Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: A Deserted Desert Discovery - The Homicide of Dr. Thomas Burchard

Episode Date: December 25, 2022

On March 7, 2019 a man is driving down the road with his children in Las Vegas Valley when they notice a car with a rock thrown through its window. They call the police, and upon further inspection, a body is found in the trunk of the car with blood everywhere. The man is identified to be Dr. Thomas Burchard, a beloved child psychiatrist from Salinas, California. In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Jackie Howard discuss the blood patterns, the evidence found inside the car, how many pieces of evidence are gathered from a crime scene, where Dr. Burchard was in his final days, and more. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 2:25 - Background and overview of the case 5:12 - Blood patterns 7:15 - Determining the cause of death from blood patterns 12:10 - Gloves found inside the car 16:15 - Arson investigation 18:30 - How many pieces of evidence can be generated from a crime scene? 21:40 - The state the body is found in 25:40 - Tampering with the crime scene 27:30 - How did investigators figure out the victim had been beaten? 33:28 - Discovering where Dr. Burchard was during his final 3 days of life 37:00 - Investigators start to piece together the evidence 39:12 - Transfers of blood, swears, and wipes 42:38 - Wrap up See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I've had the opportunity to travel quite a bit across this country, and one of the most striking locations, geographically at least, is, in my opinion, is the desert southwest of the United States. Being from the southeast, I'm used to seeing farmland and rolling hills and green everywhere. Not out there. Sometimes you can get on one of those highways and it just looks like it goes on and on forever. You kind of realize how small you are. It's kind of like when you go to the ocean for the first time when you're a kid. You see the vastness of it.

But there is a beauty to it. But not too many people stop along the roadway. There's not many establishments out in some of those locations to stop at. But can you imagine, tooling down the road, you got your kids in the car with you. Maybe you're singing a song with them, maybe you're playing a game, or maybe you're telling them to settle down. But all of a sudden, out of the corner of your eye, you catch an odd sight. In the middle of that vastness, there's a Mercedes, a blue one.

A Mercedes Benz C300, sitting there, rising up off the desert floor on what the police called an earthen berm. When your eye catches it, you notice that there's a big hole in the window. Looks like, I don't know, a gun blast or maybe a big rock went through it. But when the police finally showed up at that scene, after that daddy had called it in, when they opened the trunk of that car they found something as shocking as anything else

you might see out there in the desert they found the body of dr. Thomas Bouchard today we're going to talk about his I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Joining me today is my good friend, Jackie Howard, Senior Producer with Nancy Grace Crime Stories. Jackie, when I heard about this story, I was thinking, what an odd thing. You're riding along the road with your kids in the car. You know, you and I are both parents, and I've seen odd things along the road with my family in the car. I don't know that I would have necessarily stopped, but apparently he at least called it in to the police. It caught his attention, and can you imagine the shock of the police when they finally rolled up there and they stick their head in the window of their car and they see that there's blood everywhere?

That's going to be an indication that something pretty horrific has occurred, I would think. I would say in the landscape of California, Las Vegas, and the area in between, that's probably not the strangest things that officers have seen out there. But Dr. Thomas Brouchard was very well known and very well liked among his patients. He had a longtime girlfriend. According to Judy Earp, his girlfriend, his patients remained his friends and he helped them often throughout the rest of his life. Usually he dealt with children, but as they turned into adults, he remained contact in their life, helping them financially often when he had to.

But when Dr. Burchard explained to his girlfriend that he had to fly to Las Vegas, that was Friday, March 1st, and he was scheduled to return the following Monday. But on Sunday, she began to realize that something was wrong. She spoke to him on Friday. She texted with him on Saturday. But Judy Earp says she knew something was wrong on Sunday when she received a couple of texts from him in the afternoon that she knew, she just felt in her heart, that were not sent by him.

She even replied, Tom, I don't believe this is you. You need to call me. And after that, the phone went dead. Then she finds out that Tom doesn't check in for his flight. She gets very worried. There's days before Dr. Bouchard's body was discovered in the trunk, as you said, of his luxury car. But before the police officers looked in the trunk they looked inside as you said they noticed the broken windshield and this vehicle parked it it would almost be like a big light bulb above it because it's on display and it's basically got a neon sign that says hey look at me

i'm a flashy car and i'm sitting up for all the world to see. So police officers go to look and inside they find lots of blood, Joe. One of the fascinating things about being a death investigator is that sometimes when you arrive at a scene, you know that there are actually scenes of deaths that don't have bodies? And on initial examination, when you look, say, for instance, into the cabin of a car and it is just bathed in blood, you have to think automatically that something horrific has happened in this environment.

You have all manner of blood staining that has taken place. And, you know, with blood, there goes an indication of activity. What do I mean by that? Well, you have blood spatter where you can have a dynamic event, say, for instance, a gunshot wound or maybe a bludgeoning where you have blood that is directly blown onto a surface, sprayed onto a surface, if you will, in one manner of speaking. Then you have transfer of blood, which means that you have blood that comes about as a result of a body or an object that is soaked with blood touching that area, and then it kind of supersaturates the area.

And it leaves a very specific pattern. If you take a body, say for instance, and you move it all about an area and it's coated in blood, you'll get these kind of swirls. Say for instance, if somebody has a bloody, blood-soaked hair, it's almost like taking a mop that has mud or something on it. And you can kind of see the swirl on the floor that the mud makes as you transfer it from those strands of the mop. Same thing with hair. Clothing works the same way. Hands work the same way. And so there's very distinctive patterns that you look for.

But it also goes to the dynamic of an event, which is critical in a case where you're trying to assess how this blood is in fact directly related to a horrible event that more than likely gauging from the amount of blood you find at the scene might be an indication that the amount of blood is what's referred to as incompatible with life. Given where these blood patterns were found, there's spatter on the driver's seat headrest and in the back seat. When you're looking at a scene like this, Joe, can you just immediately, not from doing any kind of testing, but just from looking at how much and how the blood is laid out, whether it is a blunt force wound, a stabbing wound, a shooting. I mean, just can you look at that and go, oh, yeah, somebody got shot here? Yeah, you can.

Because, you know, the finer the spray, for instance, that gives us an indication of the higher of the velocity. And I'll give you an example of that. If you take, say, a handgun and you shoot somebody in the head, when that blood exits out of the body, it's going to be in a spray-like pattern. When I say spray, I'm talking about the consistency of like aerosol hair spray can. You kind of spritz it like that and the droplets will be very, very fine. However, if you have an event where someone is beaten to death, the droplets themselves will be much larger when they settle on the surface. Another thing you have to consider as well is do you have evidence that blood that give you an indication that a subject may have laid there for a period of time and blood either pumped out of their body at that spot.

It doesn't have to be like an arterial spray pattern, which tends to be kind of fine. It can be just almost like a seepage where you have blood that's kind of slowly coursing out of the body. And sometimes that's just drawn out by gravity. It all depends. So, if you have a large area of blood, you have an indication that the dynamic or that there was kind of a lack of a dynamic environment there where you've got a lot of movement around and kind of these high velocity events and that sort of thing, a lot of activity. That's one of the reasons, and this is kind of an interesting little aside, there are cases that have been worked over the years where people have actually been convicted in the absence of a body of a homicide, but yet

the investigators found such a large amount of blood at the scene. The term, just as I stated earlier, they would say, let's see if I get the phraseology right. This volume of blood is not compatible with life. In other words, that the individual lost so much blood at that moment in time that the subject could not have continued to live. And it can be indicative of what type of event that you might be looking at. You begin to look at, for instance, the appearance of the blood. Have the red blood cells begun to, say, for instance, separate from the serum? You know, the way we think about blood is if it's constantly circulating and mixing, if you will. So, once that begins to happen, that can be an indication of time as well because it takes a certain amount of time for

the serum to separate out from the red blood cells, for instance. And within the serum, you'll find other components as well. But it gives you an idea of what may have happened. And it's important because the blood will tell you, it'll give you direction many times, not just the dynamic of the event, say the spray of a blood pattern that's left behind, but also if you have, say, for instance, drag marks that are left behind, and sometimes they are telltale. People are moving a bloody body across a surface, and you see dots of blood or you might see big swipes of blood across that area.

And it kind of gives you this interesting pattern of movement, and you begin to interpret that. And I find it very interesting that in this particular case, that the police found not just blood within the cabin of the car, but they also found blood on the exterior of the trunk of this car, Jackie. As a death investigator, many times I've reflected back to that Bible verse from Genesis where God confronts Cain and he asks Cain, you know, where's Abel, your brother? Cain is kind of like, I don't know. And I think, and I'm certainly paraphrasing, I'm no theologian, but he says, your brother's blood cries out from the ground. And from an investigative standpoint, blood does cry out to you. It tells you things. It's an indicator of motion.

It's an indicator of placement. It's an indicator of activity. Well, Joe, blood does not tell me as much as it does you. So I got lots more questions for you. So let's go back inside the car. You were talking about blood was found on the outside again. But I'm still inside the car. Blood was found on the driver's side and in the back seat but there was so much more evidence that was found so I want to know

how this would have been handled latex gloves were found and of course my limited knowledge I went oh yeah we've got fingerprints on the inside and DNA on the inside. And then we find out that there may have been a fire set inside the car. And I go, OK, was that intentional? I'm learning way too much from you, Joe. That's terrifying on so many levels, Jackie. But yeah, yeah, you're absolutely right. And you're a great student.

You're probably one of the best students I've had. Well, we spend a lot of time together, but OK. So teach me some more. Yes, we spend a lot of time together, but okay. So, teach me some more. Yes, we do. When you look into an environment, and listen, one of the things you have to consider as an investigator, when I see bloody gloves most of the time, I don't automatically think perpetrator. Unfortunately, when I show up at a scene and I see bloody blue latex gloves, the first thing I think of is EMT. And this is why this is very important.

And kind of let me make this point so that our listeners understand. When we're at a scene and you have what would commonly be referred to as kind of life-saving debris that's out there, and this includes bloodied gloves, you don't throw that stuff away. You retain it. You take pictures of it. You don't say, hey, let's take a picture of a dead body, but remove all the debris that the EMT's left behind. You know, when you take the photo, you can't do that. That's altering the scene. So those gloves

that are at the scene within this car, that's part and parcel. Even if they were left behind, which I don't think they were by an EMT, but that's one of the things that you think about. You don't just toss things away because the smallest amount of evidence can really turn the case. If you exclude the emergency medical technicians that may have rolled out on any particular scene and you have bloody gloves, well, automatically your default position is I didn't leave them. You didn't leave them. So who did? And you think, well, this has got connection. And also when you see gloves, it gives you a sense that the individual that may have been involved in this event was prepared. And that's kind of, that puts the case into a completely different realm

at that moment. Because you have an individual that if they committed a homicide and they had gloves when they did it, they thought about it. They thought about what they were doing. They thought about their actions. They thought about leaving a trace of themselves behind, going back to my old friend, Edmond LeCard, every contact leaves a trace. And they're trying to do everything they can to thwart it. It's amazing to me, you know, you had mentioned recovering evidence from within gloves. And that is possible. You can get trace evidence off of a perpetrator from within the gloves, depending upon how carefully you treat it.

Why in the world would you leave the gloves behind? It's almost like they're not thinking. It's almost like an incomplete event at that moment. You thought to bring the gloves, but you didn't think to take them with you. You just thought that you'd tear them off and just lay them there and that they wouldn't be collected as evidence. So that's kind of a fascinating thing to me. But when you have gloves, that means that you want to create a barrier between yourself and whatever item that you're touching. And so if there is blood from a victim, a specific victim that can tie back, it gives you an idea that after blood had been spilled, these gloves are essentially stained

with it. So you begin to think, well, what was the purpose of the gloves? Was it to hide points of contact on a weapon that was used? Or was it to thwart the investigators to try to determine who handled the body in a post-mortem sense? The fire. They had evidence of a fire. At that point, would you have to bring in an arson team or can investigative personnel like yourself, death at scene investigators, do all of those determinations and diagnoses as well? No, never. If I have access to arson personnel, I'm reaching out to them. These are some of the most highly trained individuals and they are specifically trained to deal with fire.

I know enough about fire to be dangerous from a forensic standpoint, and I can interpret certain things. But when you begin to consider what arson investigators, the level of training that they go through, because many times in many jurisdictions, for instance, arson investigators are not just, many of them start off as firefighters. And then they go to the police academy and become police officers as well. And then they go through arson training. So these people have extensive trainings for this purpose alone. So if I have these individuals in my Rolodex, if you will, to use an old term, if I have them in my contacts and phone, I'm hopping on the phone with them. Because, look, and we talked about this on Body Bags, you get one first chance to get it right. If I say, oh, well, I'm the smartest person in the room, I'm going to go ahead and handle the area over here that looks like burning has taken place and I screw it up, which there's a high probability I would because I'm going to

miss something. I'm not specifically trained in that area. I'm going to call my friends from arson. I've got a lot of really good friends that are arson investigators. And what they can do in that kind of environment is absolutely amazing. They know what evidence to collect. They know how to interpret the fire. They can tell you, for instance, how hot the fire was. They can begin to search things out to look for deposits of accelerant. They know how to collect it and how to process it,

who to talk to at the lab. They speak the language because a lot about forensics is learning to specifically speak the language and understand where to route evidence to. And arson investigators are the best at this. So, yeah, I'm sure that in this particular case, they would have reached out to people that are fire investigators, would have brought them out and asked for their opinion, and they would have generated a report in this case as well. Okay, so my inquiring mind has gone off into left field. We've all seen on TV all those little evidence markers, you know, number 22, yellow tag with the pictures going to be taken. How many bags, pieces, slides of evidence can be generated from a crime scene like this? Each individual piece of evidence, let's say, for instance, those gloves, okay, that we mentioned, those are not to be packaged together. All right. together. Each glove is an individual piece of evidence and it will be assigned a very specific

number and it will be analyzed in and of itself. It will not be analyzed with the other glove. It's like any item. If you have two blood-soaked socks that are removed from, say, a deceased person's feet, each sock is an individual piece of evidence. Any fiber collected, say, from below the knee with a tape lift at autopsy is different than the tape lift that you're going to get from superior to the knee. Those are all individual pieces of evidence. So when you begin to kind of calculate, and I think folks are surprised to hear this, when you begin to calculate the volume of evidence that you take out of a scene, it can be staggering. I've actually been on scenes. I remember one night in particular, we had such an extensive scene within a house. We had to call out two vans, full-size vans, like a conical line

size vans to haul off all of the evidence that we had. And those were in paper bags. We had bagged things individually at that scene, and we filled up two large vans. So, you can go as deep with this as you possibly want. Yeah. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Do you mean like one bag side by side throughout the entire van, or are you just kind of talking on the shelves and things that are installed? Well, it all depends on, you know, if we want to get into a volume contest, like judging how many jelly beans are in a big glass jar, I guess we could do that. But it's going to be hard to calculate that. It's a vast number, and you have to be very careful with it.

This is why. Because each thing contained in that bag has individual value from a scientific standpoint. You have to be very careful with it. There are certain things that potentially could be jostled around and you're not going to do any damage to them. But there are other things, say for instance, that you don't want to stack on top of one another. Say for instance, if you do in fact have a blood-soaked item, you don't want to crunch that down in the bag because that could perhaps transfer blood on one aspect of an item to another aspect of the item that didn't have blood on it before. So you have to think about all of this.

Everything that you do has to have purpose behind it. And you have to be able to justify it. You have to be able to justify it to yourself and everybody you work with. But also, you have to justify it in court. Because when you get up on the stand to testify to the validity of that evidence, how it was handled and everything, you better bring your A-game. And because there are attorneys out there that are bright enough to ask you questions specific to these points. How was this evidence treated? Okay, so back to the car. Investigators look inside, find the blood, no body. Then they

pop the trunk and they find Dr. Thomas Burchard. He has been in this vehicle for several days out in the desert on top of this berm. Now, the only good thing about this investigation would have to be that it was March and not July or August. And he was enclosed, I guess good is probably not a great term, but a valid point in this investigation. The conditions that you are in, the lower temperatures and enclosed space, is going to preserve the evidence, i.e. the body, better. Oh, boy, you're right on the money with that, Jackie. And here's why. Because the best term for me is advantageous.

You look for advantages as an investigator at a scene, and this is an advantage. Remember in the opening, I talked about how vast this area is. We're talking about the desert, all right? It just goes on for miles and miles and miles and miles. They could have scattered remains all over the place, but not in this case. They have contained remains. And so for us as investigators, when you open up a trunk as foul as this is, as horrific as it is, you have the advantage in a case like this because you have essentially a contained crime scene within this environment. And, you know, we have kind of a way that we grade crime scenes or that we refer to crime scenes for us as medical legal death investigators the area or the location where we find the body that's going to be what we would refer to as a primary crime scene because with no disrespect to the dead but the body is the largest piece of evidence that you have okay you want to be able to preserve it. There's his word again. Try to keep it as pristine as possible.

And in this gentleman's death, when they placed his body into the trunk of this car, they did the investigators a favor. Because for that moment, this body sealed away. You don't have the external environment, which could be now highly unlikely. It's not going to be rain. You're in the desert, I know. They do have a monsoon season. I'm not quite sure when that is, but you don't have rain. You don't have dew, okay, that might set in the morning. You're not going to have wind. Wind can really impact the body. You don't have direct sunlight. And one of the biggest things is that you don't have vermin. You know, you're not going to have coyotes that are going to be walking up to the body and disrupting the

body as if it were laying outside of the car or any kind of other animals that might be out there. It's actually kind of cocooned in a way and protected. My thought is that the best course with a body in a car like this, and I've done this on several occasions where we do not remove the body from the vehicle at all. We have a flatbed truck that comes out and we pull the vehicle up onto the flatbed and we take the body back to the crime lab. And the car in total is processed with the body in place. And that way you don't disrupt anything. Now, that's the ideal circumstances that you work under. And sometimes that can't happen. It doesn't happen in every case. But for me as a forensics guy,

that would be my preference because I'm not going to lose anything. People don't think, you know, well, gee whiz, where are you going to lose, Morgan? Well, if you just the simple act of lifting a body out of this awkward space that you have to draw the body out of, essentially, to get it into a body bag can create a disruption in the continuity of the evidence. What if you were able to take the entire car? You just said that moving the body could possibly destroy tamper with the evidence, but wouldn't tilting a car up on its axis to move it onto a flatbed do the exact same thing? Not to the same degree as putting hands on it and manipulating it. There's a reason why people use the term dead weight. The weight of a deceased person is the most awkward thing that anyone, well, most people, except those that work on farms and carry things like sacks of feed and try to deal with hay and all that stuff, it is dead weight.

The body does not help you. When you lift somebody and they're alive, you might not sense that they're helping you. And you're disrupting the body to a great degree because you're moving the body. Let's say the body is lying on the right side. Okay, lying on the right side and say, for instance, like a semi-fetal position. They've settled into that particular position. And also, there might be patterns of things that are coming up off of the body that are underlying the body. And it gives you an idea of the position of the body. Was the person still alive when they put them in the trunk? Or had they been dead prior to this and they put them in the trunk? You lose kind of context, if you will. I think, in my opinion, it's going to be much less disruptive to simply pull the vehicle up onto a flatbed. It'll be

disruptive with the body as opposed to taking the body out and placing it into a bag and then jostling it as you walk it back to a van that's parked on the side of the road. Remember, this is out in the desert, okay? And so, you're going to have to egress across this terrain, if you will, in order to get it loaded up into a van. If you can just take that body in place in the in situ, as they say, in place in the back of this car, take it to the crime lab and process it that way. That's the most ideal set of circumstances. OK, so I'm going to let you move things as you find important, Joe.

But back to the trunk. When the investigators did remove the body into the autopsy, they found that he had been bludgeoned. And how did they figure that out? I know, you know, you get beat with an instrument, you get a certain amount of patterns, blunt force, sharp force tells you what he was beaten with. But how did they figure out that he'd been beaten? Blind force trauma is kind of a curious thing. You have to try to do an assessment many times on surfaces that are just encrusted with blood, particularly when there are head strikes involved. As I've mentioned on a number of occasions, you know, the head is in fact the most vascular area

of the body. So when you have head strikes, the surfaces that are kind of broken open as a result of blunt force trauma are going to just be super saturated with blood. And so it's hard to make heads or tails out of what you're seeing. We do an initial examination in the morgue where we'll look over the surface to see where these insults have taken place. Try to get an idea of the degree of them, but you can never fully appreciate them until, well, to be quite honest with you, we wash the individual's hair. Really clean the head off very, very well. And if they have hair still in place, most people don't realize this. We shave the head.

We take generally the edge of a scalpel, which are very, very sharp. And it's a real skill set that you possess if you're an autopsy assistant or forensic pathologist and shave back the hair. And you try to fully appreciate what's going on beneath the hair itself because the hair can obscure a lot of things. And it's at that point that this particular case that they would have been able to assess how many individual strikes because every time a blunt object strikes a surface like the skull, it will essentially lacerate the skin. Now, keep in mind, I did not say cut the skin because that's something that people get confused over many, many times. It's not a matter of a cut. This is a laceration and they're completely two different things. Cut implies that you're using a sharp-edged instrument, okay?

And it's going to be very linear in shape, and you're going to have these kind of what's referred to as smooth margins. It looks like a machined blade, which a knife would be, has sliced through tissue, all right? And the tissue is completely straight. The injury is straight with sharp force and very ordered. Now, with a laceration, many times the injury will be very jagged. They leave very nasty breaks in the skin.

And one of the ways we ascertain this is check for what's referred to as tissue bridging. And one of the ways you can kind of understand this concept is the next time you go out to eat a meal and you're eating steak or chicken particularly, you take a knife and you cut through. So you cut a piece of steak or cut a piece of chicken. Look at the edges of that meat that you just cut. It is going to be very uniformed. However, if you take a piece of meat and you pick it up with your hands and you pull it apart, it gets stringy, doesn't it? I don't care how tender the cut is. It gets stringy.

If you just kind of pause just for a second before you completely pull it apart, you'll see these little strings of tissue. Well, that's what we refer to in forensic science as tissue bridging. Bridging does not occur with a sharp instrument. You have to have blunt instruments to do that. So when we look at an injury and assess it either at the scene or at the morgue, we're looking for what's referred to as tissue bridging. Another thing that they're going to look for, and pathologists will use these $10 words, they're going to look for associated ecchymosis. And what that means is there is surrounding hemorrhage, which you see many

times with blunt force trauma. So if you can imagine an individual being struck by a rod, like an iron rod or perhaps a hammer, it will leave, at least in the pre-death state or the anti-mortem state, it will leave these little areas of ecchymosis or hemorrhage around that lacerated area. And that's how we assess a blunt force injury. And also, below the surface of the scalp, we're talking about a head injury here, a blunt force head injury, you can very well have fracturing in what's called the external table of the skull. And that is that layer of the skull that is on the outside, external. And if it's with enough force, the individual can sustain what's called a depressed skull fracture, which means it actually drives the external tissue, the skin, for instance, of the scalp, the muscle, down through the external table of the skull, and it's

collapsing it into the cranial vault, many times into the surface of the brain, actually, and the bone will actually fragment and go down in there. And that's an indication, and this is important from a dynamic standpoint when you're thinking about assessing what happened at the scene. You're trying to assess whether or not there was a very strong person that was wielding the instrument, as opposed to, say, a lighter strike that might give you an indication that maybe not as much strength or velocity was applied to the weapon that so much blood was found within the cabin, the car, and certainly in the trunk,

I think that the police in this case have a real head-scratcher going on. Is it possible to beat someone to death in the front seat of the car? Remember, there was blood on the headrest, there was blood on the seat. Or was the individual transferred from the vehicle into the trunk of the car? Did this maybe occur in another location and the car was used to transport the individual somewhere? I don't know. So as the investigation unfolded, police learned and were able to pinpoint where Bouchard had spent the last three days. He had been visiting an old patient, Kelsey Turner, 25 years old. She is a model and an actress on Instagram. And there was a relationship between her and Dr. Bouchard.

At the time, we did not know what their relationship was. Now we know that Dr. Bouchard was paying for the home that she lived in, paying for credit cards, and they had an intimate relationship. Police were able to go back to the home, and at the home, they found a situation that was pretty similar to what they found in the car. There was blood. The blood in the vehicle, does it marry up with the blood that is spilled

at this scene, at this home, if you will? And that's going to be essential because you go back to the dynamics of the event. What were the patterns of blood that they found within the home? Obviously, they have blood. We have this door that's within a house that had apparently been knocked off of the hinges. You start talking about things becoming unhinged or being knocked off the hinges. Those are action terms. We're talking about a tussle that's going on, maybe with great force that's being applied to try to subdue Dr. Bouchard. And one of the things you have to consider is, was he taken unaware in this place? He shows up to talk to this woman and to try to engage with her and to tell her that things are quickly coming to an end, perhaps, in their relationship.

And then she's essentially laying in wait. She knows that he's coming. And she's not real big. I've seen images of her and it really makes you think, would she have been strong enough, even though he's a bit older, would she have been strong enough to get the upper hand on him, even with a baseball bat? People think about the psychiatrist as being very kind of nerdy and bookworms and that sort of thing. Understand what they do for a living. Psychiatrists have to deal

with patients many times that are highly agitated. They have to deal with people that are very, very aggressive. So he would have had experience certainly trying to subdue somebody. He might not be a martial artist per se, but he's been in circumstances throughout his career where he would be very defensive and have maybe more of an awareness. Say, for instance, if you had a surgeon that walked in there to deal with this, this guy has dealt with people that are out of control. So that's an interesting dynamic. Would she have been strong enough in order to overtake him and then absolutely beat him

to death with a baseball bat? But the question is, Joe, would he have been strong enough to subdue Kelsey Turner's boyfriend? Dr. Michard may have been six feet tall, 250 pounds, but Kelsey Turner's boyfriend was younger and stronger. Inside the home, they found a door had been kicked off the hinges. They found blood in a garage. They found towels in the home that matched a bloody towel that was found. So you could see investigators starting to piece together all of the information of this murder puzzle. Yeah. When you have items, home items that are found in a vehicle,

and they're essentially saturated in blood, and you find similar items at a home, yeah, that's a big tell for us investigatively, because you have to ask the question, what is this item doing in the vehicle when I have a matching item at the scene where obviously some type of terrific struggle has taken place? At this point, when police are investigating this, we've talked about blood a lot in this particular case, and there was obviously a copious amount of it. One of the questions that an investigator has to ask, is this the only blood?

Is this blood a single source blood? Or do we have commingled blood? Do we have blood that might have originated from somebody else? Yeah, I'm sure that probably with her help, the boyfriend, her current boyfriend, could have probably easily subdued this guy. But he may have put up a fight. He may have drawn blood on either Kelsey or her boyfriend. And you have the commingling of blood. You know, what if one of them got popped in the nose? They start to bleed.

And those blood spots that you find at the scene at the home where this probably took place, are they commingled there? Or when they're transporting the body out of the house and they're placing it in the car, you have blood commingled in there. How did blood get into the cabin of the car if he's in the trunk of the car, was he ever seated in the front seat or was the person that perpetrated this crime just absolutely saturated in the victim's blood and they drove them out there? One of the other things investigators found was an effort to clean up the blood. And as we've talked about many times, when there's a murder, there's always an attempt to clean it up. There was cleaning supplies found in the home. So now we can talk about all those other wonderful words like smears and transfer blood and swipes and the wonderful fact that you can tell the difference in all of those things. Isn't that something that Those patterns that you work so hard to clean up, not you, Jackie, but you in the universal sense that perpetrators use to try to clean up with, they're going to leave some remnant behind.

You think about these transfers of blood. Somebody is, say, for instance, saturated in blood, and they take their bare hand or maybe even their gloved hand and they place it on the floor and that transfers that pattern left behind on the floor of their hand and they can go back and try to clean that up. But if you bring in an agent like Blue Star or Luminol, you can actually see these patterns many times that will luminesce in the dark for just a brief second. You have to snap a photo of it, but you can pick up some detail in that environment and kind of understand the effort. You know, we talked about bedding that was found in the car. If you wrapped the body or secured the body that's saturated within the bedding and you drag them across this floor, you're going to leave this kind of furrow,

if you will, that kind of leaves this curved pattern or curvilinear pattern, as they say, dragging across the floor. You'll see these little swirls on the ground, and that gives you, again, an indication of movement. And, you know, this case is all about patterns when you really think about it. It's the patterns that you find within the cabin of the car, the patterns that you find, the transfer patterns, perhaps, that you find on the cabin of the car, the patterns that you find, the transfer patterns, perhaps, that you find on the outside of the trunk if somebody's trying to leverage a body in there. And even one other thing that the coroner found was that when they were examining those lacerations on top of the doctor's head, they actually found a pattern that married up with a baseball bat. So this whole case kind of comes down to that.

When you think about a baseball bat striking a surface and hitting that soft tissue, if our listeners at home, I'll give you a great kind of experiment to do. If you have access to, say, for instance, like a silly putty or like Play-Doh or something, and you take an object, and it can be like a spoon, for instance, the bowl, the bottom of the bowl, the exterior of the spoon, press it down into this putty, and then leave the spoon there and see what happens to the putty. It rises up over the edges of that spoon and headed toward the bowl. That's the same principle with striking someone with kind of a rounded object,

like a bat. Did you know that when you strike that area of the skin, and you're going to break it and leave blood everywhere, but when you strike that area of the skin, do you know that that skin actually kind of stretches out and wraps itself just for a second, like a millisecond, around the edges of the bat? And you can sometimes pick up a pattern of it. And you know how a baseball bat is kind of tapered, starts off with a big barrel at the end, and then kind of narrows down as it goes down. I've actually seen cases where you can actually pick up on that narrowing pattern, depending upon where they actually strike an individual with the surface of that bat.

Ex-Playboy Bunny Kelsey Turner has taken a plea deal in the murder charges against her for the death of Dr. Thomas Brouchard. After accepting an Alford plea, where she doesn't have to admit guilt in the slaying of Dr. Thomas Brouchard, but does admit that the authorities have enough evidence to charge her, she could face up to 25 years in prison. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.