Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags: The Strange Case of Tammy Daybell

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

Chad Daybell's trial for multiple counts of first-degree murder is set to begin just after the new year. The Idaho man is accused of killing his wife, Tammy Daybell and the children of the woman he marries just two weeks after Tammy died. JJ and Tylee Vallow are missing for months before their bodies are found on Daybell's property. At first, Tammy Daybell's death is ruled natural cases. The seemingly healthy 49-year-old is training to run a 4K race, but Chad Daybell reports that his wife is dead in the bed beside him one morning. The coroner does not attend the scene, only officers who say the death appears to be natural. What's more, an autopsy is refused by the family.  As bodies seem to pile up around the newlywed family, questions are raised. Other deaths connected to this investigation include Lori Vallow Daybell's ex-husbands, and her brother. Today on Body Bags, forensic expert and former death scene investigator Joseph Scott Morgan looks into the unexplained death of Tammy Daybell.  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. You spent your entire life educating children. And I don't mean in a normal classroom. I'm talking about in the library. Servicing children for maybe a couple of decades where you're teaching them how to read. One of the most basic things in the world. You're beloved in school and not just in the school, but in the community at large. Then suddenly, one morning, your husband wakes up and finds you dead in the bed next to him,

and you're only 49 years old. Today, we're going to talk about the Tammy Daybell case. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Back 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 the Tammy Daybell case? Joe, the death of Tammy Daybell came seemingly out of nowhere. In fact, in everyday life, Tammy Daybell was a healthy individual. In fact, she was training for a 5K race.

Yet her husband, Chad Daybell, woke up, called 911, saying that his wife was dead in the bed next to him. No autopsy was done. No talk screen was done. Nothing was done by the investigative team other than to say that Tammy Daybell was dead. You know, one of the basic guiding principles in any medical legal death investigation, Jackie, is that when someone is actually found deceased, that is someone that doesn't just, you know, how people term it sometimes, keel over dead. You need to have a representative of the coroner, the medical legal community, the coroner, the medical examiner to show up on the scene. And

the reason is, is that you get one shot at this. When I teach my classes, I talk about you can only enter a room for the very first time. That is, you can only cross that threshold one time. After that, that moment's gone. And those things that you decide to do at that moment in time are critical. And in Tammy Daybell's case, there is a thread that runs through the entire thing. The family, even the coroner, the police that were in the scene that kept using the term appears to be consistent with a natural death. And when that's put forward, you have to ask this question, Jackie.

How did the coroner come to that conclusion? How did this coroner come to the conclusion that Tammy Daybell's death was a natural death. Because once you say that, once you say that this is a natural death, that convinces the family that, you know, there's no need to go any further. But you have to have an answer for that. You have to be able to fill out a death certificate. What are you going to put down? Suddenly died? God called? End of life? No, you have to have substantive reasons.

And the reason this is so important is that Tammy David was only 49 years of age, Jackie. Like you said, she was training to run in a race. And if you can do that, then that means that more than likely you're not having some kind of cardiac event that's ongoing because, you know, the number one killer in America is actually the cause of death is actually related to cardiac disease. There's no indication of that whatsoever. And from what we're hearing, what we're hearing, the only official that actually showed up at the scene of her death were members of the local sheriff's office.

And they said, these deputies said, well, it appears to be consistent with a natural death. Well, you know, my question to that is, how can a deputy sheriff in this tiny little community look at a body, not know anything about the medical history of this individual and say, well, everything appears to be consistent with a natural death? Did this individual have some kind of special insight? No, they didn't. They worked upon an assumption. And then the base law, the basics of this, the coroner violated. They didn't even show up to the scene from what we're hearing. And it's just important.

And this is why. First off, you've got this woman that has died in her sleep. You have no good reason, at least scientific reason, to hang your hat on at this moment, Tom. And you're just going to release her directly from the scene. And one of the most important things about conducting a death investigation from the perspective of the coroner is you have to see that body in context. What does that mean? I want to see the body on the bed where they were found. I want to see the body on the bed where they were found. I want to see the body on the floor, if that's where they're found, adjacent to the bed.

Is there something that happened during the night when no one else was witnessing this event that could give me clues as a trained medical legal death investigator as to what brought about the end of her life? And was there some kind of trauma that was sustained? Was there blood on the pillow? We'll never know that. But beside that, we've got another issue. We don't know what the postmortem interval is. And that's one of the things that we do that's critical. Okay. So you just threw one out at me, postmortem interval. What the hay? Well, with postmortem interval, Jackie, what that means is when we're talking about, we've got three areas that we deal in, in medical legal death, the death investigation. We talk about anti-mortem, which think of a, like an anti-chamber in a, in a

pyramid. That means the precursor that's going to mean anti-mortem before death. And then we have an event that's called perimortem, which kind of means in the throws up. That's like in the midst of the fatal event. You're not quite dead yet, but you're in that kind of lingering mode there. Say an individual that is bleeding out that has sustained a gunshot wound. And then you have post-mortem. Well, post-mortem means that period of time from when your heart ceased beating until the moment in time when you're finally discovered by the authorities.

And so, we have to be able to measure that. And the way that we measure that is examining the body by determining post-mortem temperature. That is how cool or warm the body is to the touch. And also, we can use thermometers to facilitate that because what we know is the body, once your heart stops beating, you begin to bleed energy out until like the 12th hour after death. And after that, all of the energy and the heat that your body has generated is gone. And at that point, you are just like any other element of a room, say, for instance, a piece of furniture, the bed. You are impacted directly by the environmental temperature.

That means your temperature of your body is going to rise and fall just like it would on a chair or end table or something like that. And then after that, we have to do an assessment on the rigor mortis. That is the stiffness in the body. How stiff is the body? And that's done at a measured interval. And it starts in the small muscles of the face and then it extends out to the peripheral areas like the legs and the elbows and all these sorts of things. It kind of starts at the same time in all the muscle groups, but you first appreciate it in the smaller muscles. And then we talk about stuff like postmortem lividity or the settling of blood.

You and I have talked about that a lot, Jackie. And that, again, happens at a measured interval. None of this stuff was done. So, at the end of the day, when you're doing a scene assessment on the body, and in this particular case, in Tammy Daybell's case, guess what? We got a big fat donut here. There's no data. There's no data whatsoever, no scientific data to back this up so that we can make a determination as to how long this individual has been dead, the context in which their body was found. Now, one very interesting piece to this is that Tammy's kids, they were in attendance. What we're hearing is that the children actually came to the home after they had been notified that their mom had passed on. And one little comment really caught my ear in the midst of all of this. One of the children

at that point in time is reported to have said that Tammy had something coming out of her nose, potentially out of her mouth. And it sounded to me, Jackie, like what we refer to as a frothy, edematous cone. Well, you're throwing those big ones out. What does that mean? Well, anytime we see this kind of if people just imagine almost like the head of a beer, if you will, you know how when you pour beer too fast and that foam kind of creeps up to the top, it's froth. You've heard that term before. Horses get frothy when they run real fast. But this can happen in the midst of a fatal event in which there is some type of respiratory distress that's going on where, for instance, individuals having trouble breathing. It can happen in the event of some kind of direct asphyxial event like a suffocation or like a strangulation, smothering, that sort of thing.

It can happen in certain cases relative to utilizing drugs. We see it a lot in heroin overdose victims because what we do know is that heroin, for instance, depresses the respiratory system. And so the lungs become very, very heavy at that point in time. You're really struggling to breathe. And you know what else? What other area that you see this in, Jackie? We actually see it in drowning victims. When we take a body out of a body of water and pull them up on the bank of, say, a lake or a river, it's really kind of odd to see this.

But suddenly, this frothy edematous cone begins to emerge from the nose and the mouth, and it's almost kind of a pink color to it. And that's, again, an indication that something has compromised the respiratory system. And in Tammy's case, I would want to go back and take a look at this and say, well, my gosh, what in the world would have impacted this 49-year-old, healthy, beautiful, vibrant woman who's loved by all of these folks that doesn't have any kind of physical complaints, no kind of medical history, anything like that? What would have brought her to this end suddenly in her death? And you know what? Those answers

could very well have been buried with her, Jackie. Jackie, I got to say that with Tammy's death, we've, and I know it's cliche to say this, but, you know, at the end of the day, we've, and I know it's cliche to say this, but you know, at the end of the day, we've, we've got far more questions than we do answers. And all because one simple action was not taken. And that is somebody picking up their car keys, getting in their car and driving out to the scene of her death as, as the content area expert for that particular county. And I'm talking about the coroner. You were reading my mind, Joe, because I've got a couple of specific questions here. We know, Joe, as we've been talking about, that the coroner did not go to the scene.

First off, there is a difference between a coroner and a medical examiner. And in this county, Fremont County, it is a coroner that attends deaths. Not only does that raise questions that she did not attend to the scene, Idaho does not require autopsies. The family said no to an autopsy, and that was it. There's just so many questions there, Joe, about how Tammy Daybell died. Yeah, there are. And it's really amazing, Jackie, when you begin to think about how the decision by one individual can impact multiple cases. And as we well know, with the Daybell saga that goes on and on and on, there seems like there are bodies all over the place.

And in my estimation, this is one of certainly the most curious out of all of them. And you're right. You are in that Idaho is a corner state. That means that the official death investigator, that is, the medical legal death investigator, also referred to as the certifier of death for that county, is an elected official. And there are many, many wonderful coroners all across this country. It is up to the coroner at that moment in time to make a decision about what is going to be the disposition of the body. And what I mean by that is, is the body going to be released from the scene?

Nothing else is going to be pursued? Or is the body going to be released from the scene? Nothing else is going to be pursued? Or is the body going to be sent? And in this case, the body, Tammy Daybell's body, would have been sent to the Ada County Coroner's Office, which is a rather large county, which is where Boise is. And that's where the autopsies are done. They kind of, the best way to say it is a subcontract to do all of the autopsies for this little county, Fremont County. That choice wasn't made.

The former was made. They decided, the coroner decided to release that body from the scene and sent directly to the funeral home. And what they're saying, their default position is saying, well, the family didn't want an autopsy. Well, let me break this down for you. Yeah, the family may not have wanted an autopsy, but at the end of the day, when you have a death investigation involving a 49-year-old woman who, you know, let's face it, there are other mysterious events that are going on around this body, it relies, it comes down to this corner making that decision. And they are hard decisions. That's why you get elected to this office, to go ahead.

And even if it doesn't abide by the wishes of the family, you go ahead and you do this autopsy. Because if you don't, as we're seeing played out right before us, you wind up with a gigantic mess on your hand. That means that after this period of time, which everybody knows, Tammy Daybell was sent from Idaho, eventually wound up in a graveyard down in Utah, and she's buried. So now you've got all kinds of other complications that come in. If you want to examine her body, now you've got to have her exhumed.

And there is the big problem, Joe, because with burial comes the preparation of the body to be buried. At that point, if she had been poisoned, if she had overdosed, if she had any chemical in her body, that evidence is destroyed now. And Jackie, in this particular case, this is another example of if only, if only another decision had been made. So we know that there was a bad decision made at the scene of Tammy Daybell's death. All right. The body's released. It has to go to the funeral home because you're not going to be able to transport her body across state lines without that body being embalmed. All right. There was another opportunity here. The coroner could have gone to the funeral home.

And some reports say that she did at that point in time. What she saw, I have no idea. Obviously, she felt comfortable enough at that moment in time to release the body. But I can tell you what she didn't do, Jackie. We have these big needles that we use, these big syringes, if you will. The needle itself is actually called a 10-gauge needle, and people at home may or may not know what it is, but it's a rather large needle.

It's not something you would give an injection with, say, if you're going to see your family practitioner. It's rather large. It's what we use in the morgue. We can go to a funeral home, and I've done this any number of times, and take a 10-gauge needle with a large syringe, and you go right through the breastplate, and you go into the aorta, and you directly draw heart blood. If you can't get heart blood out of the aorta, you can go into, you can do a slight incision and draw out femoral blood. Now, that's better than nothing.

What else you can do at the morgue, you can actually, and this means that you're not doing an autopsy. You're not having to open the body. We do all of this externally. We can take a similar needle and go directly externally into the roof of the bladder, if you will, and draw out urine. That wasn't done. If you can't get that, we can always go to the eyes. And what do the eyes do? Well, they're filled with what's referred to as vitreous fluid. And a lot of people aren't familiar with that. It's got a real kind of cyclical rate. It doesn't

metabolize things, say, for instance, like the blood does. It just kind of sits there and kind of slowly kind of churns in this area. And it's what gives our eye form. But what's really interesting about it is it holds on to certain chemicals that we can actually go in and conduct toxicological studies on. That wasn't done, Jackie. They missed the boat on that point, too. So now, as you mentioned, you've got all these other people that are now touching the body. You've got these funeral directors that are handling the body, the embalmer that's going to be setting things up to start this embalming process. And, you know, I've had a lot of people that have asked me, but we'll look, Morgan, you know, why couldn't they just go back and draw talks on her?

You know, after she's been exhumed. You can't. It's an empirical impossibility. Do you know why? Because all the blood is gone. Every single drop of it, because the way embalming works, it's a gravity driven process. They have a little pump that pumps this embalming fluid into the body. It starts up high, it comes down low. And so as they're pumping the body, they're infusing it with this embalming fluid. It's pushing all the blood out of the body. And they have this return where they use these large metal trocars, they're called, to start this event. And they're pulling the blood out of the body. And when that fluid turns clear, you know that all the blood is gone and the body is embalmed.

So you can't go back after the fact. And if you've never actually placed your hands onto an embalmed body, it's impacted by these chemicals, and rightly so, because embalming, the process itself itself turns the body very, very firm. It preserves the body. If folks at home will just imagine many times what an overinflated basketball feels like, that's kind of the same texture that an embalmed body has. It's very firm, but yet it still has kind of a supple nature to it. But you're not going to get anything out of that body that is really worth having relative to fluids for toxicology.

There might be a saving grace if they can go in and capture some of the tissue and look at it microscopically. But again, it's a long shot. When a body is embalmed and the chemicals are flushed throughout the body, it is going in through the veins. Is it going into the organs and the tissue as well? Yes, it is. And I've been involved in many what are referred to as exhumations, where you take the body, you remove, the body is exhumed, and the body comes back to the morgue. And many times this happens as a result of the body's not previously being an autopsy, just like in this case. And when you get that body out of the ground and you bring the body back to the morgue where you're going to do the autopsy, again, when you, not only is the

external body kind of firm to the touch, and it's a smell that never leaves you. It's not like decomposition. It's got this real sickly sweet odor to it, and that's the embalming fluid. And when you open the body, it just kind of slaps you right in the face. And you have to kind of get past it. Because when I say it's sickly sweet, I'll put it to you this way. In my experience, I would much rather be around a decomposed body than I would an embalmed body. That's how sickening the smell is to me. Wait, wait, wait, wait. I've listened to you and Nancy talk a lot about how bad a decomposed body smells and how that is such a distinctive odor that you never forget and never want to smell again. But you're telling me that an exhumed body is worse?

To me, it is. And this is why. When I go in as a scientist and I am examining a decomposed body and yet they are foul. I mean, it is really difficult to work in that environment. But you understand that this is a natural biological process that you're dealing with. OK, but when you start dealing with a with a previously embalmed body, there's something that's very unnatural about it. And it has, again, like this sickly sweet smell. And one other factor to it for me has always been in the back of my mind. When I first started, the chemicals that were being used, there was some evidence at that

point in time that many of these chemicals that were being used, particularly a long, long time ago in bald bodies, were carcinogenic. So you're sitting there and you're trying to keep your mind focused on the science, this examination that you're doing, but you're all the while you're thinking, well, what in the heck am I inhalating here with this sickly sweet kind of odor of death, if you will, that's a man-made event that is on every level for me, at least least very important. Jackie, one of the biggest hurdles that these forensic scientists are going to have to kind of negotiate as this investigation into Tammy Daybell's death continues on is this idea that her body has been embalmed. And not only has the body been embalmed, but the body's been buried.

The body's been buried in another state. And the big question is, what have they found? Why don't we have more information at this point in time? That absolutely is the million-dollar question, Joe. And what I am curious about, after authorities exhumed the body, how are they going to, or how did they determine what caused Tammy's death? And what did she die from? Yeah, that brings us back to the original proposition. The kids all got together with CBS on 48 Hours. And actually, one of the sons, I believe it was Garth, Garth Abel, he actually made the comment on air. He said, the police told us that our mother's

cause of death was asphyxia, but we haven't seen an autopsy report. That's quote-unquote. And so, again, just like these children, we have yet to see the autopsy report, but the kids are saying that they were informed that mom's death was as a result of asphyxia. And I found it very curious that during the same interview, it was kind of intimated by the kids that, well, asphyxia doesn't always mean homicide. OK, well, maybe that's the case. And I guess in a pure academic sense, that would be the case. But as we talk about day in and day out and these discussions that you and I have here on Body Bags, we know that most of the time when the police start talking about asphyxia, they're going to be talking about, look, one of two things.

Either this is kind of a self-inflicted event. You begin to think about, well, maybe somebody was hung or maybe they placed a bag over their own head and that only occurs in very rare circumstances or they died at the hands of another individual. But right now, all we're left with is kind of to try to understand how did, if they did, in fact, remember, this hasn't come from an official source, how did they, in fact, come to this conclusion? Well, that would tell me that they found something on the physical body at autopsy, if this is to be believed, what we heard the son say. They found something on the physical body. Well, what would that be?

Was there some kind of damage to the neck that, of course, was not seen beforehand because there was not an autopsy immediately after death? Could you still see evidence of that? Yeah. Yeah, you could see a fractured hyoid. You could see crushing trauma in the larynx, you know, the windpipe. We've talked about that a lot. Is there a potential that you could still see petechiae? I think that's the big question that everybody has.

I think probably if you looked close enough, particularly in the eyes. But, you know, the thing about morticians is that when they embalm the body, they do a curious thing with the eyes. They actually put cups, these little cups over the eyes and close the eyelids and then glue the eyelids shut. They do that with the mouth as well. And my question is, if there is petechiae present on the surface, what's referred to as the scleral surface of the eye, is it still appreciable after all this time? Remember, she was actually in the ground for weeks, Jackie.

And I mean, for weeks down there in Utah before they ever examined her body. And here's another factor that you have to put into all of this, because not only was she embalmed and then transported down there, but she was placed into this grave. What condition was the grave in? Had it been compromised in any way? Was it, you know, the funeral business sells coffins to people with the idea that this thing is going to be sealed, it'll be sealed forever and ever, amen, and that nothing's going to impact the bodies. I've done a lot of exhumations, bodies get impacted. So I wonder how good was this burial? How effective was the embalming? Because sometimes embalming can go bad and you'll begin to have little focal areas of

decomposition that impact certain areas of tissue. Is there any chance that that happened in the case? So it's really hard to try to understand how these individuals at the Utah State Medical Examiner's Office, which is where her body eventually went to after the exhumation, what kind of conclusions did they arrive at that point in time? And I get the feeling we're going to find out something really soon, Jackie, because there are a number of trials on the slate that are just over the horizon. And at that point in time, evidence is going to have to be presented and questions will be asked. We'll just find out what kind of answers we get to. One of the things you mentioned, Joe, was how long Tammy had been buried. Well, along with that came how long it took for us to have any findings, even just knowing that the autopsy itself was completed.

Why is that? What took so long? Yeah, that's a fantastic question, Jack. I've got to tell you, I've thought about this quite a bit. And around kind of in this odd universe of these Daybell cases, we've got all these other deaths that are involved. And let's think about all of the different jurisdictions. Well, now we've got Idaho. We've got Utah involved because of Tammy. And we go down to Arizona, where we've got deaths down there that are at least peripherally involved in these cases. And then you've got these two individuals with Chad and Lori that run off to Hawaii to get married. What you're looking at here is a multi-jurisdictional event, Jackie.

And yeah, you know, the people in Idaho are going to have the first shot at having a prosecution here. But you have to understand there are other jurisdictions that have kind of authority in this. Even the feds have an interest in this. Let's think about JJ and Tylee. Well, where were they actually kind of last seen with videography? Well, we know that at least Tylee, the last time I think she was seen was over in Yellowstone. Well, who controls Yellowstone, Jackie? That's the feds. That's the feds. And then you've got people crossing state lines. So, you know, you might have a federal interest here as well. So I'm really wondering if they are not holding back information because they're trying to get this case put together that is highly, highly complex and very, very complicated. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.