Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags: The Corn Rake Murder

Episode Date: March 27, 2022

Todd Mullis calls 911 as he drives his wife to an Iowa hospital. Amy Mullis was found by the couple's 13-year-old son, impaled on a corn rake and does not survive her injuries. An autopsy is completed and the forensic pathologist finds not four puncture wounds in Mullis' back, but six. The corn rake Todd Mullis says his wife fell on, only has four tines. Also, while Mullis told police he had a good relationship with his wife, investigators learn that Amy was apparently unhappy in the marriage and had at least two affairs. She reportedly told a friend that if Mullis caught her he would “throw her to the pigs.” Court documents showed Amy Mullis called a friend petrified and screaming that Todd Mullis had found out about her affair. Todd Mullis is arrested and convicted of killing his wife. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Farming is a difficult way of life. And no other type of farming is as hard as hog farming. From sunup to sundown and sometimes in the middle of the night, you have to tend to the hogs that you're going to bring to market. That was life that the Mullis family led in Iowa. It was the life that they lived and it resulted in the death of Amy Mullis. Today we're going to talk about her homicide.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Bounce. With me again today is my good friend Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, what can you tell us about this case out of Iowa? Amy Mullis was a 39-year-old farmer's wife, and she was found impaled on a corn rake in a shed on her family farm. Her 13-year-old son, Tristan, had been sent into the shed by his father and the husband, Todd Mullis, and the 13-year-old found Amy Mullis impaled on a corn rake again in the shed. Tristan screamed for his father, and when Todd arrived, he removed the rake from her back, put her, his wife, Amy Mullis, into the truck, and started racing for the hospital and called 911. Once she was at the hospital, Amy Mullis could not be revived.

The question then, as the autopsy was done, was this an accident or murder? So we're going to unfold this case show, but let's talk about a couple of things right off the bat. First, what is being impaled? It's not something that you commonly come across in everyday conversation, though, is that, you know, we think about when people die as a result of what we refer to in forensics as sharp force injuries. That generally involves something like stabbing, which means an instrument that is an edged weapon, like a knife, a single edge, or maybe you have a knife that is a double-edged knife.

Commonly, that's what we think of, but this is something completely different. Impalement, many times, not every time, but many times it has almost an accidental connotation to it. And it generally means that someone falls back on a penetrating object or falls onto a penetrating object. up over and over again, particularly early on with this particular case. Over the years and the months, this thing kind of ground through the court system. But this is what's kind of interesting about impalement. Impalement, as I said, generally implies many times an accidental event. I've worked cases where I've had car accidents where people have been impaled on pieces of metal, for instance, inside of vehicles. I've had people that have

taken great falls off of buildings and this sort of thing and have been impaled on an object. But impalement actually goes back in our history for hundreds and hundreds of years. It's actually a form of torture and it was actually a form of torture, and it was actually a form of execution. People would be impaled, generally on a stake of some kind, or a metal rod. But in this particular case, the implement that we're talking about is kind of interesting, Jackie. It's called a corn rake, which, you know, many people might not be familiar with. It is an unusual instrument, but if you think about a pitchfork, most people are or have an image in their mind of what a pitchfork is, if nothing else, from the famous painting of the man and woman standing holding a pitchfork in front of their house.

So a pitchfork is a metal utensil on a usually a wooden handle that's lengthy that's used to help make it easier to move product or produce of some kind. So what kind of an injury are we going to see with a corn rake? It is a four-tined instrument, which means it has four prongs. Pick it up from there, Joe. Yeah, you know, Jackie, it's a unique instrument. You know, you were talking about pitchforks. And pitchforks, if our listeners will just kind of think about the same action that goes into, say, shoveling something, you can kind of marry that up with an image of somebody using a pitchfork. But a corn rake is something that is completely different. And keep in mind, the Mullis family, they were hog farmers. Matter of fact, this property they have is vast, and they've got these two gigantic sheds that are on the property. Call them shed implies that it's some kind of tiny

little dwelling. It's not. They're shed implies that it's some kind of tiny little dwelling. It's not. They're the size of what you would think of commercial chicken houses, I think. And there's two of them. And within these sheds, they raised hogs. And of course, they would start out with piglets and raise them up from a young age. And of course, what is it that hogs famously eat? Well, some people might say everything, but in this particular case, you know, you, you feed them corn and many times the corn is still whole corn. This corn is still on the cob. And so when you're using a, uh, uh, a corn rake, uh, you contain the corn cob, say for instance, in a crib, you've heard, people have heard this term, a corn crib. And in order to get the corn out of the crib, you have to rake it out. Just like you use a rake to rake leaves. Only these four tines are bent on this corn rake at about a 90 degree

angle. And they're kind of sharp, very pointed on the end. And they're ghastly. You know, these things are ghastly when you look at them because they're roughly about, it looks to be about five, six, maybe seven inches in length. And then the tines, the distance between each one is about two to three inches. So it looks like a gigantic claw if you'll just imagine it like that. And certainly the penetrative ability of one of these tines could send it deep, deep within the body. And, you know, when I viewed this corn rake on several occasions, it was admitted into evidence in the subsequent trial. And it is, I've used the term, I think, ghastly before, but you have to, when you take a look at it, you can see this thing and it's old. It's been used for a long, long time.

It does have a wooden handle and it's weathered in appearance. And even the tines of this implement are rusty. And in a couple of the crime scene images, you can still see where blood has tracked down a couple of these tines and still remain there, even when the cops got there to take photos at the scene. Just to clarify one point for our listeners, Joe, when you say corn crib, you are actually talking about a barn. This is not like a little manger. There was something that hogs eat out of. You're actually talking about a barn. Yeah, Yeah. And generally in a large storage area where if you can, and you know,

you have to think about this, this is, this is a full on industrial operation that you've had that you have here. It's like I said, in my opening, this is a 24 seven job. And so when you're going to feed this many hogs and keep in mind, they, they eat constantly. they would deliver corn say for instance or feed in the back of a large truck and essentially dump it into the storage area where where it would be kept and then you would take this corn rake literally remember i talked about how it acts like a claw grab the feed and draw it out like that. So this is an

implement that had been used for a long time. I suspect that there was probably in an operation this size, there was probably more than one there on that property. Joe, in looking at the injuries that would have resulted, let's just say you fall on a corn rake or a pitchfork. Those injuries are going to be a little bit different because of the slant of the tines. Now we again do know that the tines are metal and they can be anywhere from four to six or seven inches long. So given the shape of this instrument and what it is used for and the length of those tines, what kind of injuries or punctures could we expect? It's not long enough to go all the way through the body, but what can we expect in that type of an injury? Well, there's

a couple of things that we're going to look for in the morgue, you know, at autopsy, you know, when you're examining these kinds of wounds, much like a bullet wound, you know, we think about the angle of travel or the, you know, essentially the trajectory of the round as it passes through the body. It's no different here, Jackie. We do many times the same thing, for instance, with stab wounds. We examine and trace actually the direction of travel of an object as it passes through the body. when when we're looking at a body that has been impaled like amy mullis's body would would be it's not uncommon for us say for instance to take a dowel rod a very thin wooden rod for instance and place it into the defect and just imagine this

and sometimes they'll be multicolored and you run this rod this dowel rod into the defect. And just imagine this. And sometimes they'll be multicolored and you run this rod, this dowel rod into the wound itself. And you can, if you take the photo just right, you can get an idea of the angle of injury and you, you document those, those dowel rods as they're coming out. We take a picture of these rods in place so that when we go to court with a case like this, we can demonstrate this photographically. And it's quite striking when you see it. Now, for us, when we're trying to figure out what happened at the scene, it gives us an idea of the relationship between the victim, the object that's used, and of course, in this case, it's this corn rake, and then, of course, the potential perpetrator in a particular case. You know, how

were they oriented to the individual when this particular event took place? And right you are when you're talking about how deep these tines can penetrate into a body. And just to give you an idea, when the forensic pathologist did the examination on Amy Mullis's body, she opined at that particular time that these tines entered through what's referred to as the intercostal space. And I'd like everybody that's listening right now to find, just touch your ribs on the side. And the kind of meaty portion that's in between each one of your ribs, that's an intercostal space. So it's muscle that it passes through. It passes through the muscle, the rib, the muscle.

Then it goes through a lung. Then it goes through a liver. And then it goes through the diaphragm. Now just think about that, all of that involvement. And not only when that implement is tracking through all of those major bodies of the deceased, it's also tracking through all of those little vessels. And there's tons and tons of these micro vessels that are existent within our body. Joe, how long would the tines have to be to immediately hit a vital organ in the body? Not too desperately long.

And let's keep in mind these injuries that Amy Mullis sustained. And I do say that these are injuries, not injury singular, injuries plural. It can potentially be a shallow track that it's going through, but it doesn't take too much depth to essentially pierce the back of the lung and then drive through the dome, the diaphragm dome that's just beneath the lung and into the top of the liver. Those things are actually located very, very close to one another. So it's not that it goes as much deep as you're headed toward the front of the body, but even a shallow strike like that,

as it's tracking downward, and that's the important part here, as it's tracking downward, can clip all of those organs. And of course, you clip all of the vessels that are associated with it. So if Amy Mullis's lung was clipped, her lungs would have immediately began filling with blood, making it difficult for her to breathe. Yeah, yeah. What you're going to have is, first off, if you think about your chest, your chest is obviously, it goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway, it's a sealed area. So people develop what's referred to as a pneumothorax. So when you penetrate that kind of sealed area, you're allowing air to come out and come in and it compromises anyway, the ability of the lungs to, uh, to, uh, take up oxygen and release oxygen. And then on top of that,

you're insulting the lung by puncturing it. So you've got this kind of twofold event that's going on. You've really got a problem here. got a problem here whenever you injure the chest like this. You're not just opening up this space around the lung, which is actually called the plural space, but you're going into the lung itself, which contains a lot of vessels. Those vessels are clipped. So right you are when you talk about this kind of indwelling hemorrhage that's going on within the lung tissue, what's called the interstitial tissue. But on top of that, all of those little micro vessels that you've clipped passing through that intercostal space

on the back of this individual, that blood is now diving into that open area around the lung where it should just be air in that space. Now it's filling up with fluid as well. So you've got a lot to deal with. If you're, say for instance, a person that's a trauma surgeon or a trauma ER nurse and this sort of thing, where you're trying to save this person's life, you're having to put out multiple fires at the same time. You know, the Mullis Hog Farm, it's this vast property. It had all these newer buildings on it, but there was one little building that was there. It's been termed the Red Shed that's out there on this property. And I can't even begin to imagine the horror of 13-year-old Tristan

when he walked through the door and he found his mother laying there on the floor unresponsive, Jackie. It would have been terrifying, I'm sure, especially for a teenager. And again, he screamed for his father. Todd came in, found his wife. And Joe, he pulled the rake out of her back. She was again impaled with this rake still sticking in her back, and he pulled it out to take her to the hospital.

If I'm understanding my Red Cross training, any time that you are impaled with something, you're supposed to leave it in. Why? Yeah, absolutely. If Amy Mullis was to have any shot at life after this event it it vanished when that rake was removed of course at that point in time we don't really know what the status was um of her breathing and heart rate and all that sort of thing when

todd mullis came upon her body but i do know do know that if you want a survivable event with an impalement, with an indwelling object, that you have to leave it in. The reason is that all those micro vessels that I mentioned just a moment ago are essentially, at least for the moment, sealed. They're sealed off. They're not going to begin to really leak out at that point in time. But the moment you put your hand to that object and you withdraw it from the body, you open the floodgates. Literally, you have this

huge dump of blood that goes into that pleural space around the lung and any other organs that may have been penetrated. And what we do know is, the lung and the diaphragm, which has its own blood supply, it's a muscle, and the liver were all impacted by this injury. You know, you can't forget about the liver here. The liver is very, very vascular. Matter of fact, probably next to the brain is probably the most vascular organ in the body. That means that it requires a tremendous amount of blood flow. So you've got all kinds of little vessels that are indwelling in there. And once that, that corn rake was removed,

suddenly at that moment, Tom, you had this flood of blood that was just filling her up inside. I find it kind of interesting that Todd Mullis described himself in one way as a quote unquote doer. You know, he implied, I'm a man of action. You know, I'm going to try to do everything that I can to save my wife's life. And at that moment, Tom, he robbed her of any opportunity to live beyond that point. Would it have been that Amy Mullis bled to death or that she drowned as we were talking about with her lungs and body filling up with blood? Or is there a distinction there? It's more of a combination. You know, when you begin to look at,

you know, the totality of these injuries because they are extensive. Let's just take the lung, for instance. It can no longer inflate, all right? It can't take on air. It can't expire. It can't push air out at that point in time. And going to that point, you've got a diaphragm. It's this big muscle, which helps us with inhalation and exhalation as well. Well, it's compromised now too, isn't it?

So it's not going to be able to perform. And then the liver, I think in this case, is probably secondary to the diaphragm and the lungs. Yeah, the liver is critical and you're bleeding out from that area. But in the immediate, in the acute sense, the fact that this lung has been damaged so desperately, the diaphragm has essentially been pinned down so that it can't rise and fall. Remember, it's got a metal object that's been driven through it. It's not going to be able to operate effectively. And so that coupled with this flood of blood internally, it's just a hellish combination here. And of course, it's a recipe for death. As we mentioned before, Dr. Kelly Cruz, who performed the autopsy on Amy's body, said the cause of death was sharp force injuries of the torso.

So explain to me actually what that means. I know you've gone over it a little bit before, but if I was a coroner and I saw this listed, cause of death, sharp force injuries of the torso, what does that actually tell me? Well, in this particular case, what she's drawing attention to specifically is, you know, I think most people are going to think sharp force injuries, you're talking about a knife or a machete or even a sword, in some cases a hatchet where somebody's been hacked to death. But she's saying sharp force injuries, and this goes to an actual description of this corn rake, and at an elemental level, it goes to the individual tines, Jackie. These tines, I encourage anybody here, don't believe what I'm saying, go look it

up. You can see images of this corn rake all over the web. They've got very, very sharp points. They're in a delta shape. It comes to a point just like an arrow, essentially. And there's four of these things. And so when she's saying sharp force injury, these are being driven through her. And I guess the closest thing I could really compare it to, like a spike, only four of them at the same time with, of course, a smaller diameter, but like a spike nonetheless. And so these penetrative injuries that are driving forth are clipping all of these vessels and then doing great damage to all of these organs at the same time. We know that Amy Mullis had had a medical procedure a few days before. The family

member said that she had been dizzy a few days before. How did this play into her death or did it? You know, when I heard that they had put this idea forward that she had had a medical procedure just a few days prior to, you began to try to factor all of this in relative to, well, how does this impact these wounds that she may have had on her body? And I think one of the narratives that was put forward by both Todd Mullis. And of course, Tristan had mentioned this too, is that Amy had complained of feeling dizzy. And it was at that point in time that Mullis,

Todd Mullis had told, had told her you need to go into the house and, and, and rest. And this was as a result of this procedure she had undergone. However, I got to say, Jackie, with how extensive these injuries were that she sustained, I don't care what your medical procedure was that you had had just a few days prior to this. These are without a team of cardiothoracic surgeons right there. And the fact that this instrument had been removed from her,

this injury would not have been surviv kind of injuries it can generate. And that's not the only interesting issue relative to this implement, because I got to tell you, as the forensic pathologist began to test file on the stand, we found out some pretty interesting information about the tracks of these wounds and also the number of them. We did, Joe, and that was part of what led to Todd Mullen's arrest for the murder of his wife. Joe, the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy on Amy's body pointed out that there were six, let me say that one more time, at least six puncture wounds in Amy's upper body. Yeah. Isn't that something? And how many times do we have? Let me see. Math's hard, but I think it was four.

We had four times on this corn rake that they have admitted into evidence. And I'm sorry, a four-time corn rake cannot make or generate six injuries in one blow. So it takes us down this trail here relative to the physical evidence that we have and what we're observing in the morgue, you know, after the wounds have been cleaned up, after everything has been removed that might impede our ability to truly observe this, these injuries as they should be observed and document them. After all that's been cleared away, we can actually appreciate that there are six different, what we refer to as punctate injuries. That's a term that's used by forensic pathologists. Punctate injuries that essentially means puncture wounds that go through the body or into the body.

And when Dr. Cruz really, really did a great job on the stand when she's describing these, because the one thing she really brought out, Jackie, in this case was the fact that she could appreciate the fact that not only was Miss Mullis struck once with this corn rake, but apparently the corn rake based upon, remember how we talked about trajectory earlier and the path of these tines, it had been removed. The individual that wielded this instrument readjusted their body in relation to Amy's body and struck again, because you had two separate angles that these tines are traveling through the body at. Now you cannot, you cannot physically sustain these kinds of injuries by simply falling on this corn rake one time. And I am not buying it that she suddenly got up, removed the corn rake and then laid it on the ground and then fell on it a second time. That's empirically impossible.

You can't do that. Certainly judging by the nature of these injuries that she had sustained. And, you know, I got to say kudos to the investigators on this case because they did something that many times people fail to, or it happens by accident. When Amy Mollis' body, or when she arrived at the emergency room, one of the things that takes place in emergency room, particularly in trauma cases, is the emergency room staff is not there to preserve forensic evidence. Everybody needs to understand that. They're there to do what? They're there to save lives. And God bless them for doing that. So the one thing that they do is they whip out the scissors, right? And they start cutting clothes away. And fortunately, in this case, they cut up the front of Amy Mullis' shirts that she had on.

Well, she had one shirt, like a t-shirt, and then she had a sweatshirt on top of that, but they saved them. And that's important. It's very important because the coroner for that county actually collected those items at the emergency room and brought those to the morgue so that when Dr. Cruz did her initial examination at autopsy, she was able to lay each one of these items of clothing out and closely examine them and make note of the little defects, which are the punctate holes that pass through the fabric and try to match those up actually with the injuries to the flesh itself. And not only does she have one example of this, she's got two because we've got, we have layered clothing at this point in time. So now just imagine you've got multiple

punctate injuries, not just to the flesh, but you've got it to a t-shirt and you've got it to an overlying sweatshirt as well. And she was able to take images of these with scale, which means that you take a ruler and you place it adjacent to these openings in the clothing and over the wounds themselves. And it gives you an idea of the depth. It gives you an idea of the breadth of these injuries. OK, the relationship between the corn rake and the distance between those tines and the relationship between that and the injuries on the body, they can see that it kind of marries up. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do this. It's very logical as it's laid out. And Dr. Cruz did a fine job of this.

The clothing wasn't all that was saved for forensic examination. No, it wasn't. And we have to bear this in mind. Remember, Amy Mullis's body was transported to the hospital by Todd Mullis. She's gone through all of these life-saving measures where they've attempted to bring her back when, you know, when they got their hands on her at the emergency room, her clothing's been cut away at this point. And Oh, by the way, the infamous corn rake, it was pulled out of her body and it was left there at the scene.

So as the police began to process the scene out there and what they would have done is taken overall photographs of that corn rake in that little red shed in there. They would have taken it overall photos so that you could see the position of the rake itself in relation to all of the walls around there, any kind of blood droplets that are on the ground, the initial position in which they observed the rake. Remember, you're not supposed to touch it out there. You just leave it in place and take photos. But after they did that, Jackie, they collected this thing up and they brought it to the medical exam, this is one of the greatest bits of assistance that we can receive from a crime scene because, you know, we're not always fortunate enough as medical legal personnel to go out to a scene, particularly if there's not a body there.

So it's very abstract. Remember, the forensic pathologist was not out at the scene. She's taking in all of this information that's coming into her from the police and the emergency room staff and all this sort of thing. So the fact that they would bring this evidence into Dr. Cruz's autopsy suite and allow her to examine not just the clothing and not just the body, but actually the implement that was used is priceless, absolutely priceless. Okay, but what does that actually do for the forensic pathologist, Joe? I mean, you've got, obviously, they've got to match things up. How do they do that? What does having this rake offer them that they normally wouldn't have? Well, you know, in forensic science, we talk about things that are within the scientific realm of possibility. Okay. You know, what's, what's real and what's not, is this even a possibility?

And so, you know, first off the, the physician, I can only imagine she probably would have taken that corn rake and held it up on edge. Remember this thing is at a 90 degree angle. It's kind of odd in its shape. And she would have considered that by holding it over the injuries themselves to see, is it possible that this implement could have generated these wounds? And it would have taken some time for her to have done this in the autopsy suite. It probably a couple of hours. There would have been a lot of measurements that would have been taking place. And she would have considered this based upon the physical injuries that she's observing on Amy Mullis's back. And then comparing that to the dimensions

of the corn rake. Remember, you're thinking about these tines being maybe two to three inches in width. That means the distance that they are apart. And then the overall length of this thing. And holding it in her hand, she can get an idea. It's very tactile. She gets an idea of the weight of this thing and what would it have taken. You know, when I consider this and I think about what happened to Amy Mullis, this is an event, at least to my way of thinking, that she was probably not driven down onto this thing as much as it was driven into her. Maybe she was laying on her front or on the anterior aspect of her body and it was driven down into her back. Some of this can be evidenced. Now, I think it was one of the things that Dr. Cruz, the forensic pathologist, brought out is that on the left aspect of Amy Mullis's face, along her left jawline, there was a

severely abraded area, almost consistent, almost consistent would say her, the left side of her head being driven into the ground pressure being applied almost as if she is being held in place as this is going on. Todd Mullis was a big man. He was a powerful man. There was also evidence, and I think this is kind of interesting as well as abrasions and contusions on the backs of Amy Mullis's hands and arms. So that gives you an idea that she had an awareness that she was maybe making an attempt to fight back in these ghastly sets of circumstances. What we found out during Todd Mullis's trial is that Amy Mullis was having an affair. And one of the things that Todd answered questions about when he took the stand was his Google searches on his iPad,

which included phrases such as killing unfaithful women, what happened to cheating spouses in historic Aztec tribes, and did ancient cultures kill adulterers? Now, I know you're not a computer forensics person, Joe, but how did all of this information gather together to come into Todd's conviction for murder? It's a perfect combination of physical evidence and circumstantial evidence. I mean, for those in the forensic world, those of us that go out and gather evidence, whether it be digital evidence like on a phone or a computer or some other type of device, or if it is actually examining a body that's been just traumatized beyond anything that

someone can possibly imagine. It's the totality of all of that data coming together. So what, and it's all dependent. None of that stuff works. And I want to say this plainly, none of that stuff works unless you have a good prosecutor. Because it's not the forensic pathologist, you know, job. It's not the digital forensics person's job to develop a

narrative and tell the tale of what actually happened. That's the responsibility of the prosecutor. They have to be sharp enough to take all of this data that we put together in our world, this big umbrella that we fall, you know, fall beneath in forensics, take all of that data, be sharp enough to take it and tell the tale of what actually happened. Remember, there was, in the end, Todd Mullis wound up in jail, but in the end, there were two witnesses to this actual event. Todd Mullis was one of them, and the other witness is dead now. Todd Mullis was convicted for the murder of his wife and sentenced to life in prison. However, he still claims that he did not murder his wife. You sit back and you think about this farm that had existed for years and years and years.

And though I'm sure a little smelly because it was a hog farm, it, it's a bucolic area, beautiful area of our country. And I don't think that anybody in that community will soon forget how brutal and horrible Amy Mullis's death was. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.