Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags: The Skull in the Swamp

Episode Date: December 4, 2021

After weeks of searching for Brian Laundrie, the main suspect in the death of his girlfriend Gabby Petito, a partial skull is found in the Myakkahatchee Creek Environmental Park in Florida. The remains and skull are confirmed to belong to Laundrie. The medical examiner concluded Laundrie died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Today on Body Bags, forensics expert and former death scene investigator Joseph Scott Morgan explains what we can learn from the recovered skull.  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, Death Investigator, Professor of Forensics, Jacksonville State University. Joe Scott Morgan has been on over 10,000 death scenes, and now he takes apart, in a way that only he can, the homicides that we are all investigating, whether you're in the thick of it with the police department or the FBI, or you're an armchair sleuth, Joe Scott Morgan will give you answers. Body bags, Joe Scott Morgan. Follow and subscribe now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast.

Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. dark still waters, Spanish moss, live oak trees. When I think of a swamp, I don't see something ugly. I see something beautiful. But there's one swamp in America that's hidden a secret. And finally, that secret's been revealed. We're going to talk about Brian Laundrie today. 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, what's come to light now regarding the death of Brian Laundrie? Joe, we now know that Brian Laundrie committed suicide in the swamps there close to his home. Chris and Roberta Laundrie were informed that the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head.

Now, we never knew specifically that Brian Laundrie had taken a gun from the home that was not released until just a few days ago. Chris and Roberta Laundrie had taken a gun from the home that was not released until just a few days ago. Chris and Roberta Laundrie had surrendered five or six guns that they stored in their home to the FBI when Brian went missing. That was not released to the public, nor was the fact that a gun was missing. According to their attorney, they did not want to cause a panic in the community. It was released to the public that a skull was found, a partial skull, I should be specific. But at that point, we did not know how Brian died. Again, we do now know that he died of a gunshot wound to the head. Explain this all to me, Joe, because I have so many questions.

Is the reason we found a partial skull because of the injury and the gunshot itself, or was this due to animals? You know, Jackie, a lot of folks might not be aware of this, but, you know, suicide, it outpaces homicide in this country. You think that there's homicides going on all over the place, and there are a lot of homicides, but it gets beat almost three to one. All right. So we work a lot of suicides and medical legal death investigation. And the number one cause when we're talking about this, it's going to be self-inflicted gunshot wounds. It's not surprising to me that when they finally did discover his body,

that they only had a partial skull at that point in time. And the reason is, is that you have this remarkable dynamic that takes place with a firearm. And somebody, you know, placing this tightly to their head, this is what's commonly referred to as a press contact gunshot. When sometimes you'll hear old timers refer to it as a hard contact. And that means that if you'll take your finger and kind of place it into the palm of your hand, your index finger, and press it as tightly as you can, generally this is what is occurring on the side of the head or in the forehead where we normally see self-inflicted gunshot wounds take place. And when that seal is created and that individual is pressing so very tightly, there's a couple of things that come out of the muzzle of that weapon.

You've got a projectile, a bullet, if you will, and it's creating the hole. All right. I know this is very simplistic sounding, but it's creating the actual hole. But people don't understand what happens after that. It's not just the projectile that's disruptive in this case. You have a tremendous amount of superheated gas that comes out of the end of that muzzle. As a matter of fact, at nighttime when people fire weapons, it looks like there's a ball of flame coming out of the end of that weapon. And there is. And there's rapidly expanding gas.

Remember, even when we were taking physical science classes back in the seventh, eighth grade, what do they say about hot air? Hot air expands. And guess what? It's destructive. So when you interject this or inject this into a skull, it blows the skull apart. And that's what you have happening. That's why that when they came upon these partial remains, remember they were talking about partial remains initially, they only had a partial skull. And the reason is, is that his head, his skull actually came apart at that moment in time when he actuated that trigger on that firearm.

So when you say that the gas, as you said, explodes or expands, you're not saying that the gas actually goes into the skull and goes from the inside out. You're just saying the pressure buildup from the outside. Well, it's an internal event relative to when that primer is struck by the firing pin on that weapon. There's a little ignition that takes place. And this is kind of a brief little firearms tutorial. You got a little primer cap in the base of that bullet. And that initiates the actual firing sequence. When it's struck, that's the first explosion.

The second explosion takes place when that spark is transferred to what's called the propellant. There's another group of powder that's in there. And listen, when you've got a tight seal, when you have a tight seal in this particular case, you've got this rapidly expanding hot air, and it's got to go somewhere. Now, the individual that is pressing the weapon to their skull, there's no way to ventilate it other than forward. And so when the bullet, the projectile actually bores into the side of that skull through that bony plate, which is what it's referred to as, that gas is going to seek that little hole that's being created by the bullet. And that's why in a lot of these cases, you see this just mammoth trauma that takes place with these press contact

gunshot wounds. And here's kind of another little fact that people don't understand about skulls when it comes to gunshot wounds. When we're being formed in the embryonic stage, you know, our skulls literally come together, all right? They kind of seal. And, you know, people have heard about things like with babies, soft spot, fontanelle, all right?

And that hardens over a period of time. It's called ossification. When the skull seals, it seals what are long lines that are referred to as suture lines. And it's a miracle of nature when you see it. It looks like locking teeth. And you've got these multiple plates of bone that kind of come together. Let's think about it. It's real simple.

You've got your frontal bone, which is where your forehead is. You've got your temporal bone. Everybody's heard of their temple. It's kind of down low and forward of the ears. And then you've got the parietal or parietal, they call it. And that makes up kind of the area above your ears. And then you've got the parietal or parietal, they call it. And that makes up kind of the area above your ears. And then you have the occiput or the occipital area, which is that thick bony prominence on the back of your ear. And it's all sealed together. It almost looks like,

if you've ever seen fault lines, you know, when they talk about earthquakes, it's kind of along these little lines like this, and they're kind of wavy. But those are weak points at that point in time. So the gas is going to try to expand. And lots of times, I have literally seen skulls open up almost like the petal of a flower. Think of a tulip kind of coming apart. It'll fracture many times along those suture lines. And it's quite fascinating to see. But, you know, you generally only see this in self-inflicted gunshot wounds, because let's think about it.

In order to form, and this is key to this investigation, Jackie, because people are going a position where you're willing to do that and you maintain that specific tension on that area. If he had a weapon that was being placed against his skull by someone else, you're not going to lean into it, Jackie. You're going to try to pull your head away, right? So the tighter, the tighter you press it, the more damage that's going to happen, not necessarily from the projectile, but from this gas. Because look, the gas, just by virtue of physical science, it has to be released. It has to expand. That's the nature of heated gas.

And when it's injected into that little port, that little hole that's being created, that cavitation by the bullet, it's massive destruction at that point in time. Which part actually kills you, Joe? The bullet? The destruction of the brain. I mean, is there a way at this point to tell or is it just kind of encapsulated in one action? There's two parts to it. And the trauma, listen, if you were just standing out in space and someone, and when I say space, I don't mean like outer space. I'm just talking about in free roaming space. I don't mean like outer space. I'm just talking about in free roaming space. And someone aims a projectile or aims a weapon at an individual. Let's not say you, all right?

Let's say you. Yeah, Nancy. Nancy kills me often. Let's not say you, all right? An individual aims a firearm at another individual from a distance and they hit you. They hit an individual center mass with that projectile inside the skull. The projectile is going to kill you. All right. And I know people at home right now rolling their eyes are saying, well, of course it's going to kill you. You got shot in the head. Well, not everybody dies and gets shot in the head, but a penetrative injury with a high velocity bullet going into the brain, it's going to

cavitate and destroy the brain to the point where it's not going to be able to function. So nine out of 10 times individual with a GSW to the head is probably going to pass on. So as you're telling me is as that bullet penetrates the brain, as well as all of that gas and force, it basically turns the brain into mush. Yes, you're absolutely right. It will turn the brain to mush. And it's not, you know, it's not mush in the sense that, and I'm going to be kind of graphic here, but this is body bags, right? It's not like a mass of mashed potatoes, all right? It doesn't look like that in the autopsy room. When the brain is actually removed from the vault of the skull, all right,

you can remove it in essentially one piece most of the time, but it's going to be greatly fragmented. You're going to have a tremendous amount of hemorrhage that's in this area. And you'll see what actual forensic pathologists, they refer to these as gas injuries, where you have this kind of ripping apart. And what will happen, and this is kind of fascinating, is that there will be gas injuries that will not be associated with the actual projectile injury. You know, like if an individual were to shoot themselves in the right temple, and this is a press contact, you're going to see a tremendous amount of trauma,

it goes without saying, to that specific area. But you can actually see gas injuries because it kind of expands out. You can see gas injuries on the backside of the brain as well, where the bullet never even touches Jackie. That's the kind of force that you're talking about here. It's a ripping. It's more of a shredding kind of thing that takes place. And it's not just what's called the gray matter and the white matter.

What you're also going to see is all the little tiny vessels that are rising up out of the floor of the skull, the optic nerves, which are very, you can appreciate them when you take the brain out, they're glaring when you see them. All of that is going to be disrupted as well. And so you'll see these little tiny areas of hemorrhage all over the place and you say, well, what in the world could that be? Well, that's gas injury that you're seeing. So it does mass destruction. That's why when people sustain self-inflicted gunshot wounds, it's very, very difficult for them to survive these things, even if they get them to the emergency room, even if they can get them into surgery. And hey, even beyond surgery, if they get them onto ICU and they put them in a coma,

it's very, very difficult for people to make it through after they sustained one of these injuries. Do you see these same kind of injuries on, let's say, somebody was going to shoot themselves in the shoulder? Do you see these same kind of gas injuries on other parts of the body as well? Yeah, you can, but there's something about the skull. It's not the same. Let's say, I love the example that you talked about relative to the shoulder. Let's take that for an instance. If you have an individual that's going to take the muzzle of a weapon and place it tightly against the

surface of their skin, overlying their chest there, and they pull the trigger. The gas in that particular instance is being dispersed into a lot of soft tissue. You've got underlying, if you're talking about your shoulder, you've got the top side of the pectoralis muscle. You've got all of these muscle groups that are involving around the collarbone and all these areas. And then you have this kind of network of bones that are through here. You know, you've got your collarbone that's there. You've got the connection with the scapula on the backside, which is, of course, your shoulder blade

and the upper portion of the humerus, all these places. But what they don't have that the skull does have is this kind of sealed environment. You know, it's almost as if the cranial vault is a separate, it's kind of a separate entity in and of itself as it applies to the skeleton. There's no other bone like it. It's a network of bones that are tightly fused together. Remember, we talked about those suture lines. It's tightly fused together, and it creates this kind of container for the brain, if you will. And it's tight. I mean, it's very well sealed.

And so the gas, as it expands into the shoulder with the example that you gave, it's going to disperse through the soft tissue. In the cranium, you don't have that. You've got your scalp that you'll see. But with the scalp, it'll literally come away from the skull and then kind of settle back down. But you don't have anything else that's going to absorb that energy. It's going to be dispersed into the sealed environment. And that's the reason the head comes apart. And one of the really interesting things that we look for, that is if we still have soft tissue, which in the case of Brian Laundrie, what it sounds like they might not have had, but I don't know that for a fact. You'll get these little injuries to the scalp. Now I'm talking about soft tissue. You get these

little injuries to the scalp. And Jackie, you know what they're referred to as? They're called stellate injuries. And the reason they're called stellate injuries is think about every image you've ever seen of like at Christmas time when people do renderings of the star of Bethlehem and it's kind of got that the long tail on it and it's got the short little arms over to the left and the right. It's got another short little arm that goes up, the injuries actually look like that. They're star-shaped. So forensic pathologists have adopted this term stellate, and you'll see that on the surface of the skull. And the stellate injuries only occur over the surface where you have tissue that's covering very closely over a flat bony surface.

The only other place that you might see it in the body is going to be over the sternum, which is a flat bone that we have in the center of the chest. You'll see a stellate injury. But again, this only comes about as a result of pressing that muzzle. And the reason it forms a star shape, if you will, is that the skin with this injection of hot gas is also ripping and tearing. It just so happens that it has a distinctive pattern when you see it, a stellate injury. Body Bags with Joe Scott Morgan. Yeah, we're talking about Brian Laundrie. And, you know, one of the things that really strikes me about this case is the body is fascinating and what they found relative to his remains or what did actually remain of his body.

But it's this hostile environment. You know, Jack, he was found in a swamp. Well, you would know about swamps, Joe. You know, you started your death investigation career out in New Orleans, and there's lots of those kind of conditions in Louisiana. So everybody wants to know. They found some remains of Brian Laundrie. They've not found a full skeleton and they found his skull, partial skull again. So we have partial remains. So we believe there's alligators there,

Joe, how were we able to find anything? Shouldn't the skull have been gone too? That's, that's the question. Since the search for Brian Laundrie started, you know, everybody was looking for him and whatnot. And they talked about all these hostile environments he was going to. And just on the side, I have to say, you know, it turns out he was almost right in plain view, I guess, you know, out there in the swamps.

But swamp can be a tricky thing. It changes day to day. You think that it's a static environment. It's not. Water levels change, foliage changes, all those sorts of things. With him being found out in this kind of semi-aquatic, mucky kind of environment, it adds an entire different level to the dynamic. Remember what they were saying in press conferences. The police were coming out and they were talking about what they were

encountering out there. You had all manner of snakes. You know, you've got cottonmouths out there. You've got copperheads and rattlesnakes and everything else. But yeah, the apex predator in this environment, keep in mind, we are in Florida, is going to be an alligator. And, you know, just like, you know, you had mentioned I started my career in South Louisiana. Well, you had to contend with Mississippi River and all the swamps and the marshes and Gulf of Mexico. And, yeah, we had a lot of gators down in that area. And I've worked cases involving gators. But what set this case apart for me and the reason from Jump Street,

I suspected that a gator wasn't involved in this, was the fact that when gators feast on a body, and it doesn't have to be a human body. They can go up on a bank and you've seen these videos of them where they just kind of lay still in the water and they'll wait until like some little deer comes up to the side of the water or raccoon or something. They'll just reach up and grab it and pull it under. But they also do a thing called a spin. And that actually kills the prey. And people, you know, I think that they're under this impression that an alligator will just immediately eat whatever the victim is. That's not the way this operates. The nature of an alligator, when they take a prey,

is they will spin it after they snatch it off the bank. And they're an aquatic animal. They love being in the water. They'll sun themselves, but they love being in the water. And then you know what they do before they ever catch the prey? Lots of times they'll back up to a mud bank, and they take that huge tail, and they kind of swish it back and forth. They swish it back and forth.

You know what they're doing? They're actually creating a meat locker. And it's fascinating. We would find these in South Louisiana many times. I had a friend that actually fell through one one time, and he landed on top of dead deer carcasses. He was terrified. He'd been fishing. And what they do with their victims is that after they kill the victim, they go back to these little lockers they have set up, and they kind of push them under the bank into this meat locker.

And people say, well, why in the world do they do that? I'll tell you why. Alligators can't chew. You might not know that. They don't chew. They actually have to wait for remains to decompose so that they can actually rip them apart and swallow them. If you ever see the action of an alligator's mouth, it's not something that even like a dog, you know, dogs will chew on things. Alligators generally don't do that. They chomp. You know, that's associated with alligators.

We hear that all the time. They chomp, they chomp, they grip, they rip, and they'll swallow. Now, you can take like a chicken carcass that you get at the grocery store. And I've seen this, you know, in alligator shows and whatnot in South Louisiana. And you can throw it to an alligator and it'll go into their mouth and they'll just swallow the thing. They don't sit there, chew on the thing. But when you're talking about the body of a large deer or even a small deer or certainly a human being, they're not going to eat that individual immediately. And so when I began to hear that they had found Brian Laundrie's body in a visible area. Now, granted, he was probably underwater.

You know, they talk about the water level had dropped and everything. And I knew that they had remains. I knew that he wasn't buried beneath a bank, which is something that you would commonly see with a gator. He was out in a visible area at that point in time. Now, I have no idea why it is that a gator didn't just come up and grab his body and haul him away. And let's be real about this. He had been out there for a while. So he would, he's going to be in at least probably a moderate to advanced state of decomposition. But for some reason, his body wasn't carted away by an alligator and it wasn't stowed somewhere so that they could come back and feast on remains later. It was out there. It was out there to the

point where they could appreciate that they had physical remains they knew that they had a partial skull at this point in time and when i heard partial skull my immediate reaction to this was okay well one of two things has happened either he was struck in the head by something like a heavy object and And they said skull. They didn't say head. So I knew that there's probably no soft tissue or this is going to be a gunshot wound. Because I do know this. I've worked a lot of cases out in the woods

where people have self-inflicted gunshot wounds. The bodies go into a skeletal or advanced state of decomposition. And the soft tissue is the first thing to go. It's going to be gone. And so you'll just have partial bits of that bony plate or those bony plates that are left behind through the process of decomposition. And when his body finally made it to the forensic anthropologist, let's keep in mind the ME turned his body over to the forensic anthropologist. Let's keep in mind the ME turned his body over to the

forensic anthropologist. They had very limited bits of human remain to work with. And I still, you know, I'm still wondering if they were able to recover everything, Jackie, because if he's in the semi-aquatic environment, he's down into the muck. Okay. This kind of muddy, mushy bottom. And it's, it's really nasty. If you've never been out into a swamp, there's a lot of, uh, debris that comes off of trees. There's always a process and it's right in your face. Uh, the swamp has a particular odor too, and it's not a foul odor necessarily, but there's always this, this kind of interesting odor of plant decay that's out there because this is always happening. That's why everything's so green. When you go into a swamp,

it's green. There's a lot of vegetation in there. That's why you get a lot of these animals that'll go into this environment. They'll have homes there. You see raccoons on the sides of these waterways, and they're living there in the swamp, and they're taking fish and crawfish and everything out of the water. Possums live out there. So you've got this big ecosystem that's out there, and eventually, eventually, it's going to consume everything. Body Bags with Joe Scott Morgan. Jackie, I got to tell you, you know as well as anybody, you've been at this for a while now. There will always, always be questions about the death of Brian Laundrie. Of course,

there will be. And the biggest one is, I think for most people, is will we ever recover a weapon, Joe? Yeah. You know, I can't sit here and actually say that they don't have a weapon. Remember, it was never even confirmed until just a few days ago that he had a weapon or even had access to weapons. You know, Jackie, what has been revealed is that the authorities recovered, and I say recovered, they were actually surrendered by the family, five to six weapons in this home. And, you know, we didn't know anything about that in the news reports initially, but what we do know is that one weapon is still unaccounted for. So we can only assume that that is in fact the weapon that

Laundrie took into the swamp with him to end his life with. And we know that he, you know, look, the authorities are saying now this is a suicide. This is a self-inflicted gunshot one. And I think the big question is, is somebody going to walk up on this weapon one day? Have they actually recovered it? Remember that mucky, silty bottom that I was referring to? Did it swallow up this weapon? And is there any chance that they can recover it? You know, as we, you know, we're heading into winter now. And the one thing about this time of year, as opposed to the summertime, we're going into kind of a dry season. So the waters in that area will begin to recede a bit. You're not going to be, you know, there were certain instances.

I remember one of the local law enforcement officers on one of the swamp buggies. Jack, there were certain times they were six, seven feet deep in water out there, you know, in the swamp buggies. You're not going to have that right now. So now, right now, as we're headed into the dry season, it's a time that the local authorities, along with the FBI or whoever else has a vested investigative injury, has a vested investigative interest in this case, are going to need to go back out there with a crime scene team. If they haven't recovered this weapon yet, they're going to have to get multiple, and I mean multiple, metal detectors on hand and sweep that area. And kind of the way that they would do this is if you imagine four or five personnel

lined up side by side with probably about three to four foot of space between each person, they each have a metal detector and they walk forward, if you will, covering this specific area where his body was found and they begin to sweep back and forth with those metal detectors, they might get hit. You know, one of the things that's kind of interesting is that they specifically mentioned, Jackie, that the water had receded. Well, what do we know when water recedes? If you've ever, you know, if you've ever been out outside of your home and there's been

a huge rainfall that's taken place, in the South, we call them gully washers. And as the water begins to recede and it goes down into the sewage lines along the street, it'll begin to pull all kinds of debris with it. I wonder if that weapon didn't kind of migrate down this area. Maybe it moved away from where they actually found the body. And that's something they're going to have to take into account here to try to determine if that weapon is anywhere in that location.

I can almost assure you they're going to be out there looking for it over these coming months because now's the time to do it. And, you know, certainly we don't want some citizen, and trust me, there will be citizens that go out there because of the notorious nature of this location now. They're not going to want some private citizen walking out there. Maybe they got a kid with them and they pick up this weapon. For all we know, this is a weapon that still contains live ammunition. Somebody could really get hurt.

So if for no other reason, they want to recover it for that purpose. You read my mind, Joe, because I was going to ask you, can't they just go out there with a metal detector and find it? Or if you've watched any viral videos these days, you see people who go out and do magnetic fishing. They take a really strong magnet, put it on a really long rope and throw it out in the water to see what they can find. So I would have to imagine, like you said, that the law enforcement is going to be on top of this. Yeah, I know that they are, Jackie.

And can you imagine what horror would follow if someone got injured as a result of them not recovering this weapon? There are a lot of people that have an interest in finding this weapon. And for me as a forensic scientist, yeah, I want to know what type of weapon this is. I want to know the specific caliber. I want to know if they recovered a projectile. And that's something else that they could be looking for, you know, with the metal detectors, you know, whether it's a semi-jacketed or a jacketed round that passed through his head and wound up, lodged in a tree or on the ground somewhere, that can happen. And also, if it's a semi-automatic weapon, the little shell casing that comes out, remember if this is a semi-automatic handgun or a rifle, that spent casing, spent brass as we call it,

will be ejected out into the air. So that's another metallic element that you're looking for at the scene. And that's going to have, and on the base of those, on the base of the spent brass, it has a caliber stamp on it. So let's just say, for instance, it's a nine millimeter. If you look at the base of that spent casing, it will be stamped with the number nine, and then it'll have MM, and then below it, it'll have a manufacturer's mark, okay? So that'll be a tieback. And even if they don't recover the projectile, one of the cool things about this,

again, if this is a semi-automatic handgun, if they recover a casing, they can actually match up the casing marks or the extraction, they're called extraction marks, on this weapon to the casing. You don't necessarily have to have the projectile itself. You can do a match. Well, it's not as accurate, but you can do a match to say, yeah, this weapon generated these tiny little ejection marks on this projectile, therefore tying it back to that. And if they can show that that weapon was owned by this family, then that should be case closed. Even if a weapon is recovered, Joe, unless there is a visible serial number that can be tied back to the family, given the damage on the skull, are they actually, if they don't have a serial number, going to be able to say definitively that this is

the weapon that killed Brian Laundrie? I think that it is going to be within the realm of possibility that they can say that because the term that they're going to use, they're not going to paint themselves into a corner either legally or forensically by saying with absolute certainty. Okay. With absolute certainty, the term that we use in forensic science, and Nancy can address this is when we're in court, we say reasonable certainty. Okay. We say within a reasonable, a reasonable amount of certain scientific certainty here. And that's what we're looking at.

Because you have to take the circumstances in total here. You might not get a specific physical match, but is the wound that you're seeing generated on what's left of this skull consistent? Consistent with a weapon that they might recover at the scene. Could this weapon generate this injury? That might be the best that it's ever going to get. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.