Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: A Tooth Tells the Story - The Disappearance of Crystal Rasch

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

Crystal Rasch is missing and her husband is using her bank card to purchase cleaning supplies. He also fails to report his estranged wife missing. Joseph Scott Morgan  explains the cleaning materials used as well as the type of experts that have to be brought in when investigators suspect a victim has been cremated in a backyard burn pile. Dave Mack will help uncover the relationship that left Crystal Rasch identified by a single tooth and her husband in jail. The trial has yet to happen but this is the first part of the story of Crystal and Zachariah Rasch.    Transcribe Highlights00:13.30 Introduction - back from London 01:00.71 Strangers in London tell Joe to watch for "pickpockets" 05:03.49 The married couple had separate bank accounts 09:55.96 Working a case from back to front 15:08.97 CCTV Records coupled with receipts from purchases 20:29.75 Wife missing, husband admits spending her money with her card 25:57.18 List of searches done on phone, gunshot wound to head vs chest 29:51.13 Search warrant explanation 35:07.58 Evidence found in a car, what to take out 39:31.91 Relationships between law enforcement and experts 44:02.09 Investigators find a toothSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Moore. I just got back from Great Britain. I spent most of the time that I was over there in London, and the people over there are just remarkably friendly. And here's why I know. I didn't have to do this, but on three separate occasions, I had total strangers walk up to me and tell me to take my phone out of my back pocket and put it inside of my jacket.

And the reason they told me that is that there were a lot of pickpockets around. And apparently this is a huge thing in London. And I just didn't really think about it. It's something that you don't think about here in America that much. I guess maybe if you live in New York, but certainly not in Alabama. And I thought, wow, how horrible would that be to have your pocket picked and then somebody use your credit cards to buy things that they'd always wanted. Now, let's take that and think a little bit about the case I'm going to tell you about today. Imagine, if you will, your lady who is estranged from your husband. Hadn't been together in a while, and then he kills you.

He takes your credit cards and goes out and purchases cleaning supplies with him to clean up the mess that he created from your homicide. That's what we're dealing with today in the case of Crystal Roche. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Packs. Brother Dave, you ever had your pocket picked? When you were talking about that, I thought, what a nice group of people. Because we haven't been, you and I, Joe and I live very near one another geographically speaking, although both of us are used to being in much bigger cities.

And it's one of the things that when you were first talking about it, I thought, what a kind thing to tell you. Except I remember being in the city, and I never put anything in my back pocket in the city. I always put it in my suit coat or in my front pocket. Basic things of life in a big city. So you're in London. Yeah. I hope my son doesn't hear this because every time he goes out somewhere, I tell him to put his wallet in his front pocket. And that's just standard practice. And he's going to hear this now because now it's for the whole world here. And he's going to hear this now because now it's for the whole world. Right.

And he's going to chastise me about it because I've been preaching to him. There you go. The older we get. I thought that was an amazing thing that somebody would take the time to share that with you, whether they're, you know, in that big city all the time or not recognizing. Hey, what do they call us? Yanks over there. Yeah. Most of you don't hear that term very much, primarily Americans.

And they don't say it with a sneer, contrary to what some people might think. Everybody is just – and look, everywhere has got jerks. It doesn't matter where you are. You could be the smallest town in the south, and you think you're going to run into totally hospitable people and you'll run into a jerk. They're everywhere. But on the whole, I've, I have yet to have a bad experience.

I've been going to London, uh, oil England for 10 years, almost 10 years. People bend over backwards to help you if you're lost. And there's, it's very easy to get lost in London because it's so massive. Wow.

Uh, but yeah, it was completely enjoyable. But, you know, interestingly enough, Kim and I, while we were over

there, we went into one of the oldest, um, oldest pubs, still operational in, uh,

in London. And there was a sign when we walk, when we walked in next to a Guinness beer ad, an old Guinness beer ad,

they had a sign adjacent to it. And it says, take care. There are thieves about. And wow, that's kind of chilling. And there was more than one sign like that in this same specific. Of course, where this pub is, Dave, is actually located in Whitechapel,ipper did, uh, perpetrated all of his cases. So I don't know, maybe there's a, maybe there's linkage there.

I don't know. Uh, nefarious, nefarious behavior. I will tell you the way that you brought it in there of in this day and age, when somebody does get ahold of your, uh, credit cards, debit cards, they can track you pretty quick. You know, I actually was at a, I was in a college town and had to stop and get gas and needed some cash for where I was going. So I went and used a teller at a convenience store. And two hours later, I get a buzz on my phone from my bank because there's somebody 600 miles away trying to buy groceries and they're like, there's, it's impossible. This

doesn't make sense and i was able to stop the account shut everything down i got hacked at that college town uh convenience store with my teller machine so people can nail you quickly and i'm glad you brought that up because it wasn't a stranger danger that got her and the money uh it was somebody that she had shared a life with and And police found out that Crystal Roche and her husband, Zachariah Roche, they did have separate bank accounts and they did not plunder each other's accounts. They were separate and they were kept separate that neither one had permission from the other, even in their married life for going into that account. And when the police are talking with Zachariah Roche, that became an important part of this case because Crystal Roche went missing and they weren't even exactly sure

when she vanished. How many times have we had that on this show, Joe, where we have a story about somebody who vanishes and the closest person to them doesn't bother to report them missing ever. It was her husband didn't. He's the last person known to be with her. He doesn't report her missing. Her stepmother does. Yeah.

So we're talking we're talking literally, I think, 12 days downrange. Right. From when she was last seen. We have to back up and say that she was last seen or known to be alive back on June the 11th. She was not reported missing

until June 23rd. So there's this big delay. And as we have talked about on body bags beforehand, the longer we move down that timeline, the more things get diminished. As a matter of fact, not only do things get diminished by time and where and all those sorts of things that we'd look at as these kind of outside factors in cases, but also they get diminished by further nefarious activity. So, if you've got this huge gap of time, Dave, and you have a suspect that still has control over, say, for instance, a human remain, then it's during that period of time this individual can

do just about anything that they want to do with a victim's body. And in this particular case, there's some pretty ghastly things that have happened here, my friend. Let me ask you this, Joe, because you mentioned June 11th. That's our starting point. That's the last time anyone remembers seeing Crystal Roche. And actually, the proof is in the pudding. She was Crystal Roche was seen at a thrift store with Zachariah Roche, her husband.

Now, granted, he is estranged. OK, she has filed for divorce. They are not living together as husband and wife. They're in the process of a divorce that was instigated by Crystal. But they are seen together on surveillance cameras in a store shopping together on June 11th. But what gets this whole ball rolling is that's the last time because as the days go on and she doesn't have a lot of contact with people. And finally, her stepmother sees her car. Her stepmother sees Crystal's car and realizes she hasn't talked to her, not getting return calls or return messages. I mean, these little things start piling up.

But when friends started getting messages from Crystal, the messages didn't ring true. And so as police get notified on the 23rd by Crystal's stepmother, can't get her. Her car's over here. I don't know where she is. Would you do a quick check on this for me? The police are already almost two weeks behind the eight ball. Yeah. So they start digging through everything. And that's what led them to bringing in Zachariah Raj.

They wanted to know, why were you shopping? Why were you buying cleaning supplies? And why are you using Crystal's bank card? That doesn't seem to be the proper thing for an estranged husband to do. No, it doesn't. And here's kind of an interesting little tidbit here. If you want to kind of get an inside peek at all this, Dave, you look back, you know, retrospectively, I think, you know, kind of conducting this retroactive investigation where they're going back. Is that normal?

Really? Yeah, it is. You have to you have to go back as far as you can, because, listen, if if you're working a case that you suspect is missing or is a homicide or both, you have to I think in in all of our our minds, we begin to think about, well, what is it that connects what previous events connect the victim and their disappearance and their death. And so you have to go back in that anti-mortem state and try to build that out. And sometimes it's a daunting task, but, you know, it's less daunting when you have numbers, Dave. And here's something, a little tidbit for all our friends. When they did a search of Crystal's financial records, what really kind of stood out is that on June the 3rd, she had a balance in her bank account of over $9,000. You jump all the way forward to June 24th, that's down to $2,900. Now, listen, you could say, well, she got paid. You get paid at the first of the month,

and when you've got more going out than you got coming in and you're paying bills and whatnot, yeah, you would expect there to be a diminishment in your funds. But that's a pretty striking amount. So, over that time- $6,500 in three weeks? Yeah. Yeah. Precisely, man. So so how do you account for that and the thing about it is nowadays if you're using a card uh which is easily tracked if you're talking about a debit card for instance and you're going in you're swiping this thing for every time you know we talk a lot about cell phones don't we dave and we forget what gets caught it gets left in the in the dust here is that for a long long, we've been able to track people with their financial records. You know, you go and you utilize a debit card somewhere.

Well, every time you do a strike on one of those cards, that literally pinpoints a location where it puts you, you know, that card is going to be in hand. Somebody has to actually utilize that card in order to make this happen. Now, I guess, you know, you could say that, yeah, well, maybe they were online purchases and things like that, but still those things are trackable. And this is, I think, moving forward with this case, I think this is going to be damning, damning information because, Dave, it has always been said, and I don't know that it necessarily rings true, but it does sometimes. Money is the root of all evil? Well, you know, Dave, I don't know that that's necessarily a true statement that I just made. People have quoted that for years and years.

Money is the root of all evil. It's the love of money. It is the love of money. But there's also something else that comes along with this. And I've said many times that most of us are at more peril at the hands of the person that we're in bed with than we are on some stranger. And sometimes that, you know, things come about, anger, jealousy, possessiveness, all those things that come around. And I would argue, I could argue the point that those things rival in their ferocity probably even more than the love of money that it would drive. And the fact that you're stealing from a dead person after the fact, which is really grimy isn't it you know when you think about it insult

to injury that sort of thing i was going to ask you about the when when police are tracking this and they're going to start with okay we got the phone call on the 23rd don't we don't know where she is and so as they start looking back they're going to try to find the last time they can identify crystal zara rosh being somewhere and so once they can identify Crystal Zara, uh, Rosh being somewhere. And so once they can identify it, we know she was here. Do they start going from like June 11th now and saying, okay,

where was she on the 12th? Let's find out. Yeah. And when, then they hit that part where now we don't know, we know that this is absolutely last day. Okay. Now they look at,

in this case, you mentioned the bank statements and you can see where they started and how it ended. Yet we don't have any proof of life after June 11th, and a lot of expenditures. Do they then break down? What was he buying? And was he with anyone? Because there's surveillance video at these places, right? Oh, yeah, there are.

And that's the other thing. There's three big components here to this case from a forensics perspective. First off, you've got the financials, which I think, standing alone, they're damning. And then, you know, we'd mentioned the text, or you did, specifically, these text messages. How many cases have we covered over the years, Dave, where we've got somebody that will get their hands on somebody's mobile device and start to pretend that they're acting as the decedent, trying to play the game out, if you will, put people off scent. So you're going to have digital records as far as phone records go. And then on top of that, I think that what's crucial here are going to be these CCTV records as well. You've got individuals that are coming in and out and you marry that up with the financial statements where you're going in to purchase things and then you

got CCTV of them actually purchasing things. Boy, that is a huge amount of evidence to present the accused with by the police. You know, I was thinking about the CCTV cameras because when you were in London, you know, at CrimeCon London. For those of you who don't know, there's a show on body bags, you know, that Joe did with an incredible, it was a blood spatter and everything else. It was just really brilliant. And Joe Millington, her voice is so soothing. It's like, isn't it grand?

Yeah. I just, I just wanted to tell her, I like, Hey, what do you want me to admit to? Cause I mean, I'll do it just to hear her talk. It was amazing.

Yeah. I found myself. It's, uh, the old Mike Myers, uh, uh, thing,

uh, from coffee talk on SNL. He said, it's like butter, you know? And so, yeah, that's. That's the way Joe's voice is. I thought about that with London and all the CCTV cameras there. They are everywhere. But Europe is a different place than the United States. Everything's closer together. Here in the United States, we're spread out a little bit. We don't have necessarily

cameras on every street corner, but in every place you're going to use a card pretty much under surveillance because it's so cheap now. So you've got that. Yeah, you've got card. Well, let's just say you go to an ATM. Well, there's videography with that. And then, you know, and they're all over banks. And then some ATM machines actually have, you know, CCTV contained therein. So you can see it.

And there's been cases, you know, where you've got a perpetrator using a card. Right. You got a clear shot of their face. And, you know, with you were comparing, you know, how it is in London where you've got cameras everywhere and you look at the Coburger case where they're just, they're trying to scrape together anything that can of the, of the white sedan. Remember that, you know,

passing by stores, they did the 20 mile loop in, in our case with crystal, you know, the, the thing that is, is going to be so damning with this is that you've got multiple points of contact.

And, and that's one of the things that you've got multiple points of contact. And that's one of the things that we look for in forensics. We try to take as much of the data, whether, you know, we're talking about forensic toxicology, we're talking about DNA, or we're talking about electronic or in financial data, and we're trying to connect the dots and see if there's any overlay with a lot of these things, you know, kind of any kind of connectivity between these. And they're going to have a lot of this, I think. And if you want to take it to another level, some of the items that Zachariah Roush was purchasing. Right.

We're talking about, now Hold on to your hat. We're talking about cleaning supplies and and drumroll sulfuric acid. Why would you get that? Is there any ration for getting cleaning supplies and acid? the nature of sulfuric acid, obviously, it's highly, highly caustic. So, it will burn you. It will clean. It's used to clean surfaces many times. And I'll tell you, one of the utilities that it has actually is you can take it, uh, uh, for instance, like if you have a carport, right. And you've got, uh, oil stains that are on the carport, you can actually take the stuff

and apply it directly, uh, directly to that surface in order to get, uh, to get those stains off of those surfaces. Uh, and it will, you know, it'll be used. It has multiple uses, you know, in industry, everything from explosives to making of paints to just tons and tons of things. But, you know, you have to think about, well, what would have been his purpose

for wanting sulfuric acid? Because this is, in fact, an industrial, they just latch onto these words, industrial cleaning agent. So, it's so caustic that you could actually take it, and I think a lot of people believe that you can take it and you can actually render down a body with it. Or maybe you can remove stains with it and those sorts of things. So it's very, very dangerous. I'm thinking you're getting an industrial cleaner.

What did you eat that has to be cleaned with sulfuric acid? That doesn't make any sense at all. Now, what we have here is we got some facts. We've got money being spent by you, Mr. Rosh, which by the way, we're charging you now with spending your wife's money without her permission. We don't know where she is, but we know you spent money that you've already told us you don't. Because that was during their interview, they brought him in and said you know you were spending her money and her card we can't find her did you have permission to use her card while she's gone and he's like no we don't do that

and you realize that's against the law right and so they charged him yeah and and that's and i'm glad you brought that up dave that's that's a salient point because if you suspect somebody, and we see this played out over and over in crimes, and I urge anybody that follows true crime, you look for these individuals where the police are looking to charge them with something more specific, probably more horrific, and they will find secondary charges to hang on them just so that they can hold them on this. But, you know, the fact that this was a theft of thousands of dollars, first off, just the theft alone puts it into the felonious category. So you're talking about a felony that you're being charged with. In most states, you know, you look at the way it has been in the past. If you steal something of value or like an item, or if you steal monies, and it's over $499.99, that's a felony count. And so, every time you go and you withdraw, say, for instance, something above that level,

these would be individual counts that you could credit them with and hold them there. And so you can present this to a magistrate and say, look, sir, we've got this individual we're charging. He's got multiple felony offenses that we're charging him with. We need to make sure he doesn't get out of jail. And all the while, in the background, the police are working the case of Crystal, who to this point is missing. You have no idea what's happened to her. But what you do know is that she's being robbed and the individual that robbed her has gone out and purchased items that would be consistent with trying to eradicate any kind of evidence, either of the body or the spilling of blood.

And I think that those, you know, you couple all of that together. They had to hold this guy, Dave. You know, I was thinking about other crimes we've covered where police ended up charging suspects with other crimes, trying to put them on ice a little bit to get to the bottom of it. And what came to mind was Haley Cummings, the little girl who went missing in the middle of the night when her 17-year-old babysitter was watching her and her dad and the babysitter getting married. Anyway, they had them charged with a couple of different crimes along the way, and it was a substantial amount of time.

All the while, I thought the charges seemed to be pushed a little bit to keep them in jail separated to get them to talk about what happened to Haley. And that never happened. We still don't know what happened to Haley Cummings. But in this case, we've got a guy who has, by his own admission, admitted to a crime of using his wife's money, her card, her account that he wasn't entitled to because he told them, no, we don't. She's not allowed to use mine. I'm not supposed to use hers. So there you go.

We're going to lock you up for this one. Think about that for a little while. Yeah. And the motivation behind this is to make sure that you're keeping them off the streets because, okay, let's just say we've already got this gap of time where Crystal's been missing, right? Right. about this in the first segment of our program where she has been missing low these many days and lord only knows what has become of her remains at this point in time well let's just say you get this individual incarcerated you don't hold them or you decide not to affect an arrest on him early on well you're just giving him more time because if he knows

where she's at, he can continue to do whatever it is that he's doing with cleaning supplies. That did not even occur to me. And so, you know, the more time you have where he's out walking the streets, the colder and colder this case becomes. And that's always a problem but you know what i think the police happen upon something that would make even the strongest among us shudder in horror Dave, I want to throw a list out to you, brother, and kind of get your reaction to this. All right. So you're a cop, right? You're a detective, and you get your hands on a suspect's phone,

and you begin to break this thing down to check out what kind of searches they've been doing on the phone. Just bear with me now and listen to this list that I'm going to give to you. You've got on here May 28th, you've got searches relative to gunshot wounds to the chest versus the head. All right. If that's not chilling enough, you get to June the 11th, and you've got a Google search for, will a 9mm kill an animal if shot to the head? And then on June the 12th, a search for carpet cleaner. You jump to the 23rd.

Hey, here's a question that's been posed in a search engine. Can police get search warrants on Sunday in Wisconsin? Kind of odd. On the 24th of June, search queries included sulfuric acid, including is sulfuric acid flammable? And let's finish it off with this one. June 25th. The subject, who you now have the possession of his phone, Dave, Wisconsin missing person alert.

That was searched out. So you take that in its totality. If you're an investigator, do you start having that little bell go off in your brain? You know, that look, we might be onto something here. I got it.

I got to tell you, uh, proof's in the pudding, man. When he looked up on June 23rd, we know that that was the day that Crystal Roche's stepmother called police and asked them to do a welfare check because she hadn't seen her and she had seen Crystal's car, but no sign of Crystal. So June 23rd, police do a welfare check, and it's on that date that he searches. Can police get search warrants on a Sunday in Wisconsin?

Well, June 23rd is a Sunday. So the very day stepmom reports Crystal missing is the same day her husband, as strange though he may be, actually searches. Can they get it? Do I have basically, hey, do I have time to clean up anything else before they show up? By the way, I think police can get a search warrant whenever a judge will sign it. Any day. And there's always a magistrate standing by expressly for this purpose. And generally, folks might know this. Folks might not know this.

There will be what the way this happens when you go to get a search warrant there's generally uh a uh a junior assistant district attorney that's on call so the way this works is you under their direction because warrants have to be very specific you can't just it's not can you tell us explain that a little bit joe a lot of people don't know until i started actually covering a lot of crime i didn't't realize what they, I thought they could just say, I think Joe Scott Morgan has XYZ in his house, and this is why I think it. And the judge goes, okay. And that's not it at all. They actually have to do some very specific crafting of the case.

The search warrant alone will tell you what police already know. Yeah, what they already know. It's a big reveal. The old adage, you know, a wide net catches a lot of fish does not apply to a warrant. You have to be very specific as to what you want. So you can't just say, and that's for our own constitutional protections. You want it, I want it, trust me. You don't want somebody to say, OK, well, I'm writing up a search warrant for Dave Mack's home and we're showing up with this piece of paper. Let us in.

We're going to search your entire house. Yeah. Like, you know, they can't go in pulling the walls apart and digging into what they refer to as hidden spaces. If they're not specifically enumerated in that search warrant, you have to say where you're going to look and what you're looking for. So he has an awareness, at least, that they're on to him, I think, at least. And so if you've, back to what I was saying, if you've got like a junior district attorney that's on call, they will be on call.

The police can go to that individual and say, here, take your fantasy law degree, look at this warrant that we've written up, and make sure that it passes muster. Because once they take it from them, they're going to take it to the judge slash magistrate. They're going to look at it, and they will go over it, and they'll say, this needs to be corrected. This needs to be, I need you to expand on this, whatever the case might be. And you have to go back. You might have to do a rewrite on it. It's like,

it's almost like English class, only there's a lot more at stake here. Okay. So, you know, once you get that warrant, you go in there and you begin to search. But here's something that's really chilling, Dave. When you begin to match these dates up, remember what we said the last time Crystal was known to be alive was back on June the 11th. Well, that search, the search for June the 11th that's enumerated here. Now, if this doesn't send a chill up and down your spine will a nine millimeter kill an animal if shot in the head

okay that that was searched the same date that she was last known to be alive you jump ahead to the 12th and this even gives it more of a chill, he's looking for a carpet cleaner at that point in time. So if we're kind of broadly looking at this thing, trying to determine, well, what in the heck has happened here, it would lead us to believe at least that she was shot and then she was shot on a carpeted surface. Now, you think about, well, what lengths are you going to have to go to to clean this mess up?

Because, you know, we have the luxury as forensics people, we go into an environment that's kind of frozen in time for us. Once we've gotten everybody out of, let's say it's a standing structure like a home. Once we've gotten that person out of that environment, we lock this thing down and it's frozen. They're not going to get back access to it. And dude, we're, you know, whereas you have somebody that flies into a fit of rage, they pull out a gun. In this case, it doesn't sound like flying into a fit of rage. It sounds a bit planned to me.

But in any case, you shoot them. Well, you know, when you shoot somebody like this, if you're one of these people that does this, you don't count on the volume of blood you're going to have. You don't count on the mess that you're going to have. So suddenly this individual, if he is the person that did this, he's looking at a body there at his feet and he's got this gigantic mess that he's got to clean up. And to boot, it's on a carpeted surface, which makes it even more difficult. When looking at the dates, June 11th, they're at the Goodwill store together, seen on video together. And then after that, she's not seen again, but he is seen spending her money.

That's what landed him in jail. By the way, he was in jail a week after she is reported missing. She's reported missing on june 23rd or well that's when they actually started looking for her right and a week later her husband they've already zeroed in on him we've always said they always look at the closest person to the individual and they lock him up on the financial crimes using the card he wasn't entitled to and then buying these cleaning supplies sulfuric acid and whatnot so So it's months later, you know, they're investigating. And it's interesting because once they had him in the clink, they were able, they went ahead and

got a search warrant for the house June 26th. And there were two different trips out to the property, Joe, separated by a couple of days. The first day they get on the property, they find a number of cars. One in particular catches their attention. It's a 2023 Mitsubishi that I'm a little confused on some of the titling here, but it was

known to be Crystal's car. And it was parked on the property in such a way that if you were driving by the property, you wouldn't see it. It's obscured from the road. Yeah. That's kind of a hint to police. Look at this car.

Yeah. The port in the middle of the parking lot is not going to be their main attention. Well, let me tell you how seriously they took this. They loaded this car up and flatbedded it. And so they've gone back, they've taken this car to the Wisconsin State Police Lab where they have a forensics garage. And so when we can take a car into a garage like this, we have everything at our disposal, everything from alternative light sources, which you're talking about, like infrared, these sorts of things, where we've got these different spectrums of light where we can analyze things. Because, you know, just a regular household lighting situation is not the most ideal environment.

Certainly, flashlights aren't to pick up on little nuances. You use the light source that you have, and certain things will rise to the top. You might even have to wear special glasses to look through in order to facilitate this analysis. If you're using certain types of light sources that we utilize in crime scene investigation. This is kind of that stuff we see on TV then. Yeah. It really is. You can see it, and it's very dramatic.

Yeah. I got to tell you, it's very boring, and it's tedious when you're going through it. Until you see something see on TV then. Yeah. It really is. You can see it. And it's very dramatic. And I got to tell you, it's very boring and it's tedious when you're going through it. Until you see something explode on a screen. Yeah. Yeah. At that moment, Tom, it's almost a eureka moment. But part of you is kind of expecting to see it. And so when you find it, you try to remain as clinical and detached as you can because you have to document this very, very thoroughly why you have that car.

And also, here's the other thing. If you get that car in there and you've got evidence that some type of trauma has taken place in there on any level, you have to make the decision, well, am I going to cut this piece of carpet out? Am I going to take the headliner out? Am I going to take the entire seat? Dave, I've been in courtrooms where it seems like piece by piece, they brought an entire car into a courtroom. Of course, I'm going over the top

with that. But every internal element of the car in the cab of the car has been brought in steering wheels, gear levers, dashboards, seats, headliners, carpeting, everything. And so, after it's been tested, you know, you try to determine, first off, what is it? If you're looking for blood, you don't know that that's blood when you see it. Okay. If it's blood, is it human blood or animal blood? If it's human blood, then what type of blood is it as far as blood typing? And then DNA-wise, you go back and you try to determine if this blood it belongs to the individual that might be missing and so you but you want that car in an environment where you can really go through it with a fine tooth comb but you know they they had something else didn't they dave they didn't just have the car that they were looking at they found elements out they found burn

residue they found burn residue they found burn residue in the yard and this is what got my attention joe because of a couple of cases that we've done i knew right away you know in a number of places around this great nation we have burn piles in our yards and fields and things like that yeah but a burn pile is different than a burned area you can tell at my house where the burn pile is right right at this particular house they they called it burn residue yeah they could tell there had been a fire here that to me meant not a burn pit burn pile but a fire took place in this spot, not a regular burn place. Yeah.

I don't know if that's true or not. It just struck me like that. Yeah, the wording is odd in this particular case. It sounds almost like it was randomized. But here's the thing about it, Dave, is that when they begin to kind of sift through this area, they do begin to turn up now. They they've reached a point now in this investigation where they have had to reach out to a forensic anthropologist. So anytime anytime you do that at a scene, first off, you're either recovering something that you don't know what you are recovering. OK, as a cop and generally what will happen, you'll see something odd on the ground. And it's one of those moments, and I've been part of them several times over my career.

It's one of those moments where you say, freeze, red light. And everybody freezes. And you say, I don't know what this is. And generally you'll call one of your other colleagues over there to look at it. And somebody will look at you and say, I don't know what that is, but doggone, that looks like bone. It could be charred bone. We need to call the people at the university. And generally, forensic anthropologists, I think a lot of people think that these people have some kind of standalone office that are out there.

Hi, forensic anthropologists here. It's not the way it works. Really? Yeah, there's not enough work. I assume there was. Joe, I'm not kidding. I thought that the police know, hey, we got, here's the guy closest. It's a Sunday.

Call Bill. He's up there in Jacksonville. He can be there in 15 minutes. It's not like that. These guys are not, they're all, most of them that you come across work at a university. So they're teaching. They're teaching. They're doing research. That's where you're going to find most of them that you come across work at a university. So they're teaching, they're teaching, they're doing research. That's where you're going to find most of them. Every now and then you might find an independent person that's out there that

have kind of gone out on their own, but there's not enough work, uh, to, you know, for forensic anthropologists to be able to do these things. Lots of times you'll find them in museums. As a matter of fact, two of the finest in the history of the U.S., forensic anthropologists worked at Smithsonian. And that's been portrayed in movies and that sort of thing over the years. So you have to go to those types of people to get them to go out into the – they're going to go out in this guy's backyard and sift through his dirt pile or dirt residue? Let me tell you something.

Forensic anthropologists live for this stuff. This is what they do. Trust me, it is. They wait. You know, it's kind of like the firefighter. They're reactive. They're sitting there and they're waiting for the alarm to go off. But, you know, here's the thing.

You were talking about we're going to call Bill. They're on call or whatever. You do not. And I mean, you do not want to be in this position and say, who can we call? So most of the time with police departments, they will already have a relationship with these individuals with forensic anthropologists who are going to study bones or skeletal remains. And then you're going to have a relationship with a forensic odontologist who is a forensic dentist. And this is not somebody where you can just go into the, well, I was about to say, go into the yellow pages that don't exist anymore. Right.

But Google search these people and they're just around the block. You have to have these relationships. And even with forensic odontologists, which people might find, I don't know, some people might find this kind of off-putting, if you will. I've worked with forensic odontologists, the forensic dentists that worked two in particular that were mentors of mine that worked at LSU Dental School, School of Dentistry. They were dental professors. But being an odontologist was not their full-time gig. But, you know, I worked with a guy in Atlanta that was our odontologist with

the medical examiner in Atlanta. Well, he's a private dentist. He's digging people's mouths, cleaning their teeth and doing fillings and extractions and all that stuff. Oh, and by the by, he's also doing forensic odontology where he would go out and examine decomposing human remains and look at the teeth and remove the jaws and do all these sorts of things that those guys do. So, this case actually involves two of these individuals because they found what turned out to be bone chips in the area adjacent to where, what was that phraseology? Burn site. A burn site. A burn site where you're going to have these, what I like to refer to it as, you're going to have these kind of deposits of carbon and it'll be black most of the time.

And you'll see this kind of scorched area. I think my question is, was this area dug out at all and if it was dug out how deep did it go i miss i actually gave you the wrong phrase investigators saw burn residue on june 26th okay right it was june 30th that's when they came out there with a medical examiner and other investigators they revisit the burn residue and they refer to it now as the burn site. Burn site. And so what they're going to have if they have burn residue, it's pretty clear. You're probably going to have what appears to be at least maybe charred wood, charred leaves.

There'll be evidence on the ground, on the surface area, where something hot has contacted that area to the point where maybe you have grass that was underlying the area that is now scorched. All right. But if you're talking about particulated bone, which sounds like what we're dealing with, like bone chips, Dave, it would take, and I know I've mentioned this before, but just hear me out. It would take so much time and time is what we're dealing with here. It would take so much time to render down a human remain to the point where you could particulate it, where you only have bone chips left. I remind our friends that, you know, with a crematorium, which is an enclosed oven that has an ongoing natural gas supply in order to render down an average human body. We're talking 1400 to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. And that's sustained.

That's sustained. That's sustained. It's the difference between, and this is so grotesque, but it is truly the difference between cooking in an oven as opposed to holding something over an open fire and cooking it. And what that means is that this would have been a labor-intensive event if they're trying to render down the body in that spot. Most of the time, once you've rendered down a body, many people will go to the next length, which will mean that they're going to try to particulate the body. They're going to try to break it down and diminish it as greatly as they can. But I think, Dave, the one saving grace here, going back to our friends in forensic odontology, they recovered a tooth, didn't they?

Found a tooth. One tooth is all they're saying they found, but they found a tooth. And based on that one tooth, they were able to affect an identification, a positive identification of crystal. And that's where we sit today. They've got a tremendous amount of physical evidence in this case. I think that the tale is left to be told as to whether or not Zachariah Rausch is going to be found guilty or not guilty. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Body Packs. This is an iHeart Podcast.