Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: A Pink Hammer's Dark Secrets -The Mysterious Death of Leon Hignite

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

In this episode of the Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack delve into the chilling case of 76-year-old Leon Hignite, who is found abandoned in his home with gruesome injuries. They explore the forensic details of blood spatter patterns, analyze the severity of Leon's injuries, the challenges faced by the medical team, and the disturbing circumstances surrounding the incident.  Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Time Codes:   0:00 - Introduction 01:17 - Overview and background 04:28 - Dave questions how the blood on the ceiling and wall could have resulted from Leon's supposed fall in the bathroom. 05:07 - Leon's limited ability to communicate due to his blindness and hearing impairment. 06:17 - The autopsy reveals that Leon sustained at least 30 blunt force impacts to his head. 07:42 - Paramedics find Leon in a deplorable state on the bedroom floor, surrounded by blood and waste. 09:46 - Leon’s feelings of helplessness and hopelessness. 10:10 - Leon is found after three days. 10:41 - Leon's medical condition, age, blindness, and other health issues. 11:04 - The police arrive to serve a search warrant and discover the house set on fire. 11:56 - Medical intervention needed for Leon's head trauma.  13:14 - Carol Hignite's claims she gave Leon ice chips to hydrate him. 14:39 - Were the injuries Leon sustained typical of a fall?  16:10 - The forensic implications of overlapping contusions and fractured areas. 18:05 - The pink hammer.  20:47 - The forensic challenges of blood being found on the hammer. 22:14 - The differences between blood spatter from impact vs. cast-off. 24:01 - Blood velocities and their relation to various weapons. 25:30 - What happened those 3 days before 911 was called? 27:40 - OutroSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Down here in the South, we have some interesting names that we call our grandparents. Maybe that's the case all over the country, but for me, spending my entire life down here, that's kind of the norm. I call my grandfather Papaw. I love that man more than anything. I had two Papaws. But the one I'm thinking about right now was what's referred to as a finishing contractor

or finishing carpenter. And he ran a crew of guys that would actually frame houses. He was not a big man, but he had gigantic hands and he had forearms that I remember as a small child that looked like Popeye. And the reason I bring this up is that he always carried a hammer and he had a wide variety of hammers. I think probably the one that everybody knows about is a claw hammer. That means that you've got the blunted side where you're driving nails and you got the other side that's pulling them out. Today we're going to talk about a case that involves a hammer and it's a hammer that my grandfather probably never would have been seen with. It's actually a pink claw hammer. But we're going to talk about its involvement in the alleged homicide of an elderly man of 76 years of age.

His name was Leon Dwayne Hignight. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Packs. My buddy, Dave Mack, he's a reporter for Crime Online. He's joining me today to help me make sense out of this case and break down the forensics. Dave, there are just certain cases out there that you think when you've heard the worst that humanity has to offer. You come across a case like this and you think, wow, can it go any deeper and any darker? And I think this is pretty dark. This is one of those situations where you've got an elderly couple, Carol Hignight,

69 at the time that this took place. Husband, Leon, is 76 at the time. You know when you see an old couple out and about and you just think how sweet it is to have a partnership like that that lasts a long time. You don't think about what could possibly be going on in the relationship beyond what you see. Just a nice old couple together. They're sunset years. But the sunset years for Carol and Leon, Leon in particular, were not what you and I would wish on anybody. Listen, when I see an older couple together, I'm a romantic at heart. I have hope for love. In this case, it's actually chilling to the bone. Now, when I'm

thinking about that elderly couple and I'm wondering if that's what people think of my wife and I or you and your wife, you know, when we're out, are we that elderly couple now? Oh my goodness. But I think we are because I think somebody actually referred to my wife and we were at Dollar General and I think I heard somebody say, isn't that a cute old couple? And I thought, hey. Yeah, it does. It's a dose of reality. But hey, we've made it to this point. So I'm thankful for that. I wonder if Leon felt that way. I've made it to this point. I'm good.

Well, here's what actually happened. 911 was called on September 25th, and they were called because there was a senior citizen suffering distress. He was not in good health, and the wife called saying, I need help. She indicated that he had gone to the bathroom and had fallen, couldn't get up. She checked on him, and the door was locked, so she couldn't get in to help him. Leon, after about 15 minutes, was able to get out of the bathroom and get out enough to crawl towards the bedroom. This is where his loving wife helped him to the bedroom. Now, she noticed that there was a lot of blood on the floor of the bathroom, Joe, because he had hit his head. And apparently, more than once in trying to get up, maybe slipping in the blood and was having trouble. So Carol helps him to the bedroom where he says, I have a bad back.

Let me lay on the floor. And so he does. That's on the 25th of September. He laid there for a couple of days. Carol says she thought he was going to get better because he had fallen before and got up. It just took him a little time to recover. But she called their family doctor and he says, well, no, you need to call 911. He needs help. He's been on the ground too long. And that's when paramedics showed up, and they took one look around the place, and they said,

hey, Joe, this is not a loving elderly couple where the man has fallen and can't get up. There's more to this than meets the eye. As a matter of fact, one of the paramedics noticed blood on the ceiling and the wall. Is there a way you could hit your head on the sink in the bathroom and get blood on the ceiling and the wall, Joe, that you can think of? You'll encounter a circumstance where people say, and it generally happens in cases particularly involving small children where there's ongoing child abuse. This is clearly to me a case of what could be defined as elder abuse. Remember, Leon, not only did he not get around well, he was blind and he couldn't hear real well.

So, you don't know what his level of ability to communicate was. Can you imagine that you've suffered these injuries and then it's almost like you're locked inside your head and the people or person that you're totally dependent upon as your caregiver is not paying attention to you. They're not rendering aid. You know that you're in a desperate circumstance, but there's darkness, there's an absence of sound, perhaps the floor is cold. And you know nothing is changing. You don't know if anything will change until the end eventually comes. But when we think about head injuries in particular, for every point of contact relative to a head injury, there will be a singular point of impact. That's important to remember in this case, because as a result of a

later examination that's done of Leon, it was determined that this man had sustained at least 30, count them, 30 blunt force impacts all about his head over and over and over again. And the fact that that had occurred and you have that much head trauma, it's hard to take the measure of what's going on internally with his brain. But I can tell you this, the brain probably at the initial onset was beginning to swell. And if there's nowhere for that brain to receive any kind of relief. It becomes more and more progressively congested. You enter into an altered mental state. This is not even counting the pain that would have been involved as you linger there and

probably eventually going into a coma. We have brought this about with this case with Carol and Leon Hignight and have brought it to the situation where Leon is on the floor and paramedics have been called. Basically, I was giving you the story from Carol Hignight, what she told their primary care physician and later what she told paramedics. The actual truth of the matter was somewhat different because as you mentioned, there's not a case where a person could end up with over 30 lacerations about their head by falling in the bathroom and hitting a sink. For three days, Leon Hignight laid on the bedroom floor. When 911 was called and paramedics arrived,

they find Leon Hignight unresponsive, dehydrated, lacerations to his head, and lying in his own filth and waste excrement. They saw blood on the walls and ceiling as well as on the bedroom floor around his head. And when you actually see some of the photos, Joe, you can see that Leon Hignight actually wedged himself underneath a bed frame in the bedroom. And I am only going to assume that he did that to try to protect himself, that he's doing anything he can to try to find some type of comfort because this did not happen on accident. It couldn't have, right? abuse. Many people that are charged in cases of elder abuse and certainly child abuse will say, well, my child fell down the staircase and this is how they wound up with these injuries. You're looking at them, the logical part of your brain wants to scream out, well, how many times did

they fall down the staircase? Because now you've got bruises all over the body. There's specific pattern injuries that come along with this. You had mentioned the idea of lacerations, and there are patterns that you can tie back to this. And the fact that he had gone in, I think, probably in those early moments into a posture of protection. I use this term a lot. Maybe I overuse it, but it's almost a primal thing.

You're trying to survive. And even as you're compromised from a sensory standpoint, you can make it from the bathroom to the bedroom. You would imagine that that would be a normal course. In my estimation, given how extensive these injuries were on his head, I would imagine that there was probably a blood trail. And the dynamics of the blood that you would see in the bathroom would certainly be different than those areas of blood that are essentially pooled. Because that's going to tell the tale in the case of Leon. If you're looking for more true crime, check out the Pikedon Massacre.

New details into what was uncovered at the gruesome crime scenes in Pike County. Accused murderer George Wagner faces a judge and jury. No Wagner family DNA was found at a crime scene. Will he face the death penalty or will he walk free? Mark my words. This case is about to blow wide open. Been to the entire season of the Pikedon Massacre, season four, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Two words come to mind, helpless and hopeless. I can't even begin to fathom what it would be like to be abandoned in the place that you would consider, hopefully, your safe harbor, your haven,

that home that you've lived in perhaps for years. There's no point of retreat. There's no place that you can go to where you're going to feel comfort that you're going to get better. And I think that that's probably the position that Leon Hignight found himself in. I've never been to a scene like this. I've been to a number of scenes where extreme things have happened to people, but I've never been to one like this, where authorities are called after the man has been laying for three days. The 911 people walk in and they see what's going on. They recognize it is so bad that they begin taking action, they being authorities, begin taking action immediately. They get Leon out of the situation,

get him to the hospital, and they start doing what they can to help him. He is 76 years old. He's blind. He's got some hearing issues. He already has a number of health issues. When all of this is looked at by a third party, they go, this is not the way she's claiming. This man did not slip and fall in the bathroom on accident. He's not been laying there for three days while she waits to help him. Police get involved. They get a search warrant to come and look at the house police arrive to serve the search warrant and as they go in they smell smoke and find that the house has been set on fire in the basement so already we have carol hignight the wife she's been charged now with assault

she's been charged with elder abuse now arson yeah and he's just hanging on by a thread and this is roughly three days post accident quoteident, quote-unquote, I'm using air quotes here, where this head strike has taken place. When the doctors begin to assess, they've got him, I'm sure, on neuro-ICU, which means that they're going to have to do the calculus here to try to determine what they're going to do to save him. Because all the while, I'd mentioned just a moment ago how when you sustain this kind of trauma to your head, your brain does, in fact, begin to swell. You don't know if there's perhaps underlying fractures, but one of the things they have to do is to relieve that pressure. And it's a surgical intervention most of the time where they'll go in and they will drill what's referred to as a burr hole in the

skull itself to relieve this pressure. They'll also insert a pressure monitor into the skull that keeps track of the indwelling pressure. There's a range of pressure that is acceptable in the human brain where if you begin to get up past that normal level, it's curtains for you. So, they're trying to assess all of this. They being the team at the hospital, they're already three days behind the curve. I'm not saying it would have been a survivable event if they'd gotten to him immediately, but I can tell you his chances may have been a little bit better. He's there on the floor for three days and he is dehydrated. He's emaciated. He's had no food or water. How long can anybody, much less a 76-year-old man with

underlying medical issues, lay on the floor without dying? No food, no water, and he's bleeding. This is not something that you're going to recover from just by resting on this hard surface floor. This is something that requires medical intervention, probably surgical intervention, in order to correct this issue, just to give him immediate relief. So, you couple that with this idea of dehydration. There's one element to this case that's kind of fascinating. Carol had claimed that while she had chosen to let him rest on the floor, that she had made efforts in order to hydrate him. As a matter of fact, she stated that she had gotten a cup and was giving him ice chips. If you've ever been in the hospital, they might not let you drink water, but they will

give you ice chips in order to kind of hydrate your mouth, stem the dry mouth that you get while you're in there. And that this was her effort, apparently, at hydration. Dehydration is absolutely lethal. Probably goes without saying. We can't go very long without taking water on in our body because all of our cells are depended upon it. And so, it's not just that he struck his head, Dave.

It's not just that he was allowed to lay on the floor. It's the idea of deprivation of basic needs. You see what I'm saying? You're depriving this individual that is literally at your mercy. Carol Hignight claimed that she checked on her husband periodically, but didn't think his injuries were severe enough to call an ambulance. So, Joe, let me ask you, according to healthcare providers who took care of Leon Hignight when he arrived at the hospital, he sustained an extensive brain injury, a collapsed lung, broken ribs, a broken leg, a fractured orbital socket,

and bed sores. Are these injuries typical of a fall? No, they're not. Let's just go to the fractures that you're referring to. When you see someone with fractured ribs and they're in a diminished position like this, now you can have fractured ribs as a result of a fall, and the elderly do sustain those. How many times does anybody in the audience reflect back and think, well, I had my aunt or my grandmother that broke their hip. That does happen. Sometimes it'll happen spontaneously, but many times if the elderly are compromised physically, they will fall and strike that area and it will fracture. The bones become brittle as we get older. But how many fractures were there? And also, how recent are the fractures?

How recent are the broken bones? And from a forensic standpoint, if you're trying to establish a timeline, one of the things that you look for, particularly when it comes to bony fractures, is has the healing process begun at this point in time? Is there any indication that the bones have begun to kind of naturally mend on themselves? And you'll get these odd appearing fracture lines where you'll see the bone is communicating where it's beginning to mend itself. And these stand out. You can't miss it when you're doing an internal examination. It would also be evident certainly in x-rays as well. So, absent that, from a forensic standpoint, you have to take what you're being told by the investigators and try to marry up these injuries and try to appreciate to what extent these things have healed. Are they in the distant past? Are they

all recent? And also, you think about, well, do any of them communicate with one another? And what I mean by that, do you have overlapping contusions, certainly fractured areas where you might have a bone that's not just fractured once, but maybe twice. Two things that stand out that you had mentioned, how do you get a leg fracture? Because that requires a tremendous amount of pressure in order to generate that. Sometimes you can see leg fractures with individuals that will be stomped on, perhaps. If you have a leg fracture, that means that there ought to be some kind of related contusion overlying the area of fracture. For anybody that's ever fractured a bone in their body, you can actually see that kind of focal strike there.

But this other thing that you mentioned, Dave, this orbital fracture that he sustained, does anyone actually realize how rare these are? We're talking about an eye socket that's fractured. That requires a direct strike. Generally, you see orbital fractures many times in fatal car accidents. That's how rare these kinds of things are. Maybe someone that takes a line drive baseball to the face, that's how much force is required. In this case, I think that there's far too much to just ignore. In total, when you begin to think about Leon and the trauma that he sustained, I'm reflecting back on my career.

I've worked plane crashes where victims have had fewer injuries than this. Fatal injuries they had, but fewer injuries than this. I would associate this with maybe a car accident as well. Any kind of motor vehicle accident where you have extreme force and trauma that's applied to an individual. I'm amazed that this man survived at all. You mentioned at the very beginning the pink hammer, and I'm looking at these, in particular, the fractured orbital socket, as you mentioned, a very difficult thing. But looking at the injuries, we know we have the pink hammer, and we know that there was blood on

the hammer. We know there's blood on the ceiling and on the walls. We've got blunt force trauma to the head, over 30 lacerations, just dealing with the head. Does it sound like rather than using the hammer to crush up blocks of ice to lovingly feed her husband while he lay there in his own excrement and blood and feeding him ice chips, or was that hammer used for something else? Just about out of every instrument that we examine at the morgue relative to blunt force trauma, I think probably hammer stands out the most based upon the unique mark that it leaves on the body. If everybody at home right now that's listening to me or in your car, think about what

a quarter looks like. And you're looking down on the quarter. The dimensions of a quarter very closely resemble what the striking surface of a hammer would look like. And remember the head, the skull, many people don't think about their head or their skull many times, but you have uneven surfaces. It's a flat bone, but it's curved. When a hammer comes down and it strikes the scalp initially, because that's where it's going to first make contact, there's this friction event that occurs. And you'll get an overlying braided area many times. And also, if the surface of that contact, the impact point of the hammer, some of them will be dimpled. You'll see that transferred onto there. But that force is transferring into that area and it leads to tearing.

Remember, they're calling these lacerations. And lacerations are not associated with sharp force injuries. Contrary to what people say, lacerations are associated with blunt force trauma. So, you've got tearing of the skin, but yet it will leave a very specific mark that's going to look a lot like a quarter. Also, you get this kind of what I refer to as a beaver teeth mark, which if someone spins the hammer around where you're attacking with a claw, you'll get this penetrating event where you have, it looks like two large beaver teeth had gone into the tissue side by side, and that's the claw.

You don't know if that's been flipped around because lots of times the hammer itself the handle will get just saturated with blood blood's very slick if you're holding it as you're striking over and we know that there were multiple strikes because investigators at the scene talked about how there appears to be cast off a copious amount of cast off in this bathroom on the walls and the ceilings and that blood actually matched leon the one problem here with this case though forensically is that they only found blood on the underside of the head of the hammer and also onto the leading edge of the handle and that blood could not be specifically tied back to Leon, nor could it be

tied back to his wife, Carol. That might be an indication that at some point in time, that weapon went through some kind of cleansing, perhaps, because you can imagine the thing would have been super saturated. We're talking about at least 30 strikes to the head, not to mention these other areas of the body. So, that's kind of telltale here. And one of the things that's particularly telling when you take back the scalp at autopsy and you begin to take a look at the external table of the skull, remember those quarter-shaped injuries that I talked about on the skin? Boy, are they appreciated on the surface of the skull. They look like plugs, essentially, where that hammer strike has taken place, that energy transfer down onto that bone, and the bone becomes detached,

and suddenly portions of it might fragment and go into the brain, or the plug itself is pressuring the brain as well. So, he's got all of this to contend with physiologically. I stand by my statement, the fact that he survived as long as he did is absolutely a miracle. Talking about the hammer and the lack of blood from Leon, the victim here. Would you not have two different types if the hammer is the weapon that causes the head trauma? Would there not be blood spatter from impact that would be at head level, as well as cast off from raising the hammer back and blood coming off the hammer onto the ceiling or the wall? That's a good point.

One of the things that happens, we teach our students at Jacksville State this as well. When you're thinking about cast off, it's almost like if you took a bucket of red paint and dipped a paintbrush in it, withdrew it. And initially when you withdraw it, what's going to happen? Well, that paint is going to drip down kind of passively off of it. But as you draw it up over your shoulder, if you're trying to imitate this idea of casting off, depending upon the force that you're using in drawing it back, you can cast blood forward and then kind of arcing. And then as you're coming down, you're going to generate

more force. And it happens many times where these patterns of cast-off overlap one another. Just imagine in your mind that you've got this big X that's happening, going up with the upward stroke and then down with a down stroke. And you'll get these kind of communicating events. The fact that he was struck this many times allegedly with this hammer that they've talked about would give us an indication because they've made no bones about it here, Dave. They talk about the volume or the amount of blood cast off that they're seeing at the scene, so you can get an idea that this would have been a rather dynamic event. Now, to your other point, when you are striking down, if you take a hammer and you were to drive it into something like a tomato, for instance, well, when at that point

of impact, what's going to happen with all of the fluid that's contained in that tomato? Well, it's going to kind of blast out, isn't it? Now, it's not going to be high velocity, but it will at least be medium velocity. We talk about velocities of blood. We talk about low, medium, and high. High is generally generated from a firearm. But when you have medium velocity, that's easily associated with things like hammers, baseball bats, crowbars, motor vehicle accidents. You're thinking about a firearm. You're thinking about maybe a subsonic or supersonic round that's passing through a body that generates that kind of blast effect. It's not quite to that level. And the blood droplets themselves, the deposition of blood,

will be larger. They'll be easier to appreciate. Whereas if you have high velocity, it'll be almost histamine-like. It'll be very fine spray that you'll see with that. They would have been able to appreciate that, and he could have been in multiple positions, because if you're talking about this number of strikes and impacts, he's not going to just simply sit there statically, at least in the beginning. He's going to try to fend this off. So, you might have these impact patterns that are all over the place, and they're going to settle in various locations, maybe underneath the sink, maybe on the side of the toilet, on the wall under the sink. You just never know because this is such a dynamic event. One other thing I wanted to get clarity on is that you talked about the hammer not having blood wound would expect.

But obviously, between the time of the incident on the 25th and the time that Carol Hignight called 911 was three days. That's not in debate. During that three-day period of time, one could clean up a lot of things. Now, those of us who are crime watchers, watching crime stories and things like that, we hear of luminol, that it doesn't matter how much you clean up, that luminol can be sprayed and it just shows up where the blood was. Is that true or is that TV stuff, Joe? It's accurate.

It truly is. I know of cases that have been 10, 12, even 15 years downrange from the actual event and they were able to go back. One case in particular in the early days of use of luminol comes to mind. A friend of mine worked where a fellow had killed his wife in a basement and redone the basement and even carpeted the floor and the cops have been watching the house for some time they were aware that she was missing a young couple bought the house and they found luminol under the carpeted surface after all those years and as it

turns out the wife was actually buried out in the rose garden in the back of the house. So yeah, it's quite possible to go back over a period of time. And certainly in this case, it's such a short period of time, you're not going to have too much degrading of that sample anyway. So yeah, you'd be able to pick up on it. So Carol Hignight was initially charged with assault. She was charged with abuse of the elderly and arson. And then it was upgraded because Leon did die. Nine days after the initial attack, the date was October the 4th, he passed away. And that's when the charges against Carol were upgraded to murder. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And she went to trial on this.

They brought in forensic experts. They had all of the witnesses. And back to the fire, they had a retired fire investigator that worked for the county there. He testified that the fire that was set was set by an individual with a handheld torch, perhaps, or fire source like a lighter, that it wasn't as a result of maybe faulty electrical box or something like this, which the defense experts said that you couldn't rule that out. Remember, they said you can't rule it out.

But at the end, her trial ended in a hung jury. But the DA has stated that they're going to try her again. So more to come on this case. We'll see what happens. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. You're listening to an iHeart podcast