Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags: The Last Thanksgiving

Episode Date: March 6, 2022

Joel Guy Sr., 61, and Lisa Guy, 55, were stabbed to death inside their Knoxville home following Thanksgiving. Prosecutors said Joel Guy, Jr., 28, killed his parents after they informed him they planned to retire and would be cutting him off financially.Guy Jr. stabbed his father at least 42 times and his mother at least 30 times. He then dismembered their bodies and put their arms, torsos, and legs in plastic bins containing corrosive chemicals in an attempt to dissolve them.Court testimony revealed that Guy, Sr.’s head was placed facedown in the corrosive chemicals. Guy, Jr. also decapitated his mother and put her severed head in a covered stockpot — which he then placed on a burning stove. The couple’s bodies were discovered the following Monday after Lisa Guy failed to come to work. Guy, Jr. was sentenced to two life sentences, consecutively with an additional four years for abuse of a corpse.Today, forensics expert and former death scene investigator Joseph Scott Morgan looks at the case. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Since I was a young boy, I've been fascinated by true crime. And one of the first cases that ever kind of caught my attention involved a serial killer over in England that was eventually hung, executed, if you will, for some deaths that he had perpetrated. He attempted to get rid of those bodies with acid. The case I'm going to talk to you about today is unbelievable, and it involves acid as well. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan,

and this is Body Bags. Back with me again today is my friend Jackie Howard, executive producer of Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Jackie, tell us about this case. Joe, the case today is the death of Joel and Lisa Guy. They were planning their last family Thanksgiving in their Knoxville home. The guys were planning to retire and had sold the home. They were moving to the family homestead in Upper East Tennessee. Lisa was still working, but her co-workers had planned a retirement party for her. But when Lisa didn't show up and didn't answer her home telephone or cell phone, they called the Knox County Sheriff's Department for a wellness check.

The detectives that went to the home knocked on the front door, rang the doorbell, but there was no response. When co-workers were still unable to reach Lisa, they called the Sheriff's Department again for the second time in about an hour. And at that time, police were able to enter the home through the garage door. They found an unlocked vehicle with a garage door opener inside and used it to enter the home through the garage door. They found an unlocked vehicle with a garage door opener inside and used it to enter the home. As soon as they entered the home, they were hit with an intense heat. The stove was on. There was a strange chemical odor. It was very overbearing. And at that point, they realized something was very, very wrong. As they headed up the stairs,

they found large amounts of blood and a scene that just became more gruesome. Yes, they did. Jackie, can you can you even begin to imagine you're kind of going about your daily business as a police officer patrolling the streets, you know, trying to look out for the people in the community and then you get summoned to this location? And, you know, any kind of domestic environment, and it's well known, this has been said over and over and over again, how dangerous a domestic squabble or problem is for any police officer to walk into. But you get there, they have to make their way into the house. And then suddenly, it's not necessarily that it's what you see initially. It's the fact that as you open this door, there's a tremendous amount of heat that just kind of

rushes out at you and kind of slaps you in the face. And it is rather shocking. And then coupled with that is this overwhelming chemical odor that to some has, I think, given the indication that it would make you lightheaded because I do know this as, as the day progressed, the police suddenly realized that they had a need out at the scene for their investigators to show up in, uh, in protective gear, you know, that had head boiling in a pot on the stove. The father's torso was in a plastic tote submerged in a chemical bath. So not really sure where to start, Joe, the dismemberment or the chemicals trying to be used to dispose of the evidence. I think you just posed the same question that the investigators probably posed themselves. You know, where in the world do we start with this case?

Because not only do you have this chemical smell that's coming out and it's kind of affecting your ability to probably even think clearly because you're worried. You're worried about your own personal safety in this environment. Heat is going to make you uncomfortable. And then you're kind of shocked in your mind's eye with this bloodbath that is essentially present at the scene, you've got areas of what would be consistent with the body having been present in a specific spot, bleeding out or maybe having the blood drained from it.

There's a large kind of damp area, focal area as we refer to it, on the carpet surface. And then you have dynamic blood staining on the walls as well. Most of it looks like it's low velocity, perhaps, or kind of drippings that are on not only the handrails, but also kind of seeping down the walls in specific locations. And then, you know, you come across a pair of hands, Jackie. Can you just imagine just for a second the thought of walking up, you're in this home. And remember, I've said this before on Body Bags, for us as forensics people, we're always having to view the abnormal in the context of the normal. This is not like some slaughterhouse or something like

that. This is a domicile that a family actually indwells. They live in. There's family pictures about. There's evidence of life being lived in this environment. Here you are in this blood saturated area, horrible odors and dismembered body parts all over the place. So it is certainly a Herculean task, I think, probably for the investigators to begin to kind of work their way through it. And, you know, what's kind of striking about this case is the fact that, you know, most of the time, forensic pathologists do not come out to crime scenes. And in this particular case, you had a situation where there was a potential for what we refer to as commingling of remains where you have more than one body and the parts are dissected out. They're lying about there's remains, you know, dissected limbs that are lying about the house. And so the forensic pathologists, they felt as though they needed them out there to kind of to help guide the investigators through the scene so that they could process it appropriately. So they could account literally for each and every remain that they were finding at the scene.

So the acid that was being used, the caustic substance was muriatic acid. Number one, what is it? Number two, what does it do to a body? And number three, how do you determine a true cause of death after a body has been subjected to this? The acid that was being used is actually a diluted form of hydrochloric acid. And the muriatic acid is actually an acid that's easily acquired. It's something that you could go to any big box store and pick up. Many times you'll find it in drain cleaners, for instance. And I'm talking about sewer lines that have gotten backed up. The problem is that the individual that's using it, just your everyday workday person that's going to apply this

to a clogged drain, even on the labels on these things, it says, look, you've really got to be careful with this because this is something that's used to remove corrosion, to remove blockages in sewer lines. You could apply it actually onto the floor in your garage if you so chose to, if you have a big oil or grease stain there to try to get it up. And this isn't the worst of it. The worst of it is the fact that there were also other chemicals present. And the police at the time had described this as a toxic soup because it was not just the acid, but this was commingled with bleach as well as hydrogen peroxide. And, you know, when you think about hydrogen peroxide, one of the things that kind of bounces around in people's minds, and you can use it for this purpose.

If you have a blood stain, you can apply hydrogen peroxide to try to get it off your clothes. And it's almost like the individual that's putting this together is attempting to create this kind of interesting recipe that is going to solve all of the problems. We want to get rid of blood evidence, maybe get rid of DNA. And also, we want to try to render down a human body. And that in and of itself is no small undertaking. Okay. So the second part of that question was, Joe, what does this acid do to a body?

Does it, it dissolves the skin and the muscle, but what does it do to the bone? Well, yeah, it can, you know, first off, let's talk about what it would do to a living person if you if you contacted this on your skin. At the very top of the list are chemical burns. It will it will actually blister your skin. It creates a situation where your skin will begin to literally ulcerate. It's very, very harmful, not to mention the noxious odors. It can create lung damage, all these things. And it is a corrosive substance that's going to eat away any kind of soft tissue. So once it gets down to the bone, after the soft tissue is gone at that point in time, it's also going to impact the bone as well as it begins to compromise the structural integrity of the bone

and potentially eradicate any kind of evidence that might be there. The one thing that can prevent this is time. You know, how quickly can you get to the body to kind of stem this chemical change that's taking place? At that point, when you have that chemical change taking place and evidence is destroyed and the muscle structure that has been destroyed. So how do you go about, Joe, finding out the cause of death. Well, you know, I think that probably from a forensic standpoint in this particular case, one of the things that may have happened is that this process of compromising the tissue, you know, to, you know, get rid of any evidence of injuries may have been diminished somewhat because of the mixture.

If the individual that had bathed these bodies in pure hydrochloric acid, their ends probably would have been better served through bathing the bodies in pure hydrochloric acid as opposed to this kind of toxic soup that's going on at this point in time. You're stemming the actual chemical reaction that occurs when pure acid is applied to the body. So, you throw bleach on top of that, you put in hydrochloric acid, and anything else that this individual may have been applying, you're creating a problem for the chemical reaction to go forward at that point in time. Now, not to say that this isn't caustic because it still has impact on the tissue, but the acid is not being utilized to its fullest effect because it has been diluted to this point.

What about the heat component to this, Joe? When the police officers arrived, every thermostat in the house was turned on high, as well as space heaters throughout the house were turned on high. What did this do? How did this affect the bodies? And was this an attempt to cause a fire? Well, there's one thing that you forgot to mention there. We've also got a big pot on the stove that's boiling. And anybody that's ever been in a kitchen that's had a pot that's been going

for a protracted period of time, the one thing that you know is that that is an incredible heat source, particularly in the immediate area. I don't necessarily think that this was an attempt to burn the house down necessarily. I think that it may be an attempt to speed the process of decomposition. And that's why I love forensic science, Jackie. That is plain and simple why I love this. Because in medical legal death investigation, one of the things that's played out in the realm of physical science that we learn from, you know, we learn physical science when we're very young, is that we do know that every experiment, most of the time that you engage in in school, you remember when you get an alcohol burner or a Bunsen burner, you turn it on, and you've got that little blue flame that's coming out, and it's, you know, you're heating the mixture up. Well, this is what we do know, is that heat will speed a process up and particularly decomposition. Heat just makes, heat causes

the pace of decomposition to increase exponentially. And a very specific example is, as you well know, I started my career in New Orleans. All right. It is a tropical, subtropical environment. And their bodies that I would examine down there for the coroner's office would begin to break down much more quickly than, say, bodies in other regions of the country. So heat does, in fact, impact this. I can only imagine that that the heat was left at this level in order to speed this process. One of the things that sticks with me about this case is that one of the police officers actually stated, and I'm paraphrasing a bit, but they actually stated that this scene is something that they will never, ever get out of their mind. And I can understand that, that you walk into this environment and you see this much destruction. You see this much horror.

And, you know, you begin to think about what in the world went on in this house. Well, we do know, Joe, that it was brutal. Joel Guy Sr. had been stabbed 42 times. But there was much more damage done to his body. The mutilation and dismemberment was severe. Yeah, it was, Jackie. And, you know, that's evidenced out in what you're seeing at the scene. I've seen the crime scene photographs from this particular case. And as I'd earlier mentioned, uh, there is, uh,

a lot of evidence of the blood dynamics that went on during this event. Um, we have everything from kind of passive blood flow, uh, you know, where you get the seepage that comes out as, as a body rest in one particular spot. And then there's kind of the more telling, uh, blood staining that's going on where you have contact blood that's kind of dripping down the walls, maybe some low velocity blood that's kind of cast off, if you will. And that happens many times with stab injuries. And particularly when

you have 42 of these, it would take a tremendous amount of physical energy for a perpetrator to wield a knife 42 times, burying it in to an individual's body. form because the person, Joel Sr., would have been fighting back. So it's a dynamic event where you've got wrestling that's going on. You've got reaction that's going on. You've got an individual that's trying to fend the individual off that's attacking them. And, you know, the forensic pathologist rightly stated that there were any number of defensive injuries on Joel Sr.'s hands and his arms. He had an awareness that this was actually occurring to him as a result of these little insults that he had all over his arms where he's trying to fend off this attack. Being stabbed 42 times, we know that his lungs, liver and kidneys were damaged. So depending on the size of the knife, how hard would the

stabbings have to have been? Or does it just depend on the size of the knife? You know, damage that's inflicted is heavily dependent upon the position of the victim in relation to the attacker. So, and let me give you an example. Let's say, for instance, an individual is charging you and you're standing upright at this moment in time. The stab wound that you would sustain in this particular posture might not necessarily be as deep as, say, the following stab wounds when you've been forced to the floor,

you're bleeding out, and now the individual has leverage over you. They're lifting the knife above their head, and they're driving it into your body. So he's got a tremendous number of injuries. As you mentioned, Jackie, we're talking about the lungs, the liver, and the kidneys. And to get to the kidneys, if you try to do this anteriorly, and, of course, anterior to get to the kidneys, if you try to do this anteriorly, and of course, anteriorly means on the front, you would have to use such force to get through all of the tissue because the kidneys are oriented to the rear of the body. So he's probably got stab wounds

all over the body, his total circumference. He's rolling around. He's writhing on the floor. These are tremendous injuries. When it comes to his dismemberment, Joe, his hands were severed at the wrist, his arms at the shoulder blade, his legs at the hip, and his right foot at the ankle. Do you believe that this was an attempt to make the body small enough to fit into the storage totes so that it can dissolve faster? Yeah, there's a lot that we can tell by virtue of the way this body was dismembered. And it's interesting that the body was dismembered at these critical joints. You know, lots of times with dismemberments, you'll see individuals that will take saws,

for instance, and try to go, say, for instance, the femur, which is the long bone in your upper leg. They'll try to cut across the shaft of that bone. That's not what this individual did. They actually went to joints to try to take this body apart. We're talking about the wrist. Remember, that was famously mentioned. Also, the shoulders.

We're talking about the hips, the knees, this sort of thing. So it's easier to facilitate this. And what happens is that if you can get a blade, and there were several blades found at the scene, Jackie, in addition to a pair of blood-covered scissors, you can cut through some of the connective tissue and literally pull the body apart at that point. Of course, it's going to take time to do this. In trying to do this, the attempt here, I believe at least, is to compartmentalize the body and to get it as compact as possible, to put it into this kind of rendering bin, if you will, where the body, the tissue is going to be placed into this area where you can actually dissolve and eradicate the body. You're going to have to into this area where you can actually dissolve and eradicate the body.

You're going to have to do this because we're talking about a grown man here. He was not a small man. So you're going to have to make him as compact as possible so that you can bathe his body in this caustic stew. The mother, Lisa, was stabbed 31 times. Her legs were severed below the knee and her arms at the shoulder. And she, again, had been decapitated. For lack of a better question, why?

Yeah, isn't that kind of interesting? You know, we know that Lisa, she was, in fact, decapitated. And, of course, you know, her head was actually found in this pot on the stove where it would appear that the individual is attempting to render down her head vis-a-vis this. But why her as opposed to dad? Sometimes, you know, I know that sometimes forensic psychologists will look at mutilation of bodies and try to paint a picture relative to the psychopathology that's going on inside somebody's head, you know, an attempt to rip somebody to shreds and this sort of thing. And you have to pause, I think, as an investigator and begin to think,

is this because they're attempting to disfigure the body or is this just their own economy, if you will, to try to render it down, make it as small as it possibly can? You know, when you take a look at the scene, people might think, well, this is a very ordered event. It's not. It seems kind of haphazard. You've got an individual that has taken out a plastic sheet, laid it on the ground, has put the tubs on top of the plastic sheet, and is rendering down those remains that were found in those tubs in this solution. But yet, you still have random bits of bodies laying all over the place. There's all kinds of blood

evidence everywhere. And also, what's kind of unique, I watched the video of the walkthrough of this scene, the crime scene walkthrough, and it's quite horrific. You'll see that there is like a huge collection of chemicals that are literally downstairs in an area that they had just kind of been piecemealed together. And you'll see all kinds of different containers down there containing everything from bleach to drain cleaner to all of these things. So there is a level of order to it, but there's also disorder like it's kind of randomly thrown together and this individual is trying to do this on the fly. Both individuals, Joe, as we've discussed, were stabbed multiple times and both saw injuries to their ribs. The mother, at least nine of her ribs were severed. The dad had 12 marks on his ribs. How much force does it take to leave that kind of damage to a bone that still shows up after being soaked in acid? A tremendous amount of force, Jackie.

And you'll get these, they're quite fascinating to see when you look at them on magnification. If everybody will, in the sound of my voice, will visualize the shape of a V, a V like the letter V. And when you're looking at a cross section of this, that's what it appears to be on high magnification when you're looking at the edges of these ribs. And that V is the result of what's referred to as a tool mark. That means that a single edged sharp instrument has been inserted through the ribs. And yeah, the caustic substance, this acid bath, if you will, combined with bleach and hydrogen peroxide and all these other items,

it might very well compromise it. You might not be able to appreciate it as much as you would have been if that solution had not been applied. However, you can still appreciate it. And what's really fascinating about this is that one of the most famous forensic anthropologists in the country that specializes in tool mark examination on bone, Dr. Steve Sims, was involved in this case and painted a very dark picture of what had actually taken place. And one more thing that's kind of significant when we begin to think about the mother here that Dr. Sims and the forensic pathologist had noted is that Lisa's head was not neatly dissected away from her neck. As a matter of fact, she was decapitated as a result of what they frame as blunt force trauma. That gives you an indication that either there was a tremendous amount of anger involved in this, they're trying to maybe in a post-mortem sense disfigure the body, or they got frustrated with trying to remove the head from the neck at what's referred to as the C1 level.

That's commonly, that's the vertebra that immediately supports your skull. Some people refer to it as the atlas. And there's evidence that there was blunt force trauma. And to my way of thinking, the individual would have started, and you'd probably see tool marks on the bone as well, they probably started with a knife trying to cut away the attachments where the head attaches to the spine. They got frustrated and probably, more than likely, they began to stomp on the back of the head until the head was dislodged from the neck. I got to tell you, I don't think that I would have ever imagined myself talking about decapitation through blunt force trauma.

I mean, I've seen a thing or two in my day. I've seen bodies decapitated most frequently in motor vehicle accidents. But, you know, the pathologist and the forensic anthropologist painted such a horrible picture here, Jackie, where they're talking about blunt force trauma separating the head from the rest of the body. Joe, what makes this case even more heinous is to find out that these murders were committed by Joel Guy Jr., Lisa and Joel Sr.'s 28-year-old son. He had arrived with the family for a Thanksgiving dinner, and the intention was to portray the fact that he was headed back to Louisiana after the holiday celebration. The sisters were planning to get in touch with him to tell him what happened.

Then the police revealed what they had found, a backpack in the home with a manifesto of everything that needed to be done to complete these murders, as well as video of Joel Guy Jr. at local stores buying antiseptic, peroxide, band-aids, bandages to treat his own wounds from committing these murders. What do we understand, Joe, about these murders from the details in that manifesto? What was in it? Oh, my Lord. I don't know that I'll ever be able to get this out of my mind. You know, I've read this several times.

And, you know, you sit here and you meditate on this for a little bit, you know, when you're trying to put this together and try to understand what's going on in somebody's mind. This guy actually laid this thing out. He had made notes, very conscious of what he wanted to do. There's no equivocation here. There's nothing here to say that, well, maybe he was not going to do this. No, he had very specific plans in order to not just kill, but to get rid of the bodies. And he's taken all things into consideration. And interestingly

enough, the police went on to later name this list as the premeditation list. Those are those things that he was considering that he would need. I'm talking about items, everything. And it ranged from everywhere from knives. He identifies knives, plural. And he uses the term multiple. And also the fact that what's kind of chilling about this, and this is actually one of the first items that's listed, is that he's got the word quiet in there, Jackie. Just think about that just for a second.

When you're talking about quiet, that his idea is that to utilize a knife is going to be quieter, say, for instance, than firing a gun. And I guess if he was really skilled at using a knife, that would be quite accurate. But as you had mentioned, he's actually seen on CCTV walking into a store in order to purchase antiseptic and bandages and all these sorts of things. Do you know why? Because like many people that wield knives, he wound up cutting himself and injuring himself. When you see the fight, that senior, his father put up the defensive injuries that the father had. This kid essentially inflicted wounds on himself with this edged weapon. He wound up cutting himself.

And this happens many times in cases involving sharp force injury. You'll see perpetrators. That's one of the reasons why when a suspect is arrested, we're very, very careful to take ventral views of the hands, the photographs, if you will, and then take palmar aspects of the hands so that we can get all aspects of the hands, because many times the hands will tell the tale. They will tell you where the individual has been, what they've been engaged in. And in this case, there's this photograph that has risen up of him actually following his arrest where his hands are being photographed. And you can quite literally see the injuries that

he has on the palmar aspects of both hands. So there was quite a fight that he was involved in. And he's really kind of playing this out. It's almost like when you read this list, he's thinking about things. It's not just like, say, for instance, a grocery list, though there are things that are listed in here. But he's talking about he's got to get bleach in order to denature proteins. That means that he's got some idea as to how we go about discovering DNA. So he's trying to eradicate the proteins. He's talking about also things like he needs plastic sheets in order for the disposal process. He's talking about this.

He even goes so far as to use the term flush chunks down the toilet, not garbage disposal. There have been many cases over the years and cases that I've worked where individuals that attempt to get rid of tissue when they will put tissue into garbage disposals and they flip the switch, what happens is that specific tissue will get hung up on those little teeth. And, you know, crime scene investigators, we've got all the time in the world, don't we? We don't have to go in and take our time and kind of flash through things. We can actually take apart a garbage disposal, get in there and recover tissue that's in there. And that tissue that we recover, you know, can be traced back to its point of origin.

And specifically, we can find we can harvest DNA from from that soft tissue. He had an awareness of all of this. One one consideration that he has on his list is this idea of he was thinking about going to the point of flooding the house. I guess he was going to maybe make the pipes burst or or just unleash a water hose inside the house to try to fill the house with water in order to. And he specifically talks about this. If he floods the house, quote unquote, it'll it covers up forensic evidence. And that's that's kind of fascinating as well. And, you know. When you're looking at this and you're thinking, well, how much thought and how long had he been thinking about this prior to doing this. Remember, it was just literally days before, days before that he had

sat at table with his mom, his dad, his siblings, and enjoyed Thanksgiving. But you're sitting there and you're thinking about him. Is he sitting there staring at his parents, staring at his siblings, thinking, how am I going to facilitate this crime? I'm sitting here watching these people eat. We're having conversations. We're talking about what's gone on over the past year, what's going on in our lives. And all the while, maybe that little seed is turning in his mind. And he decides that he's going to go ahead and perpetrate this crime almost immediately after Thanksgiving dinner has ended. Well, you're right about one thing, as always, Joe, you're usually right about everything. nature of his list shows that he had been spending copious amounts of time trying to cover all of his

bases. As you said, get multiple knives, get a sledgehammer to crush the bones, bring a blender, get bleach, the plastic bins. He even notes that it doesn't matter whether they're killed, you just have to get rid of the bloody spots. He notes that his DNA is already throughout the house. So that qualifies his DNA is there because that's where he lives. He also talks about opening up the doggy door as a way for whoever did this to get into the house. So he spent lots of time trying to figure out the best way to make this happen for him not to get caught. Yeah, right. You are, Jackie. And, you know, you have to wonder, you know, what's what's the end game for this? And he is doing a lot of thinking. Remember, our friend Nancy Grace always says that famously, you know, she always says that intent, intent, premeditation perhaps, can

be formed in the twinkling of an eye. And in this particular case, he's had quite a bit of time to kind of ruminate, if you will, on all of these issues to consider all of the possibilities. The problem in this particular case for him, logistically, is that it still wound up being very frenzied. You look at this and you understand that he was able to recognize problems. He's just not good at bringing things to a resolution and solving the problems. Hence, the guy has never had a job. He's always been dependent upon his parents for everything in his life, even at the advanced age at 26, 28 years old that he was. He was still living off of his parents.

And I think that that goes to the bigger, bigger picture here that he's just incapable, incapable of finishing anything in his life, even when it came down to the disposal of his parents' bodies. There was one more note, Joe, on that list that certainly lays out the framework for what you just said. He notes in his list, he's not alive to claim her half of the insurance, meaning his father. Money, all mine, $500,000. This 28-year-old son killed his mother and father over money. I spent some time thinking about that and how gruesome this crime was, that he would do this to the two people that that created him, essentially, you know, that he would just rip them to shreds and bathe their bodies in acid after he had dismembered them in their own home.

And, you know, I spent some time, you know, considering that. And I thought, you know, yeah, he's got five hundred thousand dollars listed as,000 listed as the end game, if you will, the motivation behind all of this. And you really begin to think, would that $500,000 have been enough? Let's say that he had gotten away with it. Say that he had laid claim to that $500,000. Would it have still been enough? What would happen when he ran through that? Would he go out and find more people to absolutely eradicate?

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.