the thirty two, there was only
(44:16):
one remaining. Okay, so let's talk about how they managed
to cremate this body so that there's very little remaining.
They are in a pecan orchard, so you would imagine
since they're planning to start a fire, they're going to
use what they easily have on hand, which is pecan wood. Yeah. Yeah, pecan.
(44:37):
Pecan's an interesting wood. Um it's a hardwood, and it's
comparable actually to hickory, and um wood is ranked as
far as like its ability to burn things or to
maintain heat um as it's rated as one of the highest. Uh.
It's rated as a wood that can produce the most
(44:59):
heat all right, Hickory. It's in the same family as hickory.
The only level above pecan is oak. All right. So
if you're going to choose a wood to generate heat, with,
pecans a good choice. And obviously, as you well stated that, uh,
that's a fuel source that you would have access to. Um.
(45:24):
You know, the thing about pecan orchards is that many times,
you know, as you and we have them all over
the South, um limbs fall away. If people are tending
their pecan orchards. What they will do is they'll grab
that wood and they'll create these kind of debris piles. Okay,
And so you've got wood that's not just laying there
and is available to use as a fuel source. But
(45:48):
it's seasoned wood, Jackie, which means that it burns even
better after it's been laying out for a while exposure
to the elements. It's no longer vital. It's not green.
You know, it's not gonna smoke a lot. It's just
gonna you're gonna get right to the point where it
if you can get this thing ignited and set off,
you're gonna have really a really hot fire. And to
give you an idea as to how hot the con
(46:12):
wood burns, uh is quite notable. Um and UH for
folks that don't know, you know, heat is measured UM
in many times and B two use it's a British
thermal unit. And that's just so folks understand a B
to you, a British thermal unit is equates to the
(46:37):
amount of heat that it takes to raise one pound
and yes I said pound of water one degree fahrenheit.
And if you look at pecan wood and just hold
onto your hat. Here if you look at thee con wood,
the con would if you take a cord of wood,
(46:57):
and that's the standard measured UH for UH firewood, which
is some people, you know, particularly down here in South,
they say I got a whole truckload of wood, and
many times it's a uh. They're saying that they mean accord,
and accord turns out to be about a cubic feet
of wood. Cubic feet of pecan wood will generate right
(47:22):
about twenty eight million b two use. Now keep that
in mind by what I just said, so it will
take one b tu raises the temperature of one pound
of water one degree fahrenheigh. So it's not necessarily how
(47:46):
hot it was at one particular time relative to the
disposal of terrors remains. It's to protracted time. It's the
piling on the wood. It's created a pire, if you will,
you know, pires is something that is created an underpinning
of wood where you have this fuel source. You lay
(48:07):
a body on top of a pire, and then you
continue to put fuel onto it. It's the the continued exposure. So,
out of all of the woods that could have been chosen,
becan is the one that's going to generate the most heat.
It's going to create an environment that is going to
be very very hostile to a body. Uh, that will
cause it at an elemental level to literally become uh disintegrated. Um.
(48:33):
But it requires constant attention. And you know when bo
Duke's talks about what he claims that he did in
assisting Ryan do, he actually stated that it took them
about two days to render down terrors remains. And what
does that mean, Well that this goes to the tending
(48:55):
of fire. It's it's not you know, and this is
this as part of the dehumanization factor when it comes
to terra. It's not like you you poured an accelerant
like gasoline like you see arsonists do many times, and
strike a match and walk off and everything. You people
have this perception everything disappears. It doesn't. A matter of fact,
(49:16):
you create more evidence when you do that. They stood
out there for a protracted period of time, according to
Bow for two days intended to fire. So what what
went into that, Well, any time the fire started to
die down, they would go get more wood and pilot on.
Any time that the flame reduced, they would turn the fire.
(49:37):
Sai that they would turn the coals over and the
entire time, and this is quite gruesome, but the entire
time there lay what remained of Terra, and they're constantly
adding more fuel to this area surrounding her body, and
they're trying to render her down further and further and further,
until at least in their perception, everything was gone. But
(49:59):
they missed a few elements, and at the end that's
how they were able to presumptively determined that this was
in fact Terrogrind states remains. How does what you described
with the b t us of the pecan would compare
to a crematory, you know, and again I think this
(50:20):
is a big, big part of this. You know, with
a crematory, you have a contained oven that is it's
got it's got four walls, man, you know, it's a
it's a box. It's like a big metal box that
you're you're putting a human remain on, essentially a conveyor belt,
and it goes in and these metal door shut and
(50:43):
you've got these little jets that are in there that
are fueled by natural gas. And it's a constant natural
gas source. And it's not just the direct burning of
the flame. It is the heat within the oven that
creates this kind of uh convex. This this heat convection
(51:06):
that's going on in this In this environment, the heat
is whipping around the remains and so it's not just
direct burning, it's it's the air itself is so hot,
and so you're talking about a constant burning roughly and
it's variable. You'll hear people say, you know, wellt fIF
hundred degrees of exposure. You know, intercreminatory is going to
(51:28):
render down a body. Well, a lot of that's depended
upon the body that you're burning, you know, the mass,
you know, and how long will it take and how
much heat is required and all that sort of thing.
When you look at terrorist body though, this was not
a contained area. This is an open air area. So
you look at at this factor that's brought into this.
(51:51):
And again this goes back to what had to happen
at the hand of bow Dukes and according to him them,
at the hand of Ryan Duke. Um, they had to
stand there and maintain this heat because they don't have
a cap on this. They're losing heat as a result
of applying this firewood or this pecan would to be
(52:14):
burned as fuel. Uh a lot of it is disappearing
up into the air. So that's why they're always having
to turn the fire, turn the fire and add fuel.
Turn the fire and add fuel. And when I say
turned the fire, if you've ever seen a camp fire,
you'll notice those those coals that glow red hot. But
they don't glow red hot forever and ever, Amen, because
(52:35):
there is not a sustaining fuel source, they will eventually
burn out. They were aware of this. They knew this.
They knew that they had to continue to apply heat
because they're bleeding off heat all along. Because it's outdoors,
it's not like it's in a crematory. This would have
been long, dirty work. They would have had to set
there for a protracted period of time searching out firewood.
(52:56):
If they didn't come prepared for it, they had to
go dry I get from other brush piles. Perhaps maybe
they cut wood. I don't know, but I do know this.
They applied enough heat and constant heat. You know, according
to Bo Dukes that it took them two days to
eventually render down her body. So this takes us back
(53:17):
Joe to the search for what remained. You've basically got
regrowth of the area you're gonna have ash in the soil.
I would assume that remains. How did the investigators find
the bone fragment and the tooth. You've got individuals that
(53:37):
are directing you to the area in which they perpetrated that.
That's your source of information, if you can imagine this. So,
once once the team, the crime scene investigative team would
have shown up out there, um, there's a high likelihood
that they would call in a forensic anthropologist to show
up at the scene as well. Because the friends anthropologists
(54:01):
they have a skill set that is not possessed by
very many other people. They spend all of their time
looking at things that we it just as uh workaday
people walking along about our lives. That they their their
worldview of things on the ground and as they see
things is completely different than the way we see them.
They can pick up on fine detail, that's what they're
(54:23):
trained to do. So when they have identified a specific area,
the forensic anthropologists will go back and essentially attempt through
their knowledge to validate the information that's coming to the police.
Visa B bodus. You know, is this a potential area
where something like this could have happened? Well, what do
(54:44):
they look at. They look at the distribution of any
kind of debris on the ground. They try to determine
if that's new debris, if that's like broken wood that
may have just recently fallen, our falling within the last
half decade, or is there something else that's different about
(55:04):
the soil, because they also have to be in tune
to things like like local soil. You know, down in
South Georgia, for instance, you've got soil that's very sandy,
Whereas if you go up to you know, like the
North Georgia Mountains, uh, that soil is completely different in
that region of the state. So they have to be
very attuned to the type of soil that is um
(55:29):
that is native to that particular area. Then they're gonna
have to understand something about plant life too, understand um,
you know what they're looking at the items that are
growing there, because you know, lots of times when people
try to cover up, um, cover up crimes like this,
they'll go in and they will plant things. UM. Now,
(55:52):
I don't necessarily think that that's the case here, but
they would go back. And that's just the general assessment
they're going to do in the beginning. Is there any
type of what we call flora. Have flora which talks
about plant life, and you have fauna, which talks about
animal life. It's the flora that I'm seeing here. Is
it native to this area? Is is something that was
brought in and kind of implanted into this area to
(56:13):
give it a different appearance. They're gonna want to know
if the soil has been recently upturned or does it
look like it's settled and it has been this way
forever and ever amen um. And then they're gonna look
for items that may give them an indication that's something
that's happened here even in the distant past. Because they
(56:34):
can look at a wood shard that you and I
could look at and it might not mean anything to us,
but they can look at the edges of the wood
to see if, in fact, this is indicative of something
that may have been exposed to high heat. Once they've
identified this area, they're gonna break it down into grids
and we you know, in crime State Investigation, we talked
(56:56):
about things like grid searches and all these sorts of
things where we break down SPECEI cific areas. But for them,
this is gonna be more in a more condensed area,
so they'll break it down into grids. If you just imagine,
uh say, across the top of the grid, you've got uh,
you know, a through m okay a a through m,
(57:18):
and then running down one side you might have you know,
one through I don't know, seventeen. And if you go
to block B five, you're going to excavate Block B
five specifically and nothing else, and you're gonna take out
every layer of soil, remove it from there, and take
(57:38):
it over to what's called a sifting station. And you've
seen these big sifters that people use where they'll shake
it back and forth and the debris will fall through
the screen or the loose turtle fall and everything that's
left in the screen is going to be examined by
the friends anthropologis to see if there's any skeletal remnant
that's in there, and they come again to kind of
(58:00):
read through that and understand what they're seeing and what's important.
The reason you want to grid it off is when
you go back and you're trying to explain this in court,
you can give an indication as to where that specific
item was recovered from. And suddenly, if you get it
in you know B five, and then of course in
(58:23):
uh C five and so forth and so on D five,
or you know, in close proximity, you can begin to
see how maybe a body will begin to kind of uh,
for lack of a better term, kind of rise up
before your eyes. In these gridge you can see the
distribution of the remains, and suddenly you get an ideas, okay,
(58:43):
we found a vertebral body here here here, this is
where we found the tooth. Um, we may have found
a handbone, a bone from the hand that's over here. Um.
And suddenly, uh, you begin to understand, well, maybe she
was in this position and as they burned her body
and rendered it down. It's very very painstaking work. This
(59:04):
is not something that is done just you know, leisurely
in an afternoon. It's very very intensive. And here's here's
the really tough thing. When you're talking about fire related cases,
these are some of the most difficult recoveries to do
because when you begin to look at everything at these scenes,
(59:24):
everything looks the same because it's all been exposed to heat.
And now after the fact, not only do you have
these items that have all been exposed to heat, now
over the passage of time, you've got dirt deposition that's
come on top, you've got plant growth that's come on top,
and any kind of impact. Remember I talked about the
term taffonomy earlier, where waters float over an area that's
(59:47):
going to come into play too. It is highly complex
and if you're not there when you're a game, you're
gonna lose and miss things. All of this work combines
Joe to bring hopefully some close sure to Tea Grandstad's
mother and her family and friends. Uh Bo Dukes is
in prison convicted for his participation in this. Ryan Duke
(01:00:11):
is currently standing trial for the murder of Tera Grinstead.
We do pray that closure in this case does bring
some comfort to the families. I've never been able to
understand if closure is a real thing in homicide cases
for families, but I do know this that after two decades,
almost two decades of pure hell that this family has endured, hopefully,
(01:00:37):
hopefully they're going to finally find peace. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,
and this is Body Backs
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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