Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Abandoned in Concrete - Georgia's Baby Jane Doe

Episode Date: February 11, 2024

A road crew in south west Georgia finds on old console tv at an illegal dumpsite on the side of a country highway. As they try to move the tv, the workers find a suitcase inside, too heavy to just be filled with clothes. As they open the suitcase, they open up a mystery that will last decades. Inside the suitcase is cement, and poking out of the cement, the body of a small child. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack will help tell the story of Baby Jane Doe, the girl thrown away like garbage, and the people who spent 35-years trying to find out her name.  Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Transcribe Highlights  00:00:37 Trash Dump off the side of road  00:01:46 Talk about abandoned child   00:02:29 Discussion of life  00:03:16 Talk about the case, started in 1988  00:05:59 Discussion of area  00:10:54 Talk about getting body out of cement  00:13:30 Discussion of cement wouldn’t encase everything  00:16:48 Talk about mixing concrete and body  00:19:42 Evidence at scene leads to home  00:22:32 Talk about body breaking down in cement  00:25:32 Discussion of investigators   00:28:37 Talk about technology catching up   00:31:02 This case hasn’t been to trial yet  00:33:58 Talk about Genetic Genealogy  00:35:39 Discussion can there be justice  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Growing up in the rural South, you spend quite a bit of time out in the woods. I come from a family that liked to hunt. And I'm not talking necessarily for big game. I'm talking about for survival. My grandfather, I swear that man never met a squirrel he wouldn't eat. And I know that for some folks that are listening to this, they might find that,

I don't know. I don't know if the word repugnant fits in there, but some people would not want to do that. Some people call squirrels tree rats, but man would take a squirrel and rice any day over chicken and rice, I think. But you know, when you're, when you're out in the woods many times, you not only appreciate the beauty, but you also appreciate the things that people do out there that you would otherwise prefer that they not do. And, you know, one of the biggest things is dumping garbage and dumping old appliances. You come across those sorts of things many times, and it really does detract from the beauty of nature. But when you're out in the woods and you're doing a job as a road

crew and you're working for local government, you have to go out and identify illegal dumping sites. And that happens with great frequency. And people want these things removed because they're dangerous. You don't know what people are throwing away. But in the case we're going to discuss, a road crew found one of the most precious things in the world that someone had treated like garbage and essentially tossed a little angel away

and abandoned her out in the middle of a lonely, lonely stretch of road in a forest. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bound. I hate this story. I hate this. I absolutely detest it. I cover so many cases with a lot of other folks, And the adults, those cases are, they're tough. Many of them are. But when I find cases in particular where somebody takes a precious little child and they treat them like garbage

and they throw them away probably many times after long periods of abuse and those sorts of things. It breaks my heart because I know how many people out there would love to have a child and have struggled for years and years to have a child. And I've often said, and I'd get angry many times. Even when I was an investigator, I remember having this discussion with my wife, Kim. I'd come home and I'd be in tears. I really would after working child deaths. And I would say, why, you know, why didn't they

just bring them to me? No questions asked. Just bring them to our doorstep. This investigation began on December 21st, 1988. A Ware County, Georgia road crew comes across an illegal dumping area just off the road. In that dump area, the crew finds a console TV. Inside the TV is a suitcase. Now, as the road crew picks up the suitcase, it's heavier than it should be if it just had clothes and toiletries in it. So they opened it up. They find the lifeless body of a small girl encased in concrete where county sheriff's office is called and they call for help from the gbi the gbi medical examiner determines the death is a homicide but the cause of death is undetermined there was one piece of evidence found near the console tv that suggests a connection to albany georgia nearly 100 miles

away now the child in the cement is not identified and becomes known as Ware County's Baby Jane Doe. That investigation that began on December 21st, 1988, continues for the next 35 years. Finally, in 2022, a local TV station does a report on the anniversary of the day Baby Jane Doe was found. They update the public on what little details they have, and they offer up a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons that threw baby Jane Doe away like garbage. A viewer watching the broadcast calls in a tip that leads investigators

to determine baby Jane Doe is actually Kenyatta Odom, a five-year-old little girl they called Kiki because a woman was watching the news and saw this report on the anniversary and said, I think I know who that is. She never believed the story that her friend told her about five-year-old Kiki. The mother had said that Kiki had moved and was living with her father. The neighbor didn't believe the story. Once you have identified this child, now it's time to find out something, you know, in concrete, this rises to a level of people really thinking about this, putting thought into this, because what do you have to do? Well, first off, you have to prep the concrete. You know, you just don't go out and buy it wet.

You have to prep the concrete in order to utilize it to its fullest potential. Then you have to have something to contain said concrete in. And obviously, you've got to have placement for the body. And why are you going about doing it this way? I don't understand. And I can only imagine at the time, and this discovery occurred in arguably one of the most isolated and rural areas in the state of Georgia, down in southwest Georgia, in a town called Millwood that's actually in Ware County, Georgia. And very, very rural, isolated, lots of dirt roads to go down, lots of thickly forested areas to go down. And there's no life in that area. And when I say life, I'm talking about, you know, you don't have a bunch of houses around there. It smacks of somebody that wanted to get as far away

with these remains and discard them. And I guess their thought was that if you go to an illegal dumping site, no one's going to pay any attention to it. But you never count on the unknown, because you can't see that. I think if you're a perpetrator, you can't think that unknown, you know, because you can't see that. You know, I think if you're a perpetrator, you can't think that, oh, well, there might be a road crew that comes by. And I don't know about you. I've got a couple of people that will roll by our house where we live and they show up in pickup trucks.

And if you've dumped, you know, some kind of, uh, something from your home, like, you know, uh, bits of furniture or maybe a piece of furniture, you won't just hauled off or whatever. They're going to stop and they're going to look at it, you know, before the truck ever hauls it away. Cause they might, they might be able to source it in a different way or, you know, collect it and fix it up or something like that. And those people exist and they're out there and they're riding around something like that. And those people exist and they're out there and they're riding around. And I think that most people that perpetrate such a horrible crime, like we're talking about today, they don't count on that. Their idea,

I think, is to get as much distance between themselves and the corpus delecti, because that is the body of evidence there. And interestingly enough, I was just having this discussion, Dave, with my students. And I teach a medical legal death investigation class at JSU. And I asked them, my classes, to envision when we're working a case and you're working a death case, obviously envision the body as being the hub of, of a wagon wheel and everything else radiates out from it, all other bits of evidence and, you know, things like that. But the body is a central piece of evidence here. And, you know, you never know how, how far those kinds of radial spokes are going to extend out from the body. You know, you've got the central little body that's there encased in cement or concrete, How far are those kind of radial spokes are going to extend out from the body?

You know, you've got this central little body that's there encased in cement or concrete. And you think, wow, you know, what was her point of origin? You know, where did she come from? We know the body was found on December 21st, 1988. But we don't know when the child was placed in that location. You made a point earlier about this witness, this friend, so-called of the family, and she asked the mother about where the child is. And as investigators, you have to go back to that last point of contact

because that might be, look, we're talking about a little child. Many people don't think about're talking about a little child. Many people, you know, don't think about the whereabouts of a child. If you don't have a closely knit family, for instance, or you're really tied in with your neighbors, that one person, and now it's playing out right here before us, that one person has that recall, and they might be the only person to ever remember this child. So you, the point that I think that needs to be made here is that how do we know how long this child had been deceased or how long had she been missing before someone actually put eyes on this location in

1988, which, you know, you go back to the fog of time man i don't know about you i can't remember 1988 i have no way of recall relative to that because so much stuff my memory is so layered now since that period of time in my life a lot of the 80s are like that for me but i'm thinking when when the body was labeled as baby janee, found in cement, inside a suitcase, inside a television console, in an illegal dump area. But Joe, could you determine right then about how long the child had been dead? Yeah, I think that to a certain degree you could. And this is a painstaking process, Dave, when you have an encasement like this. And I've worked, I think, maybe two over the course of my career.

First off, just from a logistics standpoint, I actually worked one where we had a remain that was in a block of concrete. And this is not something that you're not just going to put it into the back of the coroner's van and haul it down to the county morgue. Logistically, it's a nightmare. And how are you going to process it, move it about, that sort of thing. So I think that just because the body is encased, I think that it's really important for people to understand there's no guarantee that you're going to be able to tell specifically how long they've been in there because when you encase a dead body in concrete or maybe even something else like a suitcase you're not just encasing the body but you're

encasing everything even at a microbial level that inhabits that same environment with that body. And there's no telling what you're going to find when you finally chip it all away. Just because you have a body that is encased in concrete doesn't mean that the body is in total encased in concrete. So what I mean by that is that depending upon the skill level, the resources, the tools, the experience that a perpetrator might have relative to using some kind of medium light concrete, not everything is going to be covered up because I think a big question that people would ask is, for instance, in Kenyatta's case, you got a suitcase, yes, you've got concrete,

but how do you know that there's a body in concrete? Well, there's no guarantee that the encasement itself completely obscures everything. You might have, and forgive me for saying this, elements of the body that are extruding from that block of concrete. There might be hair. There might be clothing. There could even be an appendage that's hanging out from there, Dave. So there's no guarantee that everything's going to be obscured. We don't know how the child died or when. We don't have any of that information. And 35 years later, it's a little more blurry. So

where would you go with the body like that? That's an excellent question. Let me go back to my earlier comment about the body that's in like a huge block of concrete. That's something that on site that you're going to have to free the body up from that location. But you're talking about the body of a small child, a five-year-old, all right? This is portable. So what would have happened is that the body in total contained within the suitcase would have been transported to the local forensic science center. And there's a couple in Georgia that in the GBI, Georgia Bureau of Investigation and State Medical Examiner would have handled this case.

There used to be a lab down in a town called Moultrie, which is in far South Georgia. That would be my big guess at this point in time that the body would be taken to a location like that. But here's, here's the, the interesting piece to this is that when you show up to a morgue, we have instruments within the morgue where we're working with soft tissue and bone. We don't have construction tools. All right. So how do you, how do you free a body up, you know, that's encased in cement? And here's the other thing, and this is a big piece to this. Um, if you know that there is a body contained within it, first thing you're going to need to do is take x-rays and you have to be able to account for the density of the concrete. You know,

where are you going to be able to see, if anything, when you x-ray this? And then secondly, you have to figure out a path to get to the body without destroying any kind of evidence. And you talk about an uphill battle because you don't, you're kind of flying blind. Just think about that just for a second. So you've got this, this precious little angel that's encased in, in concrete. Uh, first off, what kind of tools are you going to use? Do you, as, uh, as a forensic scientist have a skill set where you're able to dislodge the body? Or do you need to call in somebody else that actually works with concrete and stone and all these sorts of things to be able to chip away at this mass that has been created that contains the body that, you know,

they have a particular way that they can knock the concrete away and get down to what's most valuable here. And you also don't know, I think this is another salient point too, let's just say when they're mixing this up, are there other bits of evidence contained within the mixture? And are you going to obliterate that as you're chipping away? So as the stuff is being chipped away, pulverized, you can't just take it and throw it in the trash can, Dave. You have to hold on to every little bit that comes off the body because contained therein might be an answer.

And I'm talking about any kind of biological item or element that might be left behind. There might be a projectile that's in this stuff. There might be a chipped blade. There might be a bit of a hammer if something was used as a bludgeon. For all I know, somebody may have thumped a cigarette in there and that has happened in wet cement or concrete. And then it dried and you have that encasement that there that's there adjacent. So you can't just like arbitrarily go into this environment with a big old hammer and a chisel and start knocking everything away. This is something that is painstaking, that takes hours and hours and hours to process. All I can think of is a five yearyear-old child is in the middle of this and I've

got to get around so I can find out who did this to her and put them in jail. Look, you and I are both daddies. Yeah. And I don't mean to speak for you, but I got to tell you, I want to get to, I want to get to the heart of the matter as quickly as possible. I want to, and you have to fight that urgency, I think, to get to the body as quickly as possible because, you know, speed sometimes, or your, your pace, your pacing as you're processing a scene, this applies to any scene, but in a case like this, you want to get to that body, to that element that's contained within there and collect anything you can off of it.

And sometimes you can drive, you know, metaphorically drive right over some of the most important evidence that's left behind. So you have to really take care as you're moving forward. Now, let me ask you, because you've got a scene where you found, you know, it's like those Russian nesting dolls. Oh, yeah, yeah. Wow. Good analogy. And we've got an illegal dumping area, so there's going to be all kinds of stuff out there. And the one thing they found was the newspaper from Albany, Georgia, about 100 miles away.

Isn't that something? This is, when you're looking for clues, this is a big one. This is dumb luck. I'm not saying that insultingly. I'm just saying it's almost like a wink from God back in 1988. And who would have thought? Because you brought this up. I mentioned Ware County.

It's isolated. Or Millwood is the town that they're saying. But that doesn't mean that it's like in downtown Millwood. It's out in an area adjacent to Millwood is the town that they're saying, but that doesn't mean that it's like in downtown Millwood. It's out in an area adjacent to Millwood in Ware County. You go to all of this trouble to encase this precious child in cement and then contained in a suitcase, and you're going to leave a newspaper out there because you can imagine Albany. I did the calculation, uh, from downtown Albany, which is in Daughtery County, uh, Georgia is back to the, let me get this straight is back to the Southeast of where County,

it was like 98.3 miles from downtown Albany to downtown Millwood. So what are the, and you're going to go all this, all this distance and you're going to leave a newspaper. If somebody is out there and, um, and I don't know that the, that the road crew found the newspaper, it may have been the cops when they showed up out there, they're thinking, okay, why in the world is there a newspaper here from Albany, Georgia? Well, that was a significant lead for them as it turned out because they're looking to try, you know, geographic placement and they're trying to understand, you know, what's the connection between this newspaper and also when you're looking at something as fragile as a newspaper and it's out and exposed in the elements, that gives you an idea of timing as well.

And also the date of the newspaper. You know, when was this thing published? When did it come out? This particular edition, does it approximate the time when this child was last seen alive? Oh, my gosh. That's a big, big tell there. Now you've got to identify who did it. Now you've got a basic location to look, but obviously it wasn't enough of a clue, Joe,

because for 35 years, they've got this child named baby Jane Doe. I'm wondering, basic decomposition, does it change inside the cement? Is it different? it can retard the process a bit uh however you know as i you know i stated earlier you're still all of the elements that that become involved in the process of decomposition um they're contained within that that cavity it because you know when you when you pour concrete around something you you create a cavity around the body so it's not like the the concrete passes through the body and it negates anything that's around it so the the one, you have to think about this, did the little bugs, if you will, at a microscopic level that play havoc on our bodies, is there enough oxygen for them to

continue doing what they do? Have you frozen them in that moment in time? And the potential is there that you probably haven't. And not to mention, you know, you've got this idea of we talk about two things relative to decomposition. You talk about autolysis, which autolysis is it means self auto. So it's like self digestion. So the breakdown internally of the body and then you have putrefaction, which generally counts upon external factors that are breaking down a body, you know, those things from the outside. So still contained within the body, you have this autolytic changes that are going on, the body's going to begin to be compromised, it's going to be able to break down, and

the upside is, is that when you have containment like this, anything that's there, this is aside from decomposition, but anything that is there is captured for that moment in time with that precious little angel. And you might have evidence that's going to bear out and give you proof of death. I've stood, I know I can personally testify to this. I've stood over the bodies of dead kids over the course of my career. And I could feel, I don't know, Dave, do you ever, do you have that moment in time where when you're truly angry about something, you can feel the rage like rising up within you? Your head, you feel like you have a fever almost. And it feels like the top of your head is going to blow up. I had that happen more than once, and it's not healthy. Because I don't, you know, even as an investigator, you don't have ownership over this precious life. Because you're not the caretaker of this child, but you know that somebody has abandoned a child,

and it makes you angry. It motivates you to it motivates you to want to get things done. And the frustrating thing about this, and I think that probably this is the case with, with those investigators way back then. I know that they wanted to do something, Dave. They, they had to. You can't look at the body of a child that's treated like this and not want to solve it. But sometimes there are just not answers. You're left, you're left wanting, you know, um, from just, you know, scientific standpoint, there's nothing you can hang your hat on and there's no way you can trace it back. But you know, 30 years later, over 30 years later, I think that maybe, maybe there were some answers that were provided. Thankfully,

genetic genealogy has come into play, Joe. And now this is probably the third or fourth one in the last year that we have had a chance to cover and say, look, you thought you got away with dumping that baby in the trash can. And, you know, outside of car wash in Louisiana or outside of fast food joint, North Carolina. But you know what? We got you. How do you go back from that call, Joe, of a neighbor saying, I think it might be so-and-so to here's the remains. Here's what we've got. Do we have the skeletal remains of the child or was she buried? Yeah, there's a high probability that she was in fact buried maybe in, you know, Potter's field somewhere. Uh, I hope, you know, a potter's field somewhere. Uh, I hope, you know, and this is kind of ghastly, but sometimes when you have, uh, when you have remains that are, uh,

skeletonized or even partially skeletonized, what can happen is that, um, is that you can render those skeletal remains so that they're essentially cleaned. All right. And I mean, all soft tissue is gone and you can retain those. And I know this is horrible stuff, but this is body bags. You render down the remains to the point where they are in the skeletal components and they're boxed up. They're boxed up, Dave. They're boxed up and many times they're placed on a shelf and you retain them.

And that could happen in this manner. The saving grace, I think here, is that if you did your due diligence all the way back then and you took the appropriate samples, then if there is something that is left behind, I don't know that they were able to collect blood from her at that point in time, because we would do what used to be referred to as, and I still do, it's called a blood card. And if you have blood, you essentially collect a bit of blood and you put a drop onto the specially treated card and you retain that and you can actually lift a DNA sample off of that. And in the case of skeletal remain, well, one of the richest sources from a skeleton of DNA is, of course, teeth. You know, you can go in and extract pulp from that area and draw out DNA and do a comparison.

And, you know, and that is, in fact, what I think that we're probably looking at with this case. There's at least a probability of that. And as here's the thing, technology caught up with the criminals in this particular case. And I think that that's important to remember because some people just lose hope. And I know because we encounter, I get contact about people all the time that are looking for answers, you know, regarding, you know, unsolved cases in their family, this sort of thing. You never know, on my side of the house at least, I'm not talking about from an investigative circumstantial evidence standpoint. I'm talking about from a scientific standpoint. We're really at a point in history right now where science has literally caught up to the bad guys.

And that's what we're looking at here because it was genetic genealogy that finally gave them answers. But I got to make this point because I know people are wondering, well, how did she die? Well, Dave, her body was compromised to the point that the only thing that the medical examiner could do at that point in time, state medical examiner, was rule Kenyatta's death as a homicide, one of the five manners. But they said that it was indeterminate relative to the cause of death. And the way you work that problem out logically in your mind, if you're trying to explain that to somebody, well, how can you call this a homicide if you don't have a cause of death? Okay, well, let's go down this road and let's explore this a little bit. How do you explain that this child was encased in cement

that's placed inside of a suitcase to begin with that would contain and obscure her body, then drive her body, I don't think you put her on your back and took her all that way away from Albany, Georgia and discarded her in an old TV console in the middle of nowhere in Ware County, Georgia. You, you know, you tell me, I mean, if you're doing the percentages here, there's a high likelihood that this is a homicide. All right. Cause I don't know that you have anything else to hang your hat on. And at this point in time, this, this case has not gone to trial. You know, this is waiting to be adjudicated, but they, the state medical examiner did in fact rule this as a

homicide. And that's going to be, that's going to be tough. I think that's going to be one of the big questions for any defense attorney to ask in this particular case. Well, how do you know that this was a homicide? How do you know that she didn't just die and they were so stricken with grief that they didn't have money for a funeral? So they decided to take her to a junk pile and discard her. Okay. And, you know, we wanted to so memorialize our little angel that we took her all the way out to a junk pile 100 miles away and dumped her body in an old abandoned TV console. I just, for the life of me, can't find any way of even being able to understand that. No, I can't either but here's here's the beautiful part of this because you know for years and years i can't remember they were they were referring to her as baby chain

doe correct yeah i think of a baby as being less than two years old but we've got a five-year-old here did they know they being investigators oh yeah yeah they they knew and and you know i think that the reason that they would refer to her as baby instead of diminutive female is it's an it's a term of endearment and and i think that from that perspective even though she's not literally a baby as we think about it she she is a baby and uh in this you know we call children babies we still call my children she is a baby. And in this You know, we call children babies. I still call my children baby. A baby for the whole community, adopting

this five-year-old as a baby. That makes perfectly good sense. Yeah, and it's not so much an indicator of it is an indicator that she is something less than an adult, certainly less than a pubescent child that you're dealing

with a very young child here. And that, again, that drives home the point of how ghastly this whole process is and these events surrounding this death. But one of the things that they began to understand, and Dave, this is how this newspaper plays into this, because when they took this DNA sample and plugged it in to genetic genealogy database, and I actually believe that probably I got the indication reading some of the associated articles that Ortham Lab was involved in this, that's based out in Texas, that they were able to connect this child to a family tree in Albany, Georgia. Now, just let that resonate with you for a moment, because when they're doing the genetic genealogy and they have this biological tieback that doesn't just lead them to Georgia. It leads them to Albany, Georgia, that there is a family there.

That means that someone has plugged in their DNA in that particular location, and there's multiple people that are coming, all these cousins, if you will, that are coming off of this tree. And then you reflect back to that newspaper that was left behind all the way back in 1988 and those cops were smart enough to collect that they photographed it and how do you associate that with this and you had an a eureka moment at that at that can you imagine all of a sudden i mean it's it's the greatest thrill in the world as an investigator when the pieces come together and they were actually able to tie this child back

to her mother and um as a result and the mother's name is evelyn odom and she's now been arrested she's she's facing charges at this point in time and some horrendous charges at that and homicide. They've also arrested Ulysses Sanders. Yeah, who was the mother's live-in boyfriend at the time. So they've arrested the couple? Yeah, and these people are now, I think the mother is like 56 at this point. Yeah, 56 and 61. Yeah, and guess what, Dave?

They've had a chance to live their life. Guess who didn't? Kenyatta. She didn't have a chance to live her life. Instead, she was discarded on a trash pile 100 miles away from her home in Albany, Georgia. And that's the tragedy of all this. But there's a day of reckoning coming. And I'm going to be very interested to see how the prosecution ties all of this evidence together and presents this case. And we'll see if there

is, in fact, justice for this little girl that was discarded. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.