Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Adam Broomhall - A Life Cut Short

Episode Date: August 6, 2023

Three-year-old Adam Broomhall was mercilessly beaten and burned, a victim of unimaginable cruelty at the hands of an ex-Marine—his mother’s boyfriend. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack delve into the heart-wrenching details of Adam's life and the horrific actions of Richard Fairchild, an ex-Marine turned child abuser. They provide insights into the chaotic domestic environment, the court process, and how forensic details can vividly depict a victim's experience. Additionally, they explore the psychological aspects of child abuse and the heartbreaking injuries Adam endured, leading to a discussion on Fairchild's ultimate fate. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Time Code Summary: 00:00:20 - Joseph Scott Morgan introduces the episode's tragic subject: the case of Adam Broomhall, and discusses the origin of the word tortura and its relevance to the case. 00:04:18 - Dave Mack questions Joe Scott about the court process when dealing with graphic details, providing insight into the judicial system's approach to the importance of factual accuracy in court presentations. 00:09:33 - The revelation of the negligence of the adults in Adam Broomhall and his siblings’ lives, who are consumed by alcohol and indifferent to the children's safety, and adding another layer of tragedy to the case, Charity Wade's plight is revealed. 00:11:37 - Discussion of the crucial developmental stage of a child's life, highlighting the long-term impact of neglect and abuse. 00:13:19 - Joe Scott contrasts Richard Fairchild's Marine background with his heinous actions, illustrating the stark contradiction between his past role, his present conduct, and the event that led to physical violence. 00:16:48 - Dave Mack draws from personal experience as a parent regarding bed-wetting, highlighting the everyday struggles that can trigger abuse in volatile households. 00:19:33 - Examination of the chaotic environment and the sequence of injuries in Adam's case, shedding light on the systematic nature of the abuse. 00:21:55 - Joe Scott Morgan discusses the frenulum and its relevance to child abuse cases, providing a forensic perspective on physical trauma. 00:25:03 - The challenges of determining the timeline of abuse, emphasizing the complexity of investigations in child abuse cases. 00:26:42 - Joe Scott reveals the horrific details of how Adam was struck and burned by Fairchild, a heart-rending moment that underscores the severity of the crime. 00:30:20 - A horrifying detail is revealed - the fact that Fairchild burned Adam against a wall heater, causing second-degree burns and immense pain to multiple areas of his body. 00:32:00 - Discussion of the thorough autopsy performed on Adam, revealing the extent of his injuries and highlighting the importance of forensics in understanding the true nature of the crime. 00:33:20 - Joseph Scott Morgan recounts how Fairchild threw Adam into a table, causing the final fatal blow, a chilling climax to the night of horror.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I have to confess something. I think part of me is a frustrated linguist. I always enjoy trying to understand the origins of words, kind of where do they sprout from, and what path do these words take to enter our everyday lexicon. And I want to briefly mention a word right now.

The word, and I'm not going to give you the modern word yet, but you can kind of guess what it might be. But this word originates from Latin. And actually, it originates from late Latin, like 12th century, I think. And the word is tortura. The true meaning of it in its original form was twist. It also implies rising. Have you ever writhed in pain? For a moment, there was one little boy, a three-year-old, who writhed many years ago. And his name was Adam. Today on Body Bags.

The word tortura, the word that we use nowadays is torture. Many of us are familiar with that term, and people will kind of throw that word around. There's a lot of words out there like that. People just kind of say. They don't really understand the essence of it. Some people will say, you know, this was torturous to sit here and have to listen to, or it was a torturous experience of having to get together with family members perhaps you haven't seen for a while on Thanksgiving, or my trip down to the DMV was pure torture. I submit to you, no, it's not. In the case of this sweet little angel, Adam Broomhall, his last moments on this earth were truly torture.

I'm glad you brought it up that way because words do get watered down. And when you mention torture, in this case, this defines it, I think. Richard Fairchild, what he did to a three-year-old, 24-pound little boy in the last hours of his life, and what he admitted to doing. And it is the most horrific thing you can ever imagine reading about what happened to a three-year-old boy weighing 24 pounds. Let's hear from Jackie Howard with Kramalon. Adam Broomhall was the three-year-old son of Richard Fairchild's girlfriend. The couple spent the day drinking. When Broomhall woke up in the night, Fairchild began to beat the boy. Then he burned both sides of the child's body by pressing him against a furnace. As the beating continued, Fairchild threw the 24-pound

child into a dining table, knocking him unconscious. He never woke up. Broomhall died from blunt force trauma to the head, but a pathologist was able to note 26 individual blows to the boy's body. Richard Fairchild, when he was talking to detectives about what took place, he was able to legibly write out what had happened. What happened to him is atrocious. How do you go to court, Joe, and break this down for a jury? Do you have to tell the whole story of what led up to it, or do you get into just the mathematics of here are the injuries, here's what these injuries mean, and here's what caused his death? Is it just graphic or is it graphic of explaining what had taken place in the hours leading up to this?

Look, in my field in medical legal death investigation, there is a phrase that's kind of a rote now. I'd actually seen it many years ago on a T-shirt. I'd been in a conference in Baltimore and we had been at Baltimore Police Department specifically. We were hosted by the Homicide Division of Baltimore PD and there's all kinds of terms that are out there. They had several t-shirts that they were selling and the money went to charity and one of the sayings on the shirt was, we speak for those that can no longer speak for themselves and we've heard that again it's rote it's out there and another one that's kind of

a bit coy there's another old one that says our day begins when yours ends and that's been around for a while but i'd like to address this kind of idea of we speak for those that can no longer speak for ourselves. As much of the father that I have within me, and when I say that, I mean as a father to my children, I want so desperately to get on a stand and tell his story. But we are bound by sticking to the facts of what our area of expertise is. You really try to keep everything within the guardrails. I'm prone to use that term now because you can kind of bounce off of them, but you stay in your lane, essentially. And so when we're up there and we're on the stand, I can't really opine about the life that, in a case like Adam, may have lived.

And neither could these investigators, necessarily, from a forensic standpoint. Now, you can go into the history. If you get an investigator that did a deep dive, and they have it documented point by point, it becomes kind of clinical because of the questions that are being asked and that you're not going to be able to get up there as much as you would want to if you're a father or parent. And emote for us in forensics, sometimes what seems to be very dry, mundane details can actually paint a picture of pure horror when you begin to ask those probative, or you are asked those probative questions by counsel. When you start to talk about how long does it take someone to die from blunt force trauma to the head?

Or what kind of pain threshold do human beings have for being burned? Or what's it like for the victim to have been punched or kicked or thrown about? What can we expect? What's the body's reaction. Within that kind of dry science, you breathe life into those that are gone. In the case of Adam, the witnesses did a fine job because I believe they brought him back to life in the core. Before the days of cell phones and before I had a loving wife and I was a single dude, I would go to the laundromat and I'd read a book as I watched my laundry being done.

And every now and then I'd catch myself being captivated by the dryer. You can look through that little glass window and you see it going around and around and around. You see all those items and they're bouncing around. It's very benign. But in Adam's case, it's like he was in a tumble dryer, only with sharp edges. And the energy that was being generated was being generated by someone that viewed him

as less than a three-year-old little boy, something less than a human. What is so mind-numbing about this, we have Adam Broomhall. He's three years old and weighs 24 pounds. I've got several children, okay? I've got four kids, and I think all of them weighed more than 24 pounds when they were two. So am I right in that? That seems to me to be a very small child.

Yeah, he's small. He's on the smallish side. Yeah, I'd have to agree with you. So we've got a small child, three years old, Adam. We have the mother, Stacy. And then we have Stacy's boyfriend, Richard Fairchild, going to Stacy's mother's house to drink all day. I don't know if that was their purpose, but based on what took place, I think it was. To go there, and they had the kids. So they had mom and Richard, the boyfriend and

Stacy's mom, and maybe a few other adults in there and they're drinking and playing cards, watching TV and drinking while the children were playing in a different room. When it came time to go home, Richard Fairchild and Stacy were both too intoxicated to drive home. And Stacy's mother said, no, you aren't driving home. She tried to get them to spend the night there. And they're like, no, we're going home. So Stacy's mother insisted that her 17-year-old daughter named Charity Wade drive them home. Charity drives the family home, gets there about 1030.

She checks on Adam's fine. The other children are fine at 1030 at night. Now the charity was going to spend the night because she was 17 and sober. She was going to spend the night there just to make sure the children were taken care of during the course of the evening. But somewhere in the course of getting home and getting the kids situated, Richard Fairchild made a sexual advance towards 17-year-old Charity Wade. And so she did not feel safe to stay there and she left. We have the mother, Stacy, in bed asleep. We've got the three children, at least in bed, falling asleep. And then we have Richard Fairchild, drunk, hitting on a 17-year-old. When Charity Wade left at 10.30, Adam was alive and resting.

What took place after that, between 10.30 that night and the next morning, poor little Adam, three years old and 24 pounds, Joe. He took a beating at the hands of Fairchild is all I want to focus on. Let me say something, a remark about Fairchild. Not only is Fairchild a grown man that is indwelling this home there with these kids, his girlfriend, and of course, the 17-year-old is present as well. Just a bit of background. This means an ex-marine an ex-marine all right and when we think about marines and i have many friends that are for

marines they don't like to be called ex-marines i think of somebody that's a protector you know they got rough edges on them you want them to have rough edges trust me for the job that they have to do but you think of somebody that's a protector and particularly those that are very innocent like a three-year-old but that's not what happened within this environment and i remember my kids when they were little and i think every parent has an experience with this and you know, one of the things that kind of set this whole story in motion is the fact that Adam wet the bed. He wet the bed.

And that's what kids do. Now, you can developmentally, you know, children may have these moments in time where you think that they're not going to kind of get out of that phase. And some don't. Some have trouble. And, you know, it has to be treated and there's any number of reasons why that might happen but my kids wet the bed hell they i wet the bed all right every single one of us have wet the bed if that is that thing that is going to condemn

us and in this case for adam if you view it from that perspective where it's that touchstone moment where Adam was essentially condemned to death at that moment in time. Just let that sink in just for a second. Because he was having this nocturnal event going on where maybe he drank too much before he went to bed. Maybe he's scared. Gee, I wonder why. His mom was in another room. He's been moved around throughout the evening because we don't know what had transpired specifically relative to him to maybe have upset his little system. We don't know if perhaps there was ongoing abuse at the hands of this individual that was part of the familial group. But when Adam presents, he wakes up crying, Dave, which a lot of kids do when they're wet to bed. And many times that crying is, first off, there's shame with it, I think, even at three, perhaps.

You know, and how are you going to hide it? You know, and even in a three-year-old's mind, maybe he's been chastised over it. It's not like you necessarily come to him and say, baby, it's okay. We're going to take care of it. We're going to clean you up. We'll change the sheets. It's all right. Everything's going to be okay.

It's not the end of the world. No, instead, you get this reactive event that takes place at the hands of a drunken ex-marine and little adam going back to that tumble dryer he is like he's trapped in this environment just for a moment and he begins to receive the beating of all beatings and this is at fairchild's admission he admits to having done this to this child you have this baby being knocked around he's essentially thrown against a table but before we get right get to that point there's a whole lot that went in yeah there truly is you mentioned waking up crying. The child is crying because he wet the bed and he's faced with a 30-year-old ex-Marine, a drunk ex-Marine.

That's the part that has to be painted properly. You've got a crying child because he wet the bed and a 30-year-old ex-Marine drunk is the one he has to face. there's no comfort there at all uh there's only rage and how do you take the measure that if you're a three-year-old child i don't know i don't really have memories of being three years old i cannot begin to imagine what that horror must have been like for this child was it like a quiet reaction where the storm just kind of gathered and he's drunk he has been debating with this girlfriend's mother about not he wanted to be at his home that night he's the driver behind this and and so the 17 year old agrees but she wants to take care of these babies and make sure that they're okay there's a there's other kids in this scenario. There's two other children. And make sure that they get home. Well, he's already irritated because

potentially he's drunk. He's frustrated by the fact that he's had to go home. People saying, no, you're going to stay here. He gets home. He sees his girlfriend, goes off to bed. So, now you start to put the moves on a 17-year-old. He gets rejected. And he just kind of sits there in his chair or wherever he had parked himself. And he's left alone with his thoughts in an inebriated state. And the next sound that he hears is the sound of crying. And it's Adam adam hoping for help hoping that someone will comfort him maybe for a change extend mercy to him forgiveness for having wet the bed but that's far from what he received As an investigator, you go back and you try to put the pieces in some kind of order so that you can begin

to understand what happened in a very chaotic environment. And you're trying to make sense of it. From a forensic standpoint, you're trying to understand if you have multiple injuries on an individual, kind of what the order of injuries are, the level of what we refer to as the level of potential lethality, what's going to be fatal and what's not going to be fatal or what has less of an opportunity as far as injuries go to be fatal, as opposed to that injury that takes kind of the prime spot in the pecking order. In Adam's case, Dave, there were any number of injuries to kind of select from. The picture is painted. We have a child waking up crying and we have a drunk 30-year-old former Marine. According to his own admission, the first

thing he did, Fairchild, he hit Adam in the face, hit him in the mouth actually and ruptured his lip From there on out it just got worse the crying that began with wetting the bed now became crying over the pain Fear, what does it mean to have a ruptured lip? I'm, so happy you asked this question because in child abuse cases in particular one of the things that we look for is if everybody in the sound of my voice will take the tip of your tongue and there's a little bit of tissue that attaches your lip to your gum you have it both superior and inferior so it's going to be an attachment in the maxillary area where you have your teeth, the top teeth, and then the lower, which is going to be your mandillary teeth.

And that little bit of tissue is called the frenulum. And many times you'll see it with boxers, okay, understandably when I explain this, but you see it with kids. I mean, there's been some people that have speculated over the years that one of the reasons abusers will hit kids in the mouth. And again, I'm getting into the psychology side here, but I'll say this and then I'll kind of end it with this. They say it's a reaction to the aggressor not wanting to hear what is coming out of the child's mouth. And so that frenulum will rupture.

You see it repeatedly in cases of child abuse. what is coming out of the child's mouth. And so that frenulum will rupture. You see it repeatedly in cases of child abuse. And it's a reactive, many times it's a reactive kind of strike that happens. So if you will press, if you can take your upper lip and press it tightly against your maxilla up there, that bit of bone where your maxillary teeth fit in, and you can move it back and forth, that movement that you have either to the left or the right will tear that bit of tissue, and that's a ruptured, that's a ruptured frenulum. You see that, and then of course you can have a ruptured, the actual lip itself, where it's split open. People say, well, I had a busted lip.

That's part of it. But I think probably if I were a betting man, I'd say that the frenula is what they're talking about. And it is reactive. You can learn a lot, I think, about the dynamic of the family. Fairchild could have struck this child anywhere on his body, but he chose that particular location. And what do we know was going on at that moment, Tom? Well, this baby was crying. And I can't say that that necessarily proves this supposition.

They strike the mouth because of this, but it seems like at least one little indicator of what might have been going on. But Dave, that wasn't enough, was it? No. And that's, I will tell you when I was looking at this, a lot of people immediately say, well, if the crying was so loud that Fairchild reacted in this way and hit the child in the mouth, where's the mom? Well, to back up and remember, we had a couple that had been drinking all day and she was now in bed asleep. I was going to say passed out.

We have no proof of that. We just know that she was asleep. Adam's mom was in bed and did not wake up during what began with that smack to the mouth after waking up but then this 30 year old former marine with the three-year-old 24 pound adam what fairchild does next and i guess in his stupor he was trying to quiet him down trying to make him stop crying but everything he did caused more pain and caused him to cry out even more and i wonder joe how do you as the investigator now put all of this together in order of what took place in terms of the beating of adam i mean we know he's passed away or we wouldn't be talking about this right now but you're having to come in and redo the map i guess backwards because

you start with a suspect and you start with the dead three-year-old. How do you now put it in order? Do you use purely what the suspect is telling you and then couple that with what the body is telling you? In this particular case, we have a statement by the perpetrator here. I mean, an actual statement as to what he did to Adam. In cases where you have ongoing abuse or you have an acute event, which I'm still not clear if this was acute. Again, I think I would wager that there

had been something else that had happened prior to this from an abuse standpoint. Many times, we can only base it upon, particularly with child abuse cases, we would base it upon the status of injuries. Are they in an acute phase where it had just happened or is there evidence of healing? Because you'll get this layering that goes on in child abuse cases and elder abuse cases as well, where you'll have injuries that are in various stages of resolving, you know, like bruising when you think about that. But if we're just to look at Adam, Adam's remains and take away from his autopsy, what they concluded, it's really hard to make sense of that. Really, the only thing that you can do is to try to understand how did the tissue react? Because the tissue will respond to trauma was there any evidence that

that this may have happened post-mortem and i can tell you this and this might be one of the more horrific parts to this we do know that in the next step by fairchild's admission he took this baby and he held this kid against a wall heater he took this child and he first pressed this child's chest into the wall heater now something i've learned about this wall heater is that the grate on it had a grid pattern you take a wild guess as to why i know that because that pattern was burned into this child's skin you had it not just anteriorly then that wasn't enough because he took adam and he spun him around and he pressed his bare bottom, his buttocks, up against the same grate and had that same grid pattern on his buttocks. And at autopsy, they concluded that Adam had sustained second-degree burns. When you begin to measure these things out, the doctors, they're incredible people.

If you've never been around a nurse or a doctor that specializes in burns and they work on a burn unit i don't know how they do it i could not do it that's with the living but when we see individuals come into the morgue we have to grade these degrees of burning that exist and we've got essentially these very kind of you'll get these kind of superficial injuries you know with the first degree and that very kind of, you'll get these kind of superficial injuries, you know, with the first degree. And that's kind of like a sunburn, but you start to get into second and you're down into the dermis at that point in time. Skin is highly irritated. It blisters up.

And if there's some kind of transfer, you can pick up patterns like this. And then you go to third degree, which is you've burned down through the dermis now you're starting right on the fringes getting into subcu fat and a lot of people don't realize that there's actually a fourth degree burn that we get off into where you know you begin to talk about skeletal illness being visible but in his case he had second degree burns and it would have been torturous there would have been a pain response that I don't know that many of us could even begin to fathom. We all have touched things that are hot over the course of our lives, haven't we? We've picked up something. Waitress that comes out to our table says, now, sir, don't touch this.

This is really hot. And guess what I do? Inevitably touch the plate or whatever. But in this case, there would have been a tremendous amount of pain that this baby would have been experiencing. He's only three years old. This was not just a conscious effort to cause pain. This goes into that sadistic level of evil to turn a child over and stick him again. Hence our keyword today, tortura. This is torture. And he even admits, you know, he says in his statement that he held him up there. Well, what does that mean? Well, you're having to brace this child against this particular surface that's piping hot.

You know that it's hot. And there would have been just from a reaction, pain response, this child would have tried to get away, would have tried to lift his buttocks off of the surface or remove his chest from being contacted by it. It wasn't enough. Fairchild went on to say that, I just kept hitting him, kept hitting him. And one of the other things that they discovered at autopsy is that Adam's left eardrum was burst, that he ruptured in these strikes. He burst Adam's eardrum. When I think about how a child's eardrum can be ruptured, I think of them putting a pencil or something in their ear. But how would, and that's not what happened. He hit him in the ear.

How does that happen that one can rupture an eardrum merely by hitting them and not on that side of the head? You know, there's an old term that people used to use, and I think we were talking about this before we started taping, that scene in It's a Wonderful Life, where young George goes to see the pharmacist. He thinks the pharmacist has given bad medicine for this family or created, and he gets what's referred to as his ears boxed. And that's where the hand is cupped, and the ear is struck, and that's a pressure response, where the pressure changes so dramatically that the eardrum, this tympanic surface will burst. It'll rupture or tear.

You can get a little hole in it. It's very, very painful. I mean, it is excruciating and this will burst the eardrum but this sounds as though i don't know that this was a boxing of the ears this sounds like this was like kinetic energy where his hand is transferring all of this energy down into the auditory canal which by, by the way, doesn't go straight across our axis. It actually goes in and then down. This force was essentially rained down upon this child's ear, and the eardrum wound up bursting.

And this was discovered at autopsy. They did, obviously, a very thorough autopsy. In this case, they suspected what was going on. I got to tell you, on an aside, with autopsies, we're very thorough in these cases. Most of the time, you're not going to do a deep dissection into the auditory canal. But in this case, they saw something that, and maybe they had this circumstantial information that had come up. Maybe they had the statement. They noted that maybe we need to take a look at this child's inner workings of his ear. And they went in there and happened to find that.

And that's one piece to this that begins to give you an idea as to what Adam had endured. But I think probably in conclusion with this series of trauma this child had sustained, after he's beating him and he says, I just kept hitting him, and he admits to this, he finally threw, and that's his words, threw Adam into the side of a drop-leaf table. And that's where he struck his head. Finally, that final blow. And Adam sunk to the floor at that moment, Tom. And he didn't move. But guess what?

According to Mr. Fairchild, he stopped screaming. He stopped screaming at that moment, Tom. And that child was dead. Despite the best effort of everybody involved in this. And it's at that moment in time, Fairchild finally decides, well, I think I'll go in and I'll wake up my girlfriend. And he went and woke her up and she called 911. And there's nothing that the EMTs could have done for Adam. Adam was dead at that moment in time. Oklahoma executed Richard Stephen Fairchild on his 63rd birthday on November 16th of 2022. He was declared dead at 1024 a.m.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Packs. This is an iHeart Podcast.