Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: A Baffling Ligature -Joysee Cartagena’s Death

Episode Date: November 19, 2023

Joysee Cartagena's coworkers at JetBlue know something is awry when she fails to log in for work—a complete break from her reliable character. Soon after, her lifeless body is found in her home in Sanford, Florida, a zip tie around her neck igniting a slew of investigative questions. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack dissect the intricacies of Joysee's perplexing death, weaving together cutting-edge forensic science with real-world implications. The hosts explore everything from forensic markers like ligatures and Tardieu spots to the complex relationship dynamics between Joysee and her boyfriend, Joel Bauza. As they delve into the timeline, scrutinize the evidence, and discuss the eventual charges, their unwavering goal remains: to shed light on the truth behind Joysee's untimely death. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Time codes: 00:00:00 — Joseph Scott Morgan introduces the complexities of death investigation. The discussion opens with abnormal elements that investigators often encounter. 00:01:40 — Joe delves deeper into the relevance of zip ties in an ongoing case in Sanford, Florida. He details their significance in the overall forensic investigation. 00:03:20 — Dave Mack introduces the story of Joel Bauza and Joysee Cartagena. He portrays Joysee as a caring individual who always put others first, while Joel appears financially dependent on her. 00:04:40 — Joysee's work history and her job at JetBlue are discussed. Dave reveals how important her career was to her. 00:05:00 — The red flag goes up when Joysee misses work. Her coworkers' immediate concern sets the stage for the investigation. 00:05:40 — Emphasizing the importance of timelines in death investigations, Joseph Scott Morgan argues that every minute counts when piecing together the facts. 00:07:42 — Morgan brings up the uncommon circumstances surrounding Joysee’s death. The atypical nature of the case required extra attention from detectives and crime scene techs. 00:09:08 — Dave discusses the zip tie and signs of a struggle. He lays out potential scenarios that could explain Joysee’s untimely death. 00:10:39 — Suicide as a possible result of a domestic dispute is pondered. It’s a heartbreaking thought, yet critical to the investigation. 00:11:11 — Joe Scott instructs on letting the environment of a crime scene "speak" to the investigator. He warns against being influenced by others present. 00:16:00 — The importance of leaving a ligature in place at a crime scene is brought to light. It’s a detail that can have far-reaching implications. 00:17:40 — Morgan questions why the ligature was not removed in Joysee’s case. The unanswered action hints at a potential suspect. 00:19:00 — Joe Scott explains the process of proving a suicide and emphasizes the importance of treating all deaths as homicides until proven otherwise. 00:23:00 — Dave points out delays in the criminal justice process. 00:25:00 — The physical evidence, particularly multiple abrasions on Joysee’s body, is dissected. Joe Scott posits that these suggest a struggle. 00:30:13 — Joseph Scott Morgan introduces the topic of ligatures, which are often seen in hangings. He provides an insight into the presence of Tardieu spots, a specific type of petechiae, and how they appear in cases of strangulation. 00:33:21 — The hosts discuss the pressure points on a zip tie during strangulation and how they can be traced post-mortem. 00:37:20 — Addressing mental health, Joseph Scott Morgan acknowledges listeners struggling with suicidal thoughts, provides the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline number, and emphasizes the importance of seeking help.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. When it comes to death investigation, there's things along the journey of an investigator that you encounter as just a person that is put into this crazy world where you're bearing witness to the end of life. And those elements that you observe in there, you know, go back to a statement I'm fond of making, and that is observing the abnormal in the context of the normal. And this applies, I think, also to items

that we use daily for whatever reason. You know, it can be everything from no paper that maybe you're familiar with that you see that you have possession of in your own home that people have used to scratch out a note, or it could be a vehicle that you encounter that maybe you have a friend that has one just like it, but yet it's involved in a death. Today, we're going to talk about something that's rather innocuous. It's a little plastic strip that we're all familiar with now. And I guess a few years ago, we weren't necessarily so aware of them, but I've got a bunch of them around the house. I use them for all manner of things. It's zip ties, little bits of plastic with teeth that you can use to bind and hold things in place. It plays a crucial role in an ongoing death investigation in Sanford, Florida.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Dave, I've got zip ties laying all around the house. Some people call them cable ties, and my wife loves to travel. So anytime we're loading up the car, I always, you know, feel the need to, you know, I obsess over making sure that things are secure and that they're in place. And I've been known to use a zip tie to hold certain things down on the luggage rack on top of my truck, say truck, and I got an old SUV and, you know, just hold it in place. I'm terrified. I'm terrified of things flying off, going down the middle of the road. And most of the time I view a zip tie as something that is essentially, it has this level of security to it that not many other things have out there that is immediate.

It's not like tying a rope or something like that. Once you zip this baby, it's there in place. It's easy to use. They're cheap. And it's like in your toolbox, you have duct tape and zip ties. Those are the two guaranteed things you're going to have in there if you need to just be handy. You seem like a handy kind of guy. I am not.

And so zip ties for me are like lowest common denominator. Even though I have a boat, I'm not good at tying knots. That's kind of scary. But with zip ties, I know that if I put it in place, pretty much unless something really catastrophic happens, that thing's going to stay in place. And that's why I use them too. Same reason. Whether I'm dealing with electronic wires or big stuff out by the pool, doesn't matter. There's a zip tie for everyone.

And today, we're actually going to be able to delve into this a little bit because here's the scenario we have. We have a couple, Joel Bauza, 50-ish, his girlfriend, Joyce Cartagena. They have been together since about 2016. That's when the pictures and things and stories start showing up on Joyce's Facebook page anyway. So starting in 2016, this couple dated and ended up moving in together. They were living together and had been again for a couple of years. Joyce was one of those people that everybody says, beautiful inside and out, smart, always consumed with the needs of others. That's the one thing that kept being repeated by people who were friends with and knew or worked

with Joycey Cartagena was how she always looked at other people first. Meanwhile, her boyfriend, Joel Boutsa, actually pretty much the opposite of that. He didn't really have much of a career. He was a handyman, worked as an inconsistent working handyman. They'd been living together. Joel was pretty much dependent financially on Joycey to provide the day in and day out. And by the way, Joycey Cartagena spent years working for their school board and worked as a secretary at one of the schools there in Central Florida and had for a number of years before she began working for JetBlue. Working in customer service with JetBlue, she could actually log on to her computer and everything right from the house in a virtual setting.

And that worked out really well for her. And again, she was so well thought of and so consistent in her performance show that when she didn't log in for her day, it wasn't something they just blew off at work. When Joyce Cartagena didn't log in to do her job, people immediately knew there was a problem and they did not wait very long. Matter of fact, after trying all the normal ways of getting up with her and getting no reply, they actually, they being her co-workers, they called the police and said, hey, we had a co-worker who didn't show up. She always does. Would you do a well-being check on her? One of the things that we do as death investigators is that you have to go back and check your timeline. And I'm always kind of preaching about post-mortem interval where we measure changes after death. But more importantly,

you can have that data. However, if you don't have an additional data set, which goes to where they were expected to be, you don't have anything really a baseline to compare it to when they were last seen and when they're expected to be at a location. And it's important to try to understand context-wise, when were they supposed to show up at a prescribed time or go online at a prescribed time? And the world that we live in now, particularly in this era of COVID and lockdowns and post-COVID and kind of the world that we indwell now, people have gotten used to this remote working environment. People know when you go live on air. I say on air. I'm using it in our context.

But when you go live on a system that you're supposed to be working on, and certainly with a system like JetBlue. Right. Well, they're going to log in and see who's working. And that's why I bothered them. So here's a little confusion for me, Joe. And it's not that big of a deal. But, again, going back to the timeline, it does mess with me a little bit. So we know that her co-workers actually called to have a well-being

check done. And we know that her boyfriend, Joel Boutsa, arrived at the home at about 2.10. And that's when all of this begins for us. The clock started ticking about 2.10 in the afternoon. Police arrive and they are told by Joel Bautza that when he got home that afternoon from his handyman job, he found Joyce Cartagena laying on the floor, face down, a zip tie around her neck. And he immediately, Joel Bautza, starts telling police, oh, it was a suicide. She took her own life. From the very beginning, from the very first minutes, he is telling them it's a suicide. Joe, as a death investigator, when you come to this meeting of the minds, I know that the police are first on hand.

Well, when you find a body that is obviously dead and you know it's that the person is no longer here what is the first call police make well certainly when they find somebody in these conditions like this because this would be quite striking when they roll up on the scene and they see this woman in this state every death that is that doesn't have some kind of pre-existing natural etiology, you're going to roll a detective out there more than likely. And I have to remind people, this case is taking place in Sanford, Florida. And I don't know if you recall this, but Dave, this is associated with that town is actually associated with one of the most infamous cases probably in the last 20 years.

And that's Trayvon Martin case. It's one of those places where we know that they have a detective bureau, and so the detectives are going to roll out there. It's not just going to be the B cop that's there. They'll probably call for crime scene techs as well to take photographs because that's going to be essential. You want to freeze this moment in time because this is an atypical case, certainly. If you've got someone who has allegedly taken their own life and you've got somebody un-intimate there, someone, this Bauza fellow who is stating he's lived with her now for a number of years, so they have a very intimate relationship. He exists in this domestic environment with her. He would have an awareness, wouldn't he, Dave, if she's got some kind of suicidal ideation or

anything like that. But it's super bizarre. But everybody that knew her, everybody that worked with her, suicide, last thing on their mind. And a couple other things come into play. And it's amazing to me how police work through things. I know that there's no statute of limitations on murder. And so when you have a person who is dead under, I guess, the suspicious circumstances would be the proper term because she's found alone in her house, face down on the floor, zip tie. They've got the boyfriend saying she committed suicide and they're going to make a few calls

say, well, is anybody else close to her think suicide is a real thing? Because in reality, they got to figure out more of what's going on here. And what they first see on her body besides the zip tie around her neck, well, they see like carpet burns and drag marks. They can tell that she was involved in some kind of a scuffle before this happened. And so I'm thinking in my head, Joe, immediately jumping to conclusions because I'm an idiot. She got into a fight and he killed her and now he's covering it to make it look like a suicide. But the other side of me said, OK, wait a minute. What if they did have an argument?

What if they did get a little rough and tumble? But old handyman Joel Boutsa, he says, I'm out. I'm going to go to work. I got a handyman job to do. You do whatever. And she sits there and she is a little bit bruised a little bit, some scrapes and decides I just can't take it anymore. I'm going to have to check out. That's a realistic possibility, isn't it? Yeah. And I've had cases like that where people have taken their own life in the wake of a domestic dispute. And it's almost like I'm going to show you kind of event. And of course, it ends up like all suicides very tragically. In this case, I'm just curious when you have this scenario and you're the forensic person coming to

the scene, are you going to listen to what the boyfriend says or are you just going to kind of block it out and just go, here's the body, I've got to figure out everything that went on without having all this other distraction in my ear? It's important as the forensics person at the scene that you look at the environment and let the environment, as new agey as it sounds, speak to you without any static. Dr. Tom Noguchi, who was the chief M.E. in L.A. many, many years ago, stated early on in his career that he learned to look at the ceiling when he walked into a crime scene

because he didn't want to be distracted at other things. And he would work his way down from the ceiling until he got to the body. And he wouldn't talk to anybody else. He wouldn't talk to cops. He wouldn't talk to other principals that were involved in it until after he had done his initial assessment. And in a case like Joyce's, it's important to understand that the body is probably going to tell you more than any witness at the scene. I've seen people choke to death, either, that is with bare hands. I've seen people that have been choked with items, which involves most of the time a ligature, which is a fine rope or something like this that can occlude the airway or certainly block

blood flow to the brain. I don't know that I've ever encountered a case involving a zip tie. And that's what really stuck out to me in this particular case, because you have an individual that is stating that this is a self-inflicted event and it would take a tremendous, Dave, amount of willpower in order to inflict this upon yourself, in order to take your own life. There are certainly far more simpler and less uncomfortable ways to do this. I would think a zip tie in and of itself would be a fairly painful way to go because of the sharp, you know, most zip ties are kind of sharp. You know, the plastic on the ends and that beyond the fact that you're choking the life out of yourself, if that's what's happening, you've got a lot of pain going on from that side that you wouldn't have if, say, you used a belt or something along those lines.

Yeah, and it is difficult because the way the zip tie is actually designed is that it has little teeth. Imagine like almost as if this is an old fashioned jack, which I don't know if people nowadays can identify with, that would go up. It's kind of graduated like this, and the higher you go, the more tension you get, and it increases elevation with a car in that sense. But with this, you're actually constricting. It's working the opposite, but it's got teeth that you can't back up. The only way to remove a zip tie, if you've never used one, and I think every one I've ever encountered is made out of some kind of plastic, is to actually take a sharp instrument and cut it away. Now, there are a number of demonstrations, and I kind of looked them up in advance, out there of people that there's one infamously out there with some former CIA agent that's talking about how you

break loose from zip ties if your hands are bound with them. And police actually use zip tie, or they call them plastic cuffs, to cuff people en masse. So if you have like a big riot or something like that, you'll see these guys with these things hooked to their belts. And those are zip ties, a form of zip ties that they're using to restrain people instead of handcuffs. And you can't get those things off unless you actually cut them. And so there's a tremendous amount of tension. And right you are about the pain that would be involved. One of the things that we really look at when it comes to ligatures, and just imagine this just for a second,

the less surface space that a ligature has on it, whether it's a rope or a belt, or in this case, a zip tie, the more narrow it is, the deeper the furrow. Okay, so the furrow is actually that crease that is created by this particular item, and it goes deeper and deeper and deeper into the tissue, the tighter you make it. And that applies to someone that might hang themselves or someone that's killed with what we refer to as a groat, which people may have seen in the movies, which is this item that's essentially a ligature that has two handles on it traditionally. And you see people, assassins, that will use them and they'll choke people out with these things, come up behind them in a stealthy-like manner and take the individual's life.

So you have those that are out there, but the more narrow these things are, the deeper the furrow. And so we begin to kind of appreciate this at autopsy when we're examining these bodies that have ligatures. And most of the time, when we have someone that is, in fact, deceased at the scene, we don't rush to cut a ligature off at the scene. We don't. If we have confirmed that the individual is deceased there, we're going to leave it in place because that tells us a lot at the morgue about the dynamic of the event, the placement of the item.

Has it been moved or removed and then placed over an area? And we can actually appreciate that as a result of some of the trauma that's left behind by these things, Dave. And you're also, I was wondering that earlier and I was hoping you were going to cover it because my first thought, if it was me and I found my loved one on the floor, my first thought would be to cut it off, would be to cut the zip tie off the neck. Just because if there's any chance that I can save this individual, I'm not going to be able to do it with that zip tie around her neck. No, listen, that's an excellent point. I got to say, man, that just goes to basic human compassion, doesn't it? Yes. You've got a loved one who, if she did it to herself, then you don't want this to happen.

So you're going to do everything in your power to save her life. First thing, zip ties coming off. Yeah. I don't care if I've got to go to the kitchen and get a butter knife. If I don't have a knife on my person, the thing's coming off or I'm trying to rip it off with my bare hands, anything that I can to bring this person back to life, to reanimate them, if you will. And I think that speaks volumes about this particular case. If you've got a circumstance where this is left in place by the person who found her, that there's no effort, there's, as they say, no heroic measures were taken in order to bring them back around.

I mean, what do you do? You stand over the body and just kind of shrug your shoulders and say, oh, well, well, I think I've got a suicide. I think that she took her own life. That does. I mean, that goes to the heart of this, I think. One thing that strikes me here is that while the forensic people take over, it's your job to figure out what happened

and is it murder or suicide? You've got to help figure that out forensically. But the police are also doing their work. And I'm wondering how much their efforts in trying to find out what led up to it, and you talk about timeline, but when the police are trying to figure out what was going on in this couple's life

prior to her body being found, and if it has any impact whatsoever, forensically, after you've already done your examination, if there's any questions, does the police investigation help you to determine what might have happened with the body? Oh my gosh. Yeah. It's key because let me throw this out to you, Dave. You've got a person that is putting forth an idea, the finder, and you have a finder who is an intimate. And as I stated earlier, they're going to have the most knowledge of what's going on in this person's life at that particular time. If they're putting out the idea that this is in fact fact, a suicide. You're going to have to prove that from an investigative

standpoint. That's the problem. We need to be able to prove this. And if you look at it from a scientific perspective, so what do we have as part of this equation that's going to lead us down this path logically where we arrive at a potential manner of suicide. Well, some of the things that come about are prior suicide attempts. Has this individual ever attempted suicide? Are they under the care of someone for mental health issues? And that can be anybody from a licensed professional counselor to a psychiatrist. Are they taking medications that might help them reduce anxiety or depression or alleviate depression in their life? So you're going down this checklist, right?

And at the end of this profile that you're building as an investigator relative to the victim, when you add on what this individual, the finder, is saying, you begin to think, well, is there enough evidence here that I can move forward and safely say that this is, the finder, is saying, you begin to think, well, is there enough evidence here that I can move forward and safely say that this is, in fact, a suicide? Our one supposition as death investigators, I can't say it enough, is that all deaths, not some, but all deaths are homicides until proven otherwise. So I have to exclude as a death investigator all other possibilities. And if I have someone that has, if I've worked suicides, and just so that you understand and our listeners understand,

death and medical legal death investigators work far more suicides than you ever do homicides. It's something that we're very good at. You just don't ever hear about it because you have this ratio that's, you know, sometimes two to one, three to one, depending upon where you are geographically. You've got more people. You just don't hear about it unless it's a celebrity, for instance, that has taken their life. We're skilled at this, and police are skilled at it, too, because they're coming at it from a different perspective. And certainly, when they see someone laying on the floor with a zip tie around their neck, This is atypical. So you can imagine we're going to take a long, hard look at this to try to understand and essentially check the boxes here

to see if it fits within this construct. And also, just so you know, not every case of suicide involves a suicide note. They don't always involve a recording. So just because there's not a note there necessarily doesn't mean that it's not a suicide. Some people just make that decision to go ahead and do it. And in a case like this, you're left with more questions than your answers. Brother Dave, I got to tell you, man, we have to wait sometimes for the dead to speak to us. And they do their best to reveal information in the morgue most of the time. That's kind of where we dance as medical legal death investigators. What can the body tell us? And in this particular case, boy, did this poor woman have a tale to tell. Joe, whenever there's a death and you have a significant other involved, their investigation is immediately going to be multifaceted.

They're going to have to focus on the boyfriend slash husband as well as other possibilities, but they have to look at that and eliminate that individual. That's just a given in this particular case, though, they found Joycey Cartagena down, zip tie around her neck. Boyfriend is right there. It's 210 in the afternoon.

He's seeing suicide. That shows up in all the police paperwork. Chief of police said he was leading us down this path. He was directing on the scene that it was a suicide. But they had to look at everything. It took time. Now, we're going to roll this out there and say he has been charged, but it didn't happen right away. It actually took some time.

And Joe, they had to find out that, first of all, that while Josie Cartagena and Joel Boutsa had lived together for a number of years and had been a couple since probably 2016, that there were issues. Joyce had a lot of debt. That is something kind of an underlying financial issue. She also supported Joel Bouts financially. He didn't actually support himself. He depended on her financially, and she was in big-time debt. We also have from her son, who, by the way, this young man is so broken hearted. Oh, my goodness.

He it just it hurts your heart to hear him talk about his mother. But he is actually studying to become a doctor. And he was talking about how the day of, according to Joel Bouts of the boyfriend, the morning of the death, they coupled Joyce and Joel Bouts had an argument that morning about money, about finances. And he went off to do his handyman job and she didn't show up. She did not log on. Nothing happened after he left in terms of her being alive. We don't know when she died, but we know that as soon as he went to work, she was not actually doing anything that we can prove. We've got rug burns and other signs of physical altercation on her body. And the police are putting all this together along with the idea

that he is pushing as a suicide. So we know now he has been charged with murder. But why, Joe, would it take two months nearly to get that charge? Why did it take so long? They're testing every possible outcome here and trying to examine it. And also they're waiting for information to come back from the ME's office. This assessment of the trauma that she had sustained. Look, it's one thing if, I'm glad you brought up this idea of rug burns or carpet burns. That's an abraded area on the skin. And if you've never suffered one or had one, they are markedly painful. So let me just break this down to you. If an individual impacts on a carpeted surface and they get this abraded area on their skin,

it's not something that they're going to do over and over and over again. Okay. It's like sticking your hand in fire. Once you burn your hand, you're not going to do it again. So the question is, why in the world would you have multiple abraded areas on your body? They are opining, at least at this point, that these are related to a carpeted surface, perhaps. So if there was only one marking like that, it could be explained or maybe dismissed. But having more than one, no. That's something that you sit back and you think, OK, I've got that bit to deal with.

And then you've got the atypical nature of this modality of death with the zip tie, which is super bizarre. But, you know, something that you said just a moment ago that the police spokesman was saying, and I get the idea that this individual has had a certain amount of training in an area that we death investigators really have to be careful in, and that is staged deaths. You made the comment, and I love this, that he said they were being steered. And the steering is taking place initially by this boyfriend. So he's steering and directing. You want an explanation, and rightly so, from the finder. You want this individual to give

you information relative to what they know about the person. But when they continue constantly to interject themselves into the conversation or into the investigator's kind of purpose here in order to assess what's going on, you get kind of an odd feeling about them. Why do you keep suggesting this? Why is it that it couldn't be something other than this? And all of the data points along the way, you're collecting these as you go along and you're doing this assessment of what this person knows about this intimate that they're involved with. You look at the injuries that are there, the atypical nature of this thing around her neck, this zip tie, which you may have never seen before as a modality of suicide. Let me tell you, one of the phone calls that they made after they left the scene, they called her doctor. I can almost guarantee it. They would have called her treating

physician. They would have assessed that information at the scene. You're saying that suicide, okay, now if she doesn't have a psychiatrist, we're going to call or a counselor, we're immediately going to call her treating physician. Are you currently treating her for depression? Because an attending physician, even if it's an internal medicine doc, can sit there and say, well, I'll give you this for depression or I'll give you this for anxiety. And again, you're checking a box. If you call that person, they say, no, she's got this kind of bright affect. She's never talked about. One of the things they say is she doesn't have any suicidal ideation with vocalization. None of that stuff is going on. She doesn't have a history of suicide. And so that's one of the things that

you're kind of checking off. And it doesn't, it just doesn't add up, Dave. When you get to the part of a zip tie being around her neck, do you immediately go with, well, that's obviously how she was choked, or is it possible maybe that she was choked in a different way, hands around the neck, and the zip tie was then put on, because they said it's a large zip tie, that the zip tie was then added on after she had already passed. And that was to cover up fingerprint marks. Let's talk about the dynamics of a ligature strangulation as opposed to say a manual strangulation. When I say manual, what I mean is like manual labor. That means to work with your hands. You're going to place your hands, if you were the perpetrator, around the neck of someone or get them in a chokehold where they're in the crook of your arm. if you were the perpetrator, around the neck of someone or get them in a chokehold where they're in the crook of your arm and you're going to choke down on them. You're going to apply

pressure, external pressure, that is going to impact the internal structures of the neck. Now, that can be the trachea, you know, the airway, or it can be the vessels that are supplying the brain with oxygenated blood. So that's going to leave a significant marker for you at autopsy. So when the autopsy is conducted, first off, you're going to photograph this area very, very carefully. If the zip tie is still in place, which it sounds like it probably was, you'll take images of the zip tie, what we refer to as in situ, which means in place, then away from probably 180 degrees around the circumference of the tie itself, the mid-range away from where the thing is actually tied off, where it kind of pull it tight, you're going to clip it

right there. You'll set it aside. You'll take a photograph of the actual ligature or the zip tie itself. And you'll take a photograph of this furrow that's left behind. Now, one of the things that you see, and this is kind of interesting, that you'll see with ligatures many times, you see it in hangings, this sorts of things. You'll see these things referred to as tardue spots, which are, they're like petechiae, and they're all over. They'll just kind of blast all around that area, particularly if you've got this kind of focal area that has been tied down very, very tightly,

like you see with a noose. So it looks like petechiae, but there'll be like a little storm of them, and you'll get them kind of all over the surface of the skin. You can appreciate and you would take note of that. They don't appear every single time, but it's something you would look for externally before you open the body. If you've got a ligature that is this tight and buddy, it would be tight, man. And you don't have any signs of hemorrhage in that area that that ligature or zip tie in this case was in place over, you got a problem. And it's going to be revealed once you do what's called the neck

reflection. So we go into these cases where we actually reflect back the tissue of the neck, the external tissue, so the skin. You get down into the layer of the muscle around the neck, and you begin to examine those areas. You look for something, there are these structures within the neck called the strap muscles. And there are these muscles that kind of intertwine with one another that are on either side of the trachea, that kind of cross over the trachea in this area. And this is the way they were engineered. And you look for soft tissue hemorrhage in the muscles, in the overlying tissue, the

sub-Q fat, all those areas, you look for hemorrhage in there. If you have got a ligature that is this tight, you're going to have a very focalized area. You can even appreciate it internally. You'll see this line that goes across. If you're absent that, but yet you have this kind of broad, expansive hemorrhage that is not quite as deep, but it is there, that there's a high probability that if you have associated hemorrhage that may perhaps be brought about as someone having the life choked out of them, you look at the ligature that you have and you don't see any kind of associated demarcation with the ligature itself. You know that this is something other than as advertised, that perhaps they were

choked out or manually strangled. And then the zip tie was put on as just an afterthought to kind of put this forward. She took her own life. She had access to a zip tie and she put it around her neck and she tightened this thing down can you imagine and so science is going to trump every single time it's going to trump whatever you might be speaking you're trying to speak this into existence right you got this guy from the very beginning he's already in there saying this is what it is again i'm still stuck with joe this person that you have had an intimate relationship with for years is dead on your floor and you didn't try to do anything to help except tell the police I have a suicide. It just boggles the mind. But I'm wondering, Joe, you know, when you put a zip tie and you pull it, certain areas of the zip tie would have pressure on them first, you know, as you're pulling back on it. Would you be able to trace that in post? Perhaps. I think that probably the most pressure is going to be exerted probably away from where

it's actuated, from where you slip the tip of this thing in and then pull it tight. So you're going to have initial pressure that's applied, again, 180 degrees away from wherever that connective point is, and then laterally, which would be at the 90 degree marks on either side as you're tightening it down. And then finally, you'll have that one place where you make that one final pull as you tighten it down right there. And sometimes the skin can get wrapped up in there. It'll pinch. We've seen this happen with people that have had their hands zip tied. You'll get these little pinched areas that'll have focal areas of hemorrhage that are associated with that. And so there are a number of things that you're going to look for on their person. And here's something else. And this

particularly happens with female victims, even if they're fully clothed. In a case like this, that has this kind of violence, nowadays, what will happen in the morgue, even if they're fully clothed in a case like this, that has this kind of violence nowadays, what will happen in the morgue, even if she's fully clothed, Dave, they're going to do a rape kit. There's a high probability because, you know, lots of times people can be raped and they'll be redressed, for instance. I'm not saying that that happened in this case, but I'm saying that just to be safe, this would have happened. They would have also done, and this is kind of fascinating, they would have also done examinations of her hands. You know, we talked about the abraded areas that she would have relative to these friction abrasions that come about as a result of contacting carpet. But we would look at the nails and do the nail trimmings and the

nail scrapings. Nail scrapings and trimmings is the way it actually happens to see if there's anything caught beneath those nails. It seems as though, I don't know what you think about this, Dave, but it seems as though the narrative that we're being given, she fought back or resisted in some way. And many times if an individual can, they're going to try to, particularly if someone is putting pressure on their neck and the individual is using their hands, you would look at a suspect. If you can get them early enough, you would look at their wrist, right, to see if there's nail marks. And they're going to look like little half moons where the nails kind of penetrate into the skin of the perpetrator and also scratch marks on the face. Because you're trying to do, the victim is trying to do anything they can to get away.

And in this particular case, we haven't heard. No, you know what, Joe? We have. They did say that they could tell a struggle had taken place. You've got the other marks with the rug burns and things like that. They alluded to other things that they witnessed at the crime scene. You mentioned a rape kit, even though she's fully clothed. And that's the other part of this. To believe his story is to just be wacko and looking at it from every other way possible, Joe, if not him, somebody just came in there after he left for work and killed her for no reason and went on about their merry way without taking anything. Yeah, you're right. And the police or the D.A. at least have enough that

they felt secure enough in charging Bauza. They did, in fact, charge him with homicide. First degree premeditated murder. Yeah. And they premeditated, which is a boy, that's a certain element there, particularly in Florida. You have this knowledge in advance that you're planning to do this. And so premeditation is certainly something that's very chilling. This is not a reactive event. In the opinion of the police, he has been charged. He hasn't been convicted. He hasn't even been tried.

But from what I understand, the judge didn't feel secure enough, apparently, or the magistrate didn't feel secure enough to offer bond for him. He's being held without bond, Dave. So that gives you an idea as to where prosecutor's mind is and certainly the police's minds are. I think that it's very important, though, that we understand that even though he's saying that this is a suicide and the police believe that it is a homicide, it's important to know, Dave, that we have people out all across this country and within the sound of our voices that are struggling with things right now. And if you or someone you love and you care about

is struggling with thoughts of self-harm, please know that there is help. You can simply dial 988 for Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.