Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: A Mother's Betrayal: The Chilling Forensics of the Daybell Children's Deaths

Episode Date: May 21, 2023

In this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack explore the harrowing case of J.J. Vallow and Tylee Ryan.  They reveal the disturbing details of J.J.'s death, the challenges faced by forensic pathologists in examining J.J.'s remains, the presence of GHB in his system, the crucial role of preserving evidence, and the potential for uncovering latent or plastic prints on surfaces involved in the case. The look at  tragic and unsettling death of 17-year-old Tylee Ryan discusses her tumultuous family life, her struggle with pancreatitis, the discovery of her remains, the challenges forensic experts faced in determining the cause of death, and they provide insight into the methods and findings of the forensic anthropologist and pathologist.   Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeartSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan Fending for yourself. How many kids does that apply to in this world we live in now? I know one that it did, in fact, apply to. Tali Ryan. Tali was a young lady. She had seen the life that her mother had lived.

Five husbands. Multiple moves. Dissettlement. had lived with five husbands, multiple moves, to settlement. Tylee had essentially become the anchor in her family. Certainly as that applied to her little brother, J.J. Vallow. Always envisioned them clinging to one another. There's that image where they're hugging each other very tightly and I would think that in their world that's really all they had to hold on to for stability was one another.

But just like with JJ, we found out a lot of disturbing news about how Tylee met her end because we've heard from the forensic pathologist that did her examination. In this episode, we're going to break it down. We're going to discuss it down and we're going to discuss it. The horror of Tylee's death. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. There is no satisfaction, and my listeners know how much I hate the word closure because it doesn't exist. Particularly when it comes to death.

You get answers and some answers are just wanting. They're unsatisfying, I think. Because you haven't quite filled in all of the blanks. And unfortunately, with Tylee Ryan's death, that's kind of the situation we find ourselves in right now. But what I can say is that her death was horrific. Dave Mack, would you agree with that assessment? 100%. What we know about Tylee Ryan and her passing is it's frustrating and sad. I say that not lightly.

Frustrating because we don't still to this moment know all the things you would normally know about somebody who died when you have remains to examine. I say remains because there was not a body to examine as one would expect when you say body. What happened to Tylee Ryan, and we don't even know exactly when, what we do know is that Tylee Ryan was last seen September 8th in Yellowstone Park in a picture with her mother, her little brother, JJ, and her uncle, Alex Cox, who was Lori Vallow's brother. We have that picture, and we have some other information that we know she was alive with the family September the 8th. And then we know she's missing until June 9th of 2020.

What took place in the interim is where people like you come in. How did they find Tylee Ryan? I think that to say buried is inaccurate. I prefer the term discarded with an attempt to cover up. Burial, to me, when you say that, it goes to honoring. You know what I'm saying, Dave? When we honor someone, we bury them. She was not this young woman. She's in that weird space

in time. She's 17. Actually, she died two weeks before her 17th birthday. Yeah. I mean, right on the cusp. And the world's about to open up to her. And unfortunately, I think in a very bad way, it had already opened up to her. She had seen things that I think that by virtue of the way that her mother chose to live her life, she had been exposed to. Just the dissettlement in and of itself that she had had to endure for all those years. It's very important to note two things really quickly. One, when we did a program about J.J. valo and how his body was recovered and his body was recovered and if you haven't listened to it i encourage you to do so but what happened with tylee ryan totally different it was like two totally separate things not connected by anything

and you mentioned that tylee had been through a lot with her mother well her mother was married five times when you watch the interview of tylee r Ryan with police after Charles Vallow was murdered by Alex Cox, watch that interview. And in the times after, she seems unaffected. Tylee Ryan seemed totally unaffected. She actually was emulating what her mother was doing. They were joking, talking like it was just another day. She's copying her mother and no emotion, giggling, laughing, moving on. So, Tylee Ryan was so impacted by the lifestyle that her mother led that her demise and the way she was discarded shows something, a total disconnect from life and love. That's rooted, I think, in something else, that touch of reality, that dose of reality in her short life.

It was read into the record. By the way, Laurie Vallow's trial is actually going on right now as we're laying this down. It came out in testimony on the part of the forensic pathologist that he had had a chance to review Tali's medical records. And I was kind of surprised by this. She had lived a very short life, but in that time, she had been diagnosed with anxiety. She had gone through having ovarian cysts. And get this, she had actually suffered pancreatitis in that short life. Pancreatitis is a miserable condition, and ovarian cysts are certainly unpleasant as well,

and then you have this anxiety. You know what? 17 years old, why does she have anxiety? I'm a firm believer, you know, that many times illnesses manifest themselves as a result of stressors in your life and that sort of thing. And you take its measure by thinking that this person that she's attached to at the hip, her mother, has literally drugged this child through a keyhole her entire life through all these various relationships and situations that they've been in. You'll never convince me, you know, you're not going to have things manifest in your life physically. What is pancreatitis exactly, Joe? I have no idea.

Well, it's an inflammation of the pancreas, and it's deadly, actually. I mean, it is. It's super deadly. And many times it's associated with things like elevated cholesterol. Not that she was, but, you know, you'll have people that have problems with chronic alcoholism develop pancreatitis. There's any number of reasons why you can develop it, but it is an infection of the pancreas. Very painful. I mean, it comes along with horrible abdominal pain, high fever.

It can go systemic as it impacts the totality of your system, the way your pancreas functions. Remember, the pancreas controls insulin in your body. Just a horrible set of circumstances. And you couple that with everything that she was having to endure right before she was murdered. She's not yet 17, and she's dealing with the homicide of her stepfather at the hand of her uncle. And please add in there, Joe, that Tylee Ryan was at home and knew the truth of what had transpired. You mentioned stress and worry, and that can lead to some of these things that she was experiencing. Yeah. And here's another little nugget kind of picked up on friends of mine that are in the media that have been following kind of the family dynamic of this more so than I have. I try to

stick more with the forensics, even though in this case, it's really hard, as you can see, to kind of hide my feelings relative to it. But in this particular case, from what I'm hearing, she would not stand for some of the stuff that her mother would engage in. She would be combative with her. She would make comments to her. She was not just going to go along with the mom because mom said that this is what she could do. You know, she's not another man coming into her mother's life that her mother can manipulate with her beauty and sex appeal and whatever else that she's trying to sell to whomever is coming down the track.

Tylee has seen behind the curtain. You know what I'm saying? And you know what? She showed that to people that came into Lori's life. For instance, that Lori Vallow's best friend was Melanie Gibb. And Melanie Gibb, it was brought up in trial that Tylee Ryan didn's best friend was Melanie Gibb. And Melanie Gibb, it was brought up in trial that Tylee Ryan didn't particularly care for Melanie Gibb. So I think that while she has a mother that is dragging her, you mentioned dragging to a keyhole. I think that's a great,

that's a great identifier there, but that maybe Tylee didn't overreact with her mother, but it manifested itself in the way that Tylee looked at Lori's friends that were also part of this crazy world that Tylee wasn't buying into, which is why Tylee had to go. Tylee wasn't on board. They had made an assessment that she's one of these dark spirits, or however they were framing it, you know, as a justification for these things. But what we do know, this new space that her mother had chosen to occupy or was planning on occupying, this place that's out in this beautiful area of the country out there in eastern Idaho, it ended in sheer horror. And it actually wound up being Tylee's resting place after she was apparently murdered.

If you're spending time out in rural america if you're out on a farm don't know of any farm that doesn't have a place where you burn brush down here in south calder burn pile where you can take limbs and things that break off of trees and and whatnot and you can you save it up and kind of gather it and maybe you'll have a bonfire maybe you'll just stand out there and whatnot, and you save it up and kind of gather it, and maybe you'll have a bonfire, and maybe you'll just stand out there and burn it and make sure it doesn't spread, and then you walk away and everything is said and done. They had a place like this. There was this location that Chad Daybell had on the backside of his property adjacent to this big red building, which I've always suspected had something to do with the deaths of these children,

that was just out back of it where it looked more like a fire ring, actually. But it was also known as a location where Chad Daybell and his wife, Tammy, would bury pets. And as it turned out, this is where Tylee Ryan's body was found, Dave. And you mentioned that it was a burn pile. You know, a burn pile, you burn trash and rubbish. But also, in that same ring, as you mentioned, there were benches around there where that family, roasting marshmallows, having s'mores, and they chose that location, the pet cemetery location, to actually

dispose discard the body of tyler ryan i don't know how that impacted the investigation but i'm really curious joe when you start digging around something like this and you have what you know is the pet cemetery area and you have obviously fire what are you finding as an investigator as you start looking for remains? I'll throw a word out to you, stratification. I don't mean that in a sociological standpoint. I'm talking about from a geological standpoint. We have strata relative to the ground where you have various layers of earth.

And this would have been stratification in the sense of recent when i say recent i'm not talking about hundreds and thousands of years i'm talking about in the recent history where you do this layering if you will of things so for every bit of wood that you burned or other items that you're trying to dispose of by fire, it burns down and it settles, right? And then just imagine that progressively becomes more compressed over a period of times. You burn more items, you throw more stuff in, you're getting this strata of all of these elements that have been burned down and rendered down over the years. And where they found Tylee's remains, this earth would have been probably a bit

more loose, if you will. You know, it had been, the earth was probably turned more regularly. With JJ's remains, when they went out to that retention pond or dried up pond or whatever that area is, whatever they're calling it, where his remains were found. That earth had not been turned. Beautiful green grass all around except for that one area. But when you get to an area where you've got a lot of debris that's just been settling there for a while and you might add to it, the soil is going to look disrupted as well.

So when you show up as an investigator, you're going to have to take a long, hard look. And it might not just be your sight that you're relying on when you're looking around. It might be smell. It very well might be smell. Because you're sitting there and you're thinking, I'm smelling something that is obviously organic. It is decomposing. And you catch wind of it.

And the reason that you might catch wind of it, and this is absolutely horrible, but the forensic anthropologist in this case, her assessment of Tylee's remains, she said that there had been animal activity in her remains. So, she's referring to a small mammal she doesn't know what type of small mammal but you know you've got possums famously chad daybell had mentioned a large raccoon part of this alibi he had put forward when he was talking to his wife tammy raccoons will feast as well you have any number of rodents that will do this. If in fact, rodents or some small mammal hadn't made their way to all the remains of tiley, that means that they would have disrupted the soil. And when they disrupt the soil, they open it up. They're not going to go back and recover it. Okay. So if you get close enough, you begin to detect an odor. Okay. And

if you look very carefully, that's why it's always very important with a case like this to not just simply have a forensic anthropologist consult on a case where they're back at a laboratory. You physically need them out there. They're amazing people. I've got a couple of friends that are forensic anthropologists, and they are, I'm not going to say they're OCD by nature. They're the type of people that can look at ground, and they see things that I might just regard as a rock, and in a rock, they have the ability to read ground the way that nobody else can. And so if you physically have the forensic anthropologist out there, which they actually did, Dave, actually at the scene, they can take a look at a space of ground, even in a burn area, and they can see lines of demarcation that might indicate where

burial has taken place, kind of the margins or the borders, if you will, of where the soil has been disrupted, where they actually detect a pattern. And I've had this happen a couple of times over my career where I would be staring at something and I was staring at what I should stare at, but I don't recognize it. And then it takes the forensic anthropologist to say, okay, do you see this deviation right here? This delineates the borders. And you start to stare at it. And it's like, you remember those old 3D paintings that you would look at and they say you got to stare at it long enough? And it's kind of like that.

All of a sudden, you see the old woman. Yeah. The image just kind of pops for you all of a sudden. And it's revelatory at that moment. And once you identify it, the tough part really begins in because you have to begin to lay your grid out. And, of course, with Tylee, her body's not intact. So you've got deposition of human remains that are spread out over an area. I can't give you the exact dimensions, but I know that they're spread out. They were not recovered in one piece.

And if this helps at all, Dr. Warren, the forensic pathologist, actually made a statement. I'm kind of paraphrasing right now, but he did make this kind of offhanded remark in his testimony under direct when he was being asked about the receipt of Tylee's remains at the Ada County coroner's office. How do you receive remains? He said, well, normally I receive remains in a body bag. So how did you receive these? In multiple bags. Tally arrived at the coroner's office in Ada County, Idaho,

in pieces, not one intact body. It's a partnership when you work together in forensics. There's multiple practices that forensic pathologists can align themselves with in their forensic practice. First thing I think that probably comes to mind is traditionally like forensic pathologist and forensic odontologist or forensic dentist. Toxicology, certainly, you're always trying to decide what was going on with the chemistry of the body, what was going on inside. There's some peripheral people sometimes will consult a radiologist, certainly neurologist that will examine brains, but I don't know of any other marriage that exists in forensic practice that is so kind of conjoined as that between the forensic pathologist and the forensic anthropologist. They're kind of doing the same

thing, only the forensic anthropologist is really focused on human skeletal remains and what they can learn from the bone. Physicians can point you in the right direction with it, but these people, they spend years and years going through their doctoral programs out there to learn how to read bones and tell the story that's left behind, because sometimes that's all that remains. The autopsy for JJ took about four hours. The autopsy for Tylee Ryan took him about a week. The body was burned. Was there an odor that would be recognizable as that of a decomposed individual even after being in the elements buried in the dirt, burned. What kind of condition are we expecting out of this? Are you going to smell it when you start digging? Are you going to smell it when you're standing on top of the ground? In the state in which they have mentioned that Tylee's remains were in, probably once

you start, once you break the earth, I mean, really substantially break the earth, you know, a cadaver dog would hit immediately. But for kind of our spectrum, our olfactory spectrum as humans, it would take turning the earth to really smell it. The decomposition that you smell relative to a decaying remain has to do with soft tissue. Bones will have an odor to them, but it's not as profound as is associated with soft tissue. And Tylee, she still had, and this is horrible to say, but I'm going to get into body bags. We're going to talk about this, but she still had, her bowel was still present, her heart, though compromised and kind of shrunken, I think probably as related to heat,

was still there. Her lungs were still there. So, not everything had been eradicated. In total, the forensic anthropologist, Dr. Christensen, had stated that she had 100 bones that were found. And of course, human bodies got over 200. So, some had been rendered down or just impossible to recover. She had also mentioned that there was some type of animal that was out there and animals will take away bones as well. You begin to think about the bones of the fingers and toes and the feet and all those sorts of things. But they found a goodly portion of the remains that were left behind, but they had been burned. That makes this kind of a daunting challenge. The forensic anthropologists will do their assessment on the body,

but it's at the end of the day that the forensic pathologist is the one that actually signs a death certificate and lists what the cause and manner of death is. They classified Tylee's manner of death. Remember, we have five. We've talked about this before, but we have five, and they classified her manner of death as homicide. But the cause is very interesting. Her cause of death is nonspecific homicidal trauma. And you hear that many times when you have these kind of fragmented bodies like this. You know the cause of death was something that was at the hand of another, and that's what defines a homicide, death at the hand of another. That's what you're saying when you actually use that term. It's going to be violent, traumatic, but beyond that, they can't say. It's like saying gunshot wound or strangulation or bludgeoning or

stabbing or some kind of blunt force trauma. The forensic pathologist said he couldn't go any further than that. So, this becomes, at that point in time, in our world, in the medical legal world, that this becomes a kind of a circumstantial event, right? And you're assessing what you have remaining from the physical remains, and then you're coupling that with the circumstance in which the body is found. You've got a body that there has been great effort that has been put forth to render the body down by fire and then cover it to obscure it from view. So, that in and of itself gives us an indication that you've got something very nefarious at work here. And that's what the forensic pathologist had to work with. And that was their final ruling

but there was one part of this that that kind of stood out to me and that is got i identified heart both lungs one kidney you mentioned portions of bowel and liver but they found small fragments of brain matter i know obviously that they've got multiple bags. Her body didn't come in intact. But are we talking about the total destruction of a human being beyond it's enough that she's dead, but now we're smashing her head? Is that what had to happen for there to be brain matter? Hard to say. And let me tell you why.

You've got a real feel for this, Dave. When you have thermal injuries, okay, and thermal injuries can, it's not just an anti-mortem event. You can have thermal injuries to a body post-mortem. Many things happen dynamically. You can get heat-related fractures of the body, okay, of the bone itself. So, the bone will actually crack as a result of exposure to heat as it's beginning to break down. If you have the skull and they didn't have the intact skull, they talked about like the area around the supraorbital ridges, there's a few focal areas that remain. You have to wonder, did Tylee's skull fracture as a result of a heat fracture being

exposed to intense flame and then you've got brain matter that's leaching out or is this something that was maybe part of the causation of her death and you had brain matter that was extruding in some way at the time of death, and then they find it there. So, that, again, is one of these things that's very difficult to assess. And heat fractures, anything that occurs in death, those fractures are going to appear differently, particularly to the trained eye of a forensic anthropologist, you know, where you have some kind of antimortem event where you'll have associated hemorrhage surrounding

the points of fracture and all that stuff. You don't have a lot to go on here because a lot of the soft tissue has been rendered down. And that's one of the big things that we look to in forensic pathology is if we have soft tissue, that's going to give us an indication of things like bruises or contusions and scratches, marks, ligature marks, you know, even gunshot wounds. We've talked about a range of fire on the show before, you know, deposition of soot. Somebody's been cracked in the head with a hammer, perhaps.

You'll have markings on the outer soft tissue that give you an indication of laceration. And you don't have that to deal with. And it's very nonspecific. But my eye in this case is drawn to something that the forensic anthropologist mentioned on the stand. And that is that she, given her extensive training and background, she saw striking evidence found on the pelvis. She opined from the stand that what she saw was an attempt at dismemberment. And we had heard this. We had heard this before. But they were very nonspecific about this dismemberment, this whole issue with dismemberment. My thought was, where are they getting it from?

Did you see saw marks on the bone? That's not what she's seeing. According to Dr. Christensen, she had seen great external force that was exerted to the bones of the pelvis. It's very nonspecific, but it's, I hesitate to say crushing, but there's kind of these linear marks that gives you an idea of a downward strike of something. So, I mean, are we talking about an ax? Are we talking about a pickaxe, which I think has been mentioned before, in order to break the body apart, to try to render it down? Because you have to make a body manageable if you're going to try to render it down. And sometimes that just doesn't happen.

She did, the forensic anthropologist did mention that this is not typical of a traditional quote-unquote dismemberment where you would go to a joint perhaps and saw through a joint, break down the elements of the body. That's not what was happening. That's not what they were seeing. This is an odd place, Dave. It's very odd that you would have fractures in the pelvic region of Tylee's body that are associated with some kind of strike downward force that's occurring. It sounds almost half-hearted, just like the burning, because her body was not totally rendered down. You know, it takes 1800 degrees Fahrenheit in a

crematory of like constant fire. They're not doing that here. They're using wood, apparently, in order to fuel this. They did a very shoddy job because they left behind all of these remnants of bone and organs as well. They did not finish the job. It seems like it was something that was done quite hastily. In reality, I mean, could they determine that the markings that show they were trying to dismember occurred before or after fire? These are going to be postmortem injuries. And the direct quote from Dr. Christensen is that there were five areas of sharp force trauma to the left hip bone, and they were not the result of a disease process. You know, this is kind of speculative, but you're thinking about someone that's going to go to the trouble of conducting a dismemberment. You have to have the right tools for the job. And if you're talking about strikes with some kind of weapon that's being swung downward, that sounds like bad preparation. You're not thinking this process through. It's certainly not somebody that would have had experience with butchering, say, for instance, an animal like a deer.

You know what you need. You're going to have to have a hacksaw. You're going to have to have a sharp knife. All these things that come along with that kind of experience. You're using some type of item that's just a weapon or a tool of convenience. I'll be very interested to see what the trace evidence people have to say about this case. What did they find? All signs for me point to that red barn out there.

I've always thought that something had happened because if you're going to purpose yourself to dismember or render down human remains, You have to have a sequestered area to do that. You have to have a location where you can do this undercover, where nobody is going to take notice of it. You have to have a certain amount of privacy. This is not something that you're just going to do out in the open in your backyard. This is something where you're going to need cover for it. Tylee was 16 years years old two weeks away from her 17th birthday jj just a little fella seven years old and they went missing when we first started covering this case it was a missing child case there are two children missing and we don't

know where they are but her mom tylee's mome's mom, JJ's mom, is in Hawaii and has married some guy. So we were backpedaling, trying to put these pieces together. We already know that JJ and Tylee are both gone. They're both passed away, which is what we're going to actually talk about today. But the reality is it started as a missing persons case with some very religious adults involved. I've got a grandchild JJ's age. It has been very emotional to think of what happened to this boy and his older sister. And it was done at the hands of people who were supposed to love and care for them. I have so many questions, and I'm praying that you're going to be able to give us the answers that will at least help us understand the mechanics of what

took place. I've been scratching my head over it, David. Let me say this going into this conversation. I've been talking with some of my friends that are on the ground in the courtroom who are physically there in the news media. And to a person, they described the reaction of people in the courtroom and even members of the jury. There were people, they were so disgusted by what they saw that they turned away. There were people wiping tears away. They couldn't bear to look at it. As a matter of fact, the judge at one point in time had to step in and say, okay, that's going to be the limit of what we're going to be showing here because it was so horrible what they were bearing witness to.

And I always have to go back to what is expected of a jury member. Maybe one of the most honorable things you can do in this country. I know people grouse about it and complain that they got called away from work, but when you think about the privilege that it is to sit on a jury, and you're common everyday folk, people like me, Dave, I haven't seen everything, but I've seen a lot of stuff. It's tough, and a case like this is even tougher, but just all the more so for these jury members that are having to take all of this in and view it in balance and try to understand and try to take the measure of it. I mean, really, try to take the measure of it. You mentioned your grandbaby. I got grandbabies too.

You sit there and you think about it and you think, oh my God. We can try to understand precisely what happened in leading us along this journey. We had the benefit of having a man named Dr. Garth Warren, who is actually with the Ada County Coroner's Office over in Boise. And just so folks know, JJ and Tylee's remains were not examined in that location, that remote location over in eastern Idaho. They were transported to Ada County, to that coroner's facility there. Folks might not understand, but if you don't have a facility, particularly that is manned by a forensic pathologist, most of these little counties will contract with a bigger county that does. That's what happened here. So, their remains had to be transported literally all the way across

the state. It's a painstaking process. To back up a minute, I mentioned early on, this was at first a missing child case. Two children were missing. Their mom was not sharing information about their whereabouts. She was telling all kinds of different stories to people who knew her, that they were with a friend, they were with a relative. I'm keeping them safe. And what ended up happening through the investigation of law enforcement and the FBI, everybody being involved, that's how they were led to, on June 9th, 2020, finding two separate burial sites at Chad Daybell's house. So we actually started looking for JJ and Tylee in November of 2019 when their grandmother asked for a welfare check on JJ.

Hadn't talked to them in a couple of months, very concerned. And that's where this story began for many of us. So I said we were backing up right at the beginning. The bodies are recovered on June 9th of 2020. For you, Joseph Scott Morgan, what are some things you're thinking about? What do you need to find as a forensic person to determine how these people were killed and why are they where they are? It's not just what's beneath the surface, Dave. It's what the ground is going to tell you in that area, particularly when you have a clandestine grave. And that's what both of these cases would be considered. That's the way we term it, a clandestine grave. That means a location where remains have been purposely

buried in order to hide them. There are certain changes that you look for externally on the surface for turned soil, all those sorts of things that don't quite match up. And these are two distinct locations where these children were found. You know, when we think about Tylee, you know, a lot has been made of the fact that her remains were found immediately adjacent to what they refer to as a pet cemetery. Animals were buried there that were associated with this familial group, which we could go down that rabbit hole all day long when you begin to assess how the remains of your precious daughter are treated and that you discard them

amongst the carcasses of dead animals. And of course, there's a burn pit there too. And what was really striking to me when I first initially saw the aerial photography in this case is I could see before the ERT, the evidence response team from the FBI showed up, there was like a ring around this area where they, you know, you could tell that the family had at one point in time pulled up large wooden benches. They were like fell trees that were kind of sliced down. You could sit on them and they'd create a ring. Eventually, all those are moved, but you can see the initial image of this. And it conjured up, you know, sitting around a bonfire with your family, playing the guitar, singing, making schmores, and all of these sorts of things. You know, that kind of joyous environment.

And then you marry that up with this horrific finding when they began to try to discern where she was. And her grave was not that deep below the initial surface. As a matter of fact, we found out that there's been some animal activity around there. But just to kind of frame this, when you see her location, you know that it's adjacent to where things were burned, all right? Maybe bonfires, maybe just trash off of this farming area. You walk a distance over, there's what appears to be a dried pond. It's like a big defect in the ground. It almost looks like a crater, but it's real green. It was real green and lush, but there was

one area where soil had been turned and it's right on the edge. And that's where JJ's remains were found. So he's in a completely different area. It looks kind of very peaceful compared to where Tylee was, where there was a lot of traffic. There was no traffic in that area where JJ was found. Soil had not been turned around the surrounding area. You could tell there was not a lot of foot traffic except in that one location where he was deposited. And these two children were treated completely different, Dave. Completely different. And you're really learning a lot about how their bodies were handled. And I think going along with that, you begin to learn a lot about the people and when it comes down to jj valo his body was i don't know there's really no other term to use other than cocooned he was cocooned he was protected to a certain degree he's certainly

protected from the elements you You know, when you compare how his mortal remains were treated compared to his sister, you've got a big difference here, huge difference. For him, his body, his little body, his little broken body was able, I think, in this particular case, to begin to tell a tale because it was so very intact, Dave. When you get to the scene and police have done their investigation, they have gotten the search warrants and they've laid out how they came about to search this property. The police don't know the exact place. I mean, they have a really good idea. In this particular case, police were watching Chad Daybell. He was on the property. It was his property. And they were watching Chad as they began working in that backyard. And the detective noticed that Chad Daybell kept watching where they

were looking and kept following with his eyes, looking at the same spot. Like they haven't found him yet. They haven't found him yet. They noticed where he was looking and that sent the detectives on where we need to dig right here for JJ. They didn't know JJ versus Tylee at that point, but that's how they actually figured out where to start. What is the process that they go into? I can't imagine them pulling out big shovels and just digging in deep. No, no. First off, you have to document everything you can with photography and videography before you ever put what we call spade to dirt and turn any bit of soil whatsoever. And even before the tools come out, you're going

to do what's referred to as gridding off an area. And if you just imagine a grid coordinates only on a smaller scale, and you make each one of the little squares, maybe a foot by a foot, and you have several of these along the way, and you label these, you're going into a specific grid. And that way you can document everything that's contained within that grid, because you don't know what you're going to find. So as you take the soil out and place it into a bucket, which is where it would have gone and those buckets are labeled, they sift through everything until you get down to the body as it is. And in JJ's case, I'd mentioned the word cocooning, and he is wrapped.

He's wrapped in plastic bags. He's certainly got a white bag over his head. I can specifically imagine because I've been in circumstances like this. You look down and you begin to take the measure of what you have before you and you have a body, what appears to be a body that is covered in plastic. I've had them in shower curtains, tarps, visqueen, those sorts of things where bodies are wrapped up like that, and you don't know what is inside. And so it was at that moment when they got down to that point

where they had recovered all of the surrounding dirt, because you don't know what you're going to find in there. You have to save all this stuff and sift through it. The investigator then opened up the plastic bag, the outer black plastic bag that JJ was wrapped in total and determined that he did in fact have remains here. When they made that slit in the bag in the testimony, they described brown hair and a crowning.

I can't imagine the feeling that comes over you when you see hair, you know, this is who you've been looking for. What is that like? Does that not really impact these individuals for the rest of their life with that trauma? It doesn't right at the moment because you're, if you've got your clinical hat on, which you should to protect you while you're there, there's your clinical hat on which you should to protect you while you're there there's certain things you just can't escape but there's a bit of relief too in a case like this because you know that you've been looking for him and all those those sweet pictures that we see of jj all over the place you know his hair is like swept to one side i mean and it's like

parted on one side and kind of swept he's got long bangs and you can get an idea as to the color of his hair and they knew that this is they're getting into you know they're getting into the arena where they're going to begin to narrow down at least visual identification at this point in time it's one of the boxes that'll be ticked at that moment time but you listen there is a real temptation that comes upon you. You have to restrain yourself at a scene like this, Dave, because you want to just go in and just rip the bag open, right? And just dig in and see what's there. That's the worst thing you can do.

That is the absolutely worst thing that you can do because you're not in a controlled environment. First off, you've got a dozen hands around you. You've got everybody peeking over and wanting to see. And at just the baseline, you're going to destroy it for every cut that you make in that bag, every compromise of structural integrity of that bag. You begin to potentially ruin any evidence that's there because all this stuff is very fragile. Oh my God, it's so fragile. So, when you remove this body, you have to lift it up. And then what we generally do is take a clean white sheet. And that clean white sheet is placed into an open body bag. The sheet is then folded around the body, which in JJ's case is contained, is cocooned, like we mentioned.

And then you zip the bag up and then you seal it with a lock. That's where your chain of custody actually begins. Remember, the body is the biggest piece of evidence you have. So, there are these little red locks, and they actually talked about them in court, little red locks that you use that have numbers on them. And that thing is not broken until it gets to the morgue. And the forensic pathologist will look at it and they'll annotate it in their notes. They say, I observed a red body bag lock with a number. And then they take a pair of scissors and they say, and they'll include in their report, I cut this away myself. So, they confirm this chain of custody all along the way. You have to, because you've got a body,

Dave, that's traveling over 100 miles. It's going to be in a vehicle traveling down. And people don't think about the logistics of this. Does the driver stop along the way? Is the driver with the body the entire time? Did they stop off and get something to eat? Did they stop off at a gas station? People think, oh, my God, they wouldn't do that. Yes, they do. I've actually known people that have gone through drive-thru restaurants with bodies and cars. And because of that, we've taken steps to document the time that they leave, the mileage that's on the odometer, what time did you arrive at the final destination, what was

your mileage there, because everything has to be accounted for. And you want that. And it's a daunting task just to remove the body from the scene and get it downrange to where it has to be deposited, which is going to be Ada County, Idaho. We all have heard the stories of the odor. These bodies have been in the ground for a considerable amount of time. Is there still, after all these months, is there still an odor? Is it something that you can smell once you start uncovering? Yes and yes.

The deeper you dig down, the more profound the odor is. So in JJ's case, what I'm understanding from testimony and from my colleagues that have seen the images, he was actually appreciable. His face was appreciable. You could look at that image that they showed on the screen and you could say, that's JJ. He was intact. Now, the color changes that come along with decomposition had been occurring. In death, our bodies go from kind of a mottled color to kind of a red, then kind of a greenish color, then to black. And you could still appreciate his features. His body was intact to the point where you could look at his body and at least visually

get a general confirmation of identification. That's not valid in my world. I like to have scientific confirmation. And I just like to eyeball the body and say, that is, in fact, this person. I don't even like families to do that because you never know what's going to happen. There's always something along the way. So, I like to get scientific confirmation of fingerprints or dental or certainly DNA. The process is just beginning now. What happened, you know, when you got the remains to the morgue? Well, one of the things that was so glaring, you know, those pajamas that JJ was last seen in as he's being born by Alex Cox on his shoulder. He's wearing those pajamas, Dave.

He's wearing those pajamas. That was part of the testimony that came up with David Warwick, the boyfriend at the time of Lori Vallow's best friend, Melanie Gibb. He was there that weekend of September 22nd, 23rd, and he gave a description of Alex Cox carrying J.J. into the Valo apartment. And it was a very beautiful thing that he described J.J. with his head resting on Alex's shoulder and Alex taking his nephew upstairs to the bedroom. He described the clothes, even though he said, I don't know exactly. I can't remember 100 percent, but I think he by saying, I think he was wearing, you know, and he described the clothing that JJ was found in. And that, if you were watching the trial, you're listening to it, you're wondering, why is he saying this?

Well, that's why. They knew the answer. Yeah. They knew the answer. And I think that many people had, and there have been people that have suspected that JJ may have been deceased when Alex was carrying him along that night. I don't believe that was the case. I'll go ahead and reveal this right now because one of the things that came up in testimony was that when they were able to do toxicology, and remember, they didn't really have blood or urine to do talks with JJ. So, that means that you, at autopsy, what you have to do is you have to take organ samples. These are going to be pre-fixed organ samples. So, you can't like expose them to formalin, which is a type of formaldehyde. You have to get them in the current state in which you find them. And we've talked

about this before, but they're spun down at that moment in time to liquefy them. Liver in particular, because liver is, it's like a gigantic filter in our body and it holds on to a lot of the toxins and whatnot. But what they did find in JJ's system was actually gamma hydroxybutyrate, which GHB, which is a rape drug. Now, people will say, ah, that's like an aha moment. You know, light bulb goes off and people thought that maybe he had been poisoned. That's probably not the case because let me kind of throw this out to you, Dave. In decomposition,

GHB is actually produced and it's very in the process of decomposition, just like people don a quantified amount of something. You can qualify it. You know, the machinery will tell you that, yeah, this is present. But to what degree is it present? It's not really measurable because one of the things, any drug you can think of, cocaine, for instance, cocaine, actually, if you look at it for folks that are not familiar with lab results, as you know, that cocaine actually has a therapeutic level because cocaine has been used for medical purposes. So, it has a therapeutic range. So, everything, all these numbers are variable. You can't put that kind of fine point on a body that's decomposing. So, I think that it's significant that GHB was in his system to a certain degree,

but based on the fact that there was so much decomposition or that he was downrange that far, you just can't quantify it. And so, I think some folks are probably, they were hoping that you would have that definitively there as a cause of death for him. There have been many times in my career where I was assisting with an autopsy. And I would look down at the remains that we were examining. And you have kind of this moment where you begin to understand what you're in the middle of. You have this appreciation for how fragile this person's remains are that are before you and all of the evidence contained within and without. I've hesitated before. I actually had a forensic pathologist look at me one time. We were doing an autopsy on a lady that had been bound and gagged.

And I kind of froze for a moment. And he looked at me and said, what are you waiting for? Let's get on with this. I was trying to understand or process in my mind what I needed to do to remove these bindings from this lady's hand. She had been tied with rope because I didn't want to screw anything up. I can imagine there's a hesitancy on the part of the pro sector, the pathologist that's there and his assistants, his team. They want to make sure that they have everything done and documented, x-rays, photography, measurements, all of that stuff has to be done before they go in and begin to remove

all these layers that JJ's packaged in. When it comes right down to it, you have taken care of all of the business necessary to get JJ's remains up out of the ground. He has been transported. It's been documented. And now he's on the table. And so far, they cut a small slit and that's it, right? He's then put in the body bag with the white sheet he's now on the table in a clinical setting and what happens now and what can you

expect to find i can tell you what they've done they've done full body x-rays on them because they don't know what they're going to find when they open that bag you don't know what a cause of death is at this point remember you you, I was talking about toxicology and whatnot. That's weeks away at this point. You have no idea what you're looking at here. And so they'll do head-to-toe x-rays before they do that. They'll turn that around really quickly. They'll develop them and throw them up on the light board.

And they'll look for any kind of what we refer to as radio-opaque items that are in there, like broken knife blades or certainly projectiles from a firearm. You want to avoid, as you're removing this tape, you don't want to go ripping and roaring. Here's a couple of reasons why. First off, with the tape, if you begin to kind of cut it, then you're compromising the integrity of that tape to dislodge it, okay, just to facilitate opening the bag. So, you don't know what's going to be contained on either aspect of that tape, like on the smooth surface that's on the backside, the non-tacky surface, and then on the underside, which I can get into that, certainly.

But then you think about the bag itself. Well, these bags are non to a certain degree they're a non-porous surface they're not exactly like glass but it's you're not dealing with wood like rough wood either there are any number of times when you can actually get fingerprints off of bags certainly the, heat and humidity play a role in this, but you have to work from the perspective that anything that is on the surface of that bag has the potential of leaving something behind. And that could be a latent print that's left behind in oil. Or here's something, Dave, that not many people have heard of before. We have something we refer to as plastic prints.

And a plastic print is, all of our listeners, just imagine, and this is something I do with my granddaughter. She loves Play-Doh. She loves Play-Doh, man. Hadn't got the silly putty yet, but she loves Play-Doh. Harper and I will be playing with Play-Doh. If you press your finger into the Play-Doh and remove it, you can actually appreciate your fingerprint. It's the same principle with duct tape.

With that tacky, the glue, the adhesive that's on there, did you know that you can actually press your finger? And I urge anybody, look, if you've ever wrapped Christmas presents and you're in a frenzy on Christmas Eve, you know how kind of wadded the tape gets and it'll get stuck to your hand, you're trying to get it off. Well, you're leaving a plastic print. It's not oil dependent, okay? Because that's on smooth surfaces, you leave a print behind because, and it transfers from these fatty lipids that are on the surface of your fingers, okay? It's easily compromised. But when you talk about leaving it behind in this adhesive, that's resilient, dude.

It really is. And so you can actually image that. There's any number of sprays that you can apply to this that'll kind of capture it. And you can get beautiful photographs of this stuff. And they can be matched up with people. So it's akin to almost like walking through a minefield because you can't see anything when you're doing it. So you have to assume that every place you put your hand in order to remove tape or whatever the case might be, that could lead to a compromise. Joe, let me ask you, you're observing the body or you're observing the bag, okay? And you see tape, you see bags, you see all of this overall, and you're making not just

mental notes, but physical notes. As you begin to unravel this, whether it's duct tape or bags, what is that process for documenting and how do you get to, because your goal here is to find out how this person died, correct? In the case of JJ Vallow, if they've already done x-rays and they don't see any obvious signs of bullets or knife blades that are broken off or fractures that might result from blunt force trauma, like he had his skull crushed, as horrible as that is, then you begin to think, well, is this drug-related or is this something else? And you begin to exclude things.

And, you know, Dr. Warren's conclusion relative to JJ was that his remains demonstrated to them based upon how that white bag, remember I mentioned the white bag earlier in this episode, was wrapped around his head with multiple links of this tape that his death resulted from suffocation. That's a diagnosis of exclusion is what that means, is that you have gotten to this point, you don't have any other answers to what may have brought about his death. Are you suggesting that he was alive when they put the bag on his head? Yes. Yeah, I am. And you know how I know that, Dave? I'll tell you how I know it. He actually had marks on his little fingers that

would be consistent with a struggle. These are anti-mortem, which means, of course, all my listeners know this, prior to death, that's where these insults came from. He's got these marks that are on his wrist. His hands were actually bound with duct tape. They were overlapped on top of one another. And multiple twists of this tape were facilitated like that. So imagine if you want to get a sense of how horrific this is. If you have ever been in a position where you've had to struggle to breathe, that's what this child's faced with. His brain is screaming, I need oxygen. And it's at that point in time.

Let me paint this picture for you a little bit more in depth. This is a child that had to wear a diaper at his age. This child was totally dependent upon the adults in his life to take care of it. He had physical issues. He had physical issues. He had developmental issues. And whoever did this put a plastic bag over this baby's head and turned that tape over and over and over again and blocked his airway. He could not uptake oxygen at all. And he's struggling. That primal brain is kicking in and he's fighting. He's

fighting however he could in order to try to break the surface of the proverbial water just to get a breath. He couldn't. It wasn't there any longer. The one thing that a lot of us can hold on to when we cover these stories is that the victim didn't suffer. But now you're telling me the exact opposite, and you are able to determine this by the way his body was found in the ground, that not only was he murdered by probably a loved one, but that he suffered and knew who did it and what they were doing when it was happening. I'm saying that plainly. Yeah.

He had an awareness. And yes, he did suffer. That conclusion is being drawn by what Dr. Warren had stated. There was evidence there that he had struggled. He had fought for his life. People use that term, they throw it around. To what degree do you have the ability to fight for your life if you're a small child and you've got the hands of an adult or adults on you facilitating your death. In order to honor both Tylee and JJ, we're going to have two separate episodes detailing the information that we have surrounding their deaths and the findings of the forensic pathologist and the forensic anthropologist.

Tune in Thursday for our follow-up episode where we will be discussing the death of Tylee Ryan. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.