Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan:  ALIVE in a Funeral Home

Episode Date: June 16, 2024

Imagine waking up inside a body bag, declared dead and transported to a funeral home, where you find yourself short of breath, BUT STILL BREATHING! In this episode of Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan we will explore something that is happening far more often than you think, people being declared dead, who wake up on a table in a funeral home!  And how to make sure you are not Buried Alive! Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Transcript Highlights  00:00:08 Introduction: worst nightmare come true  00:03:02 Discussion being buried alive   00:07:28 Talk about funeral homes  00:11:49 Discussion of hospice care nursing  00:16:29 Discussion of soldier Battle of the Bulge  00:20:24 Talk about forensic pathology  00:24:46 Discussion of dead body, signs of death  00:28:30 Discussion of death investigation  00:31:34 Talk about people declared dead, waking up in funeral home  00:34:16 Discussion of death and declaring someone dead  00:38:04 Conclusion: cautionary tale, death investigation is important See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. I want to throw a question out there to you. What, in your estimation, is your worst nightmare come true? Now, you know, that statement is so broad, I know. And it can be populated with all manner of horror. I think, for me, I'm horribly claustrophobic and that's something that has happened as a result of

my work that I did for years and years. It's just kind of one of those little adjunct things that comes along with PTSD. I couldn't bear the thought of it. Being locked down, closed in, surrounded by a bunch of people where I couldn't get out. Not being able to breathe. Panicked. Searching for an exit.

Can you imagine waking up in an environment that's not familiar to you? Or perhaps you feel danger. You're panicked. Today we're going to talk about a case that in my estimation is going to talk about a case that, in my estimation, is going to be the stuff of absolute nightmare for many of us. We're going to talk about the death, the resurrection, and the death of Constance Glantz. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Now, we're past Resurrection Sunday, Dave.

Yes, we are. Low these many weeks. You know, Easter has ended, you know, and a great celebration, something I look forward to at my church, you know, every year. However, there are those events involving death that I think that many of us are fearful of. Many people feel very uncomfortable. I've had people actually feel uncomfortable around me. And I'm a pretty approachable guy.

Just merely by virtue of the fact that I'm associated with death. Just my presence makes people uncomfortable. And I've never threatened them or anything like that you know they just they know that i've been around death and that sort of thing but i'm thinking back we were we were kind of talking about this earlier and it it kind of gave me a chuckle uh about the uh the links the links that folks used to go to our ancestors to avoid being buried alive. The term saved by the bell is part of that lore. You're right. And that's not just a teeny bopper TV show from the 90s.

This is there's a reason. Yeah, they used to actually have a bell that was adjacent to a gravesite. And there would be a string that went through a hole in the ground down into the casket. So if the person who had been freshly buried, let's say it that's why were to suddenly awaken yep they could pull on the string and ring the bell um and there were actually also i'll see how can i describe this so the people um there were actually these these horns that came up out of the ground when i say horns they're like megaphones old megaphones that had a cup that you would speak into and it would transmit the sound through the bell that was above ground and people could hear you i hope somebody would hear it yeah no kidding and i

think that they used to actually have a group of people that i don't know the specific name other than maybe grave watchers that would hang out for 24 hours after burial in some circumstances just to guarantee that the person that had been buried was in fact deceased. And this goes back to times when, you know, prior to embalming. Right. All right. Embalming is not something I know we hear about it with the ancient Egyptians and all that sort of thing. It's not something that has been around forever and ever in Western society. OK, so the fact that today we have a case of a lady who was declared dead.

And turned out not to be dead. Right. That's the name of the game right there. And she doesn't really come to in the funeral home, but it was a funeral home worker that essentially saved her life, at least for a very short space of time. Well, all right. Constance Glantz, 74 years old. She was already in a nursing home, extended care, late care, whatever you want to call it, but in a nursing home.

And they were she was on that that zone of life where, yeah, your family has already said their goodbyes. And yeah, end of life care. Yeah, there you go. Thank you. I was trying to come up with end of life where yeah your family's already said their goodbyes and yeah end of life care yeah there you go thank you i was that was trying to come up with end of life care well the staff at the nursing home believed you know the nurse goes in to check on her and doesn't appear to be breathing can't find a pulse and call in the nurse practitioner who comes in i guess and yep she's dead now i don't know if they got a mirror and put it up under her nose or anything like that but she was believed to have passed away at 9 44 a.m because it's in a nursing home in nebraska they don't call the coroner right because it's not a suspicious death it's expected yeah so rather

than a coroner being called in to declare her dead she is sent directly to the funeral home now once she's at the funeral home somebody a worker preparing the funeral i guess man it might not have been for her. You know, they're preparing a funeral generic term there realizes she's breathing. Now, I don't know if she burped, coughed. I don't know what happened, but this worker, thankfully, realized that this woman was breathing. She was still alive. And this is a couple hours after the fact. We're not talking minutes. We're talking a couple hours after she'd been declared dead. The funeral home worker, I don't know what happens after this, Joe. I mean, I don't know the process when you're in the funeral home.

You know, there's several rooms in a funeral home. You know, there are living quarters. There are the areas where they display the deceased for visitation. There's usually a small casket room displaying other caskets that you could purchase at some funeral homes. You have a kitchen area and you have the embalming area. Yeah. The prep room.

Prep room. Yeah. So I don't know. I'm going to assume that she's in the prep room. Yes, that would be where, and they have actually put a dead body in a funeral home. Right.

Exactly. And it has to be done. And it's generally done in a dead body in a funeral home right exactly and it has to be done and it's generally done in a very tasteful sense i i gotta tag i gotta make a confession to you here uh funeral home confessions here we go new tv show brought to you by that's a million dollar idea isn't it um funeral homes creep me out they always have and even even in my in my world which i've spent a lot of time in funeral homes because I've actually had to go there after the fact to conduct examinations on bodies before we actually say, okay, we're going to go ahead and say, you know, you can proceed with the preparation of the body. And of course, I've been there, unfortunately, many times for people that I've known and loved that have passed away. But there's something about the artificial nature of it, the manufactured ambiance, if

you will, the creepy lighting, the music, the PowerPoint, all of that stuff, even the way the place smells. It's just it's not my it's not someplace that I look forward to going to at any point in time, even as a forensic scientist. And I've been to prep rooms over the years where bodies are in various states of the prep, pre-embalming and post-embalming, and certainly in the midst of the embalming. Part of me was fascinated by that because I wanted to see how the who is there, who is getting ready. Now, just keep in mind that is getting ready to essentially profuse the body with embalming fluid because that's the next step. You have to do that. And what do they notice? Well, they notice that the chest

is apparently rising and falling, that Constance's chest is apparently rising and falling, giving an indication that she still has life. And you talk about being in an odd space. Here you are,

you normally are taking care of individuals' mortal remains. But I can, and again, I'm superimposing my thoughts upon this. They started CPR on her, Dave. And while they were doing CPR, they were, I can't even begin to imagine what was going through their minds at this moment in time. And they had said that they started CPR. And I'm thinking, well, if she's breathing, if you notice she was breathing, why are you doing CPR?

But they did call 911 and 911 came to the facility. So that's kind of a weird bit there for me to try to understand. Why would they do CPR on an old lady? I have no idea. Because if the chest is rising and falling, that's an indication that life is still indwelling. So maybe she saw the breathing and then realized that she stopped breathing. And she may have. But, you know, when you have people now, let's keep in mind, Constance was in a nursing home, but she's also been identified as a hospice patient.

Right. Now, you can have a whole wing of a nursing facility that is devoted to hospice care. And these patients are completely different than the rest of the population that indwells a facility. And these facilities sometimes can be massive. So, they're providing what is referred to as palliative care. Palliative care is you're making the individual comfortable in the last, the final weeks or days, maybe months, I don't know. It's hard to say, leading toward their end. And it's called palliative care. I always thought that just meant that you were giving them friendly care, but I guess

you are being a pal, you know? Well, palliative, yeah, it has kind of a different, yeah, it kind of does, but it does have a different connotation here. And here's the thing, you mentioned the coroner, and I want to get back to this very quickly because i think that many folks assume that every time someone dies the coroner is is notified or the coroner slash medical examiner and that is not the case the law dependent upon the state that you're in has a uh have had pretty pretty uh have pretty specific rules about when the medical legal authorities are notified, but almost across the board. If you have an attended death with a care provider present or approximating the body, they've got a history of some kind of illness that is either terminal

or could be a terminal, leading up to a terminal event. It can be documented. Sometimes those cases are not reportable. And take it another step with hospice deaths, those are never reportable to the coroner. And so they do fly beneath the radar many times. So there wouldn't be a need if someone passes away in a hospital, I mean, in a hospice situation, there wouldn't be a need to contact us. And you never know, first off, what has brought the person to the nursing home facility to begin with. Now, maybe they sustained trauma many, many years ago. Can I tell you a

quick story that's kind of fascinating? I actually did an autopsy on a guy that went into a nursing facility, his first nursing facility that we could make note of was, I think, in 1948. I did his autopsy. I assisted in his autopsy in 1989. And he had come in paralyzed below the waist. Okay. Now, you say, well, all the way back in the 40s, why in the world would you do an autopsy on somebody like that?

You want to hear something really amazing? This young man had participated in the Battle of the Bulge. Oh, wow. He sustained a rifle wound to his abdomen. And I actually, I'm actually the person that went into his spine with striker saw and recovered that projectile. And did you know that after all of those years, the pathologist that I was working with, they ruled his manner of death as a homicide. And I'll never forget this.

This stands out in my mind so much. Two parts of this. The fact that when we removed that projectile, I was holding in my hand literally a piece of history because this projectile had last been touched and loaded into the weapon of probably some young German soldier in the Wehrmacht that was at the Battle of the Bulge and had fired that rifle and struck this equally young soldier in the abdomen and started this chain of events that led to his death decades later. And I held that projectile in my hand. I'll never forget.

It was like one of those moments where you're touching history. But it kind of have cause and effect there. And that they did report that death to us. And we wanted to examine him because we they told us he still has a bullet in it. But many times and I guess he could have gone on to hospice maybe but in most states when you have somebody that is in hospice care those are not going to be reportable to the coroner and in constant's case she had they had diagnosed her she's on if she is on hospice, which we are discovering here, then she would be in kind releasing her body to a funeral home where she's going to be prepared to be buried? You know, they say that if you see a cardinal in your yard, that's a visitation. That's a messenger sent by God, perhaps even to give an indication that you have a loved one. You're talking about the red birds, right?

The red birds, yeah. Okay, I was thinking, because don't Catholics have cardinals and others? Yeah, yeah. It's an ecclesiastical post, and it's a high-ranking priest, the College of Cardinals. But those are nouns, aren't they? We have something in death investigation that is actually an adjective. And so, it means for us, we have what are referred to, Dave, as the cardinal signs of death. And it's one of the little lists that we go down to assess deceased individuals.

When you begin to look at subjects at the scene, the first thing you need to do is try to validate your presence at the scene. Why am I here? You're calling me out because you have determined that this individual is dead. You might be saying they're dead, but let me tell you something. I'm going to prove to myself that they are in fact deceased no longer existing in this realm have you ever been called out to a dead body that wasn't dead not me okay not me however however when i was in atlanta and this is gonna right blow you away one of my colleagues was and i'll give you the quick quick thumbnail here this colleague of mine who was a really old death investigator even he was much older at this period

of time and this guy was highly experienced he had been a homicide detective in atlanta and he gets called out to what is the police are reporting as a suicide and it is a gentleman that has killed himself in a bathtub by by slashing his wrist and the bathtub is full of warm water it's up to the very top and it is tinged with red blood, guy's nude in a bathtub and his hands are resting on the sides of the tub and his, both of the, the wrist are slit. And this investigator with our office went over, walked over to the body and starts taking, this is back in the days when we still did Polaroid snapshots and 35

millimeter, but we'd also do Polaroids for quick reference. This is before in the days when we still did Polaroid snapshots and 35 millimeter. We'd also do Polaroids for quick reference. This is before digital cameras. And so he's snapping Polaroid photographs. And he had brought along a physician that was in training with him to become a forensic pathologist. This individual walked over, had their gloves on, knelt next to the tub. And when they went to reach for the body to do their examination, the dead guy's hand went up in the air like this at the wrist. It bent at the wrist and went up. And this individual turned to the investigator and said, this guy's alive.

Now, this is in a bloody bathtub. This is a monumental failure on the part of the paramedics. To a lesser degree, the police, because the police are not really there to assess death. The EMTs had come out. And, you know, what we determined at that point in time was that because of the supersaturation that was surrounding the body, they, and you know what they say about assume, they assumed that they were dead, but they didn't want to put their hands in the bloody water. Isn't that something? Well, the investigator, whom I'd mentioned, was a former police officer. He goes outside of the apartment, and there's a cop standing post at the door.

And he starts, as we say down in the South, he starts giving him down in the country. He's yelling and screaming at this cop. He's up in his face like a Marine Corps DI. And he's saying, get the wagon back out here immediately. I want you to know in that particular case, the wagon did roll back out. The ambulance did. It wasn't the same crew. They're probably hiding under a rock.

Right. They pulled that guy out of the water. They saved that guy's life. Wow. They stitched him up, transfused him, put him on the psych unit. He got healthy. Wow. And he went on with his life. I don't know whatever became of him. But those things do happen. And for us, we're looking for the cardinal signs of death in forensics. Let me run some of these down for you. And I want people to understand this. This is one of the things we do as death investigators to try to assess. And this was not done with constants, I don't think.

We look for, first off, is there a palpable pulse? You can check the carotid in the neck. You can check the radial pulse in the wrist. You can check the brachial pulse, which is if you stick your finger between your bicep on the medial aspect of it and press in, you can feel a pulse stronger there below your bicep on the inner portion of your bicep, much better than you can the radial pulse in your wrist. You know, they always show people holding the wrist. You can feel it a lot better at the brachial. You can even do a femoral palpitation. That's a bit more difficult. So, you're looking for a pulse or an absence thereof. You're also looking for absence of respiration. And so, how do you do that? Well, if you don't have a stethoscope handy where you can hear breath sounds, you can actually get down to the level of the body

so that you're even with their chest, they're in your eyeline, and you can look and see if the chest is rising and falling. Now, you had mentioned a mirror earlier. There are some people that, you know, fog in the mirror is what it's called. Do they fog the mirror? I've never come across anybody that assesses that way. I'm assuming that it has been done at some point in time. Another thing you look for is non-responsiveness to what we refer to as painful stimuli. And if you've ever seen somebody that is passed out and you're around the EMTs that are assessing them, you'll see them do a sternal rub.

That's where they take their knuckles, and it's very painful. They'll press down on the sternum and rub vigorously, and you're going to wake up relative to that. You can even with gloved hand, you can even touch the eyeball and there's, there's a reflex that occurs in that, that you're going to respond where the person will blink from an evidentiary standpoint. It's not really a good idea. And of course, we look for things like obvious signs of decomposition. We also look for, you know, if they've got a foul odor and skin is changing color, you know, you can pretty much say that the person's probably passed on to their reward at that time. And we also look for things in the immediate, like

rigidity with rigor mortis and all those sorts of things, post-mortem lividity. But just the part of the rising and falling of the chest, the absence of a heartbeat, and non-responsiveness to painful stimuli, those are just three in the immediate that you could do. Now, there are people that are in such a state and they're in hospice care where they're kind of in that lingering, that kind of twilight zone, if you will, where they're almost comatose. And you might not be able to fully appreciate the status of the individual at that particular time. And that can be problematic, I would assume, because the individual is not, in fact, demonstrating any kind of life signs. But with Constance, she rolled out of the door on a gurney. Now, keep in mind,

on a gurney, Dave, that's either placed into a van or a hearse. I can't believe this. And carted off to the local funeral home. And where they're going to prep her. That's a lot of people involved in her transportation. Oh, my gosh. You nailed it. Nobody taking a close look because she's at a nursing home.

It's end-of-life care. They call it. Nobody taking a close look because she's at a nursing home. It's end of life care. They call us. She's passed away. And you go there and gently, respectfully, you're I would, you know, again, that assume you're basing your activity on those that preceded you by calling and saying we have an elderly woman who has passed away. No need to call the coroner. Just take her to you know mulberry funeral home or no it's mulberry nursing home is where she was take her to the funeral home now they were very specific that she passed away they declared her at 9 44 a.m my first thought on this

joe was andy griffith really yep andy griffith passed away on the outer banks of North Carolina, and he died at about 730 that morning and they held his burial within five hours. life plan he was not embalmed and i don't believe there is a state of the union that actually requires embalming but in this particular case he was not embalmed he was having breakfast with his wife at 7 15 7 30 he's dead before lunch he's in the ground and my thought was this what if he was just lightly breathing you know and? And anyway, so that was, again, my thought was, I hope he was really dead. Yeah, no, isn't that a horrifying thought? You know, because one of the things that you, I think, that is conjured up in our minds, and we hear this, and you've seen it in movies before. As a matter of fact, I think in the original Brendan Fraser mummy movie, they showed the interior of a sarcophagus and there were scratch marks on the interior of the sarcophagus. No way, man.

And so that generates kind of this unease, if you will. Yeah, thing? Yeah, exactly. And you really wonder if this has, in fact, happened before. But we have to say that you never know what's waiting around the corner in any death investigation. It doesn't necessarily have to be some big trauma event because I know from my experience, surprises await us around every corner. I want to ask you a question, Dave. What do you think? What do you think my biggest fear was when I was working in the morgue?

Oh, dead person waking up. Yeah, to a certain degree. My biggest fear was that, and I actually had this as a nightmare, a reoccurring nightmare. And I think that it was just maybe the mathematical probability had entered into my brain. I had an absolute terror of holding a number 22 scalpel in my hand, which is generally what I did autopsies with, which is a blade size, by the way. I was going to ask you because you say number 22. You may as well say number 14 millimeter socket. They come in a variety of sizes.

But anyway, it had the most utility for my purpose. And when I make that initial incision, which is the Y incision, it starts at the apex of the shoulders, that it would not be blood that would come out of the incision in a seeping kind of way. It would be an arterial spray. I always had that dream, that reoccurring dream. And, you know, you hear all of these stories, Dave, because, you know, our history is populated by these things. I mean, it really is. They don't happen with great frequency where somebody does, in fact, wake up in the morgue.

But there are those cases out there. I think you had mentioned there's one just in the past year. There have been three in U.S. nursing homes in the last year. And in one case, the nursing home was fined $10,000. And it was in Iowa where it, granted now, this was a woman who was in end of life care. She had dementia and was suffering from Alzheimer's, but she was only 66 years old, Joe. And she was determined to be dead. And in this particular case, staff members at the Glen Oaks Alzheimer's Special Care Center reported that she had passed away about 6 a.m.

As I mentioned, she had early onset dementia and anxiety and depression. She had a number of issues for being in this hospice care. And a staff member reported that she could no longer feel the woman's pulse and alerted in this case iowa a nurse practitioner can declare a mega death declaration and it's different in every state as to who actually can do this and iowa law allows nurses uh physicians assistants addition to doctors to declare a patient dead. In this case, it was a nurse practitioner who declared the woman dead. About 90 minutes, Joe, 90 minutes after she was declared dead, she was taken to the funeral home and crematorium in a zipped body bag, in a zipped body bag.

When she arrives at the funeral home they unzipped her and somebody saw her chest was moving and she gasped for air i bet she did she was in a body bag joe yeah oh my goodness yes terrifying stuff and uh they called 9-1-1 yeah well i'm glad they did, because, you know, in Constance's case, you know, full reveal here, she didn't make it through the day. You know, she was transported to the hospital, and she's fragile to begin with, obviously, if she's in hospice care and palliative care. And so I don't know that she mercifully ever regained consciousness. But right now, I think my thoughts kind of move toward the family.

They're having to process all of this coming in you know because okay so let's just say and this is the way it would happen she passes away at uh at this nursing home as soon as she she passes away there's a mechanism that goes into place. The family is notified. Now, as you said, if she's in hospice status, the family, this is not unexpected, right? So, can you imagine this scenario? You're the family. You get the call that Constance has passed on. Okay. Well, in hospice care, what's mandated and in any nursing home, many times,

they will have a designated funeral home that's already in your chart. Okay. So, just so that you understand that, the family would have said, okay, well, go ahead, call the funeral home. We have it listed down there. They call the funeral home. Funeral home comes and picks up Constance, okay? Now, we don't know how her body was prepped because in certain hospitals and facilities, what they'll do is they'll use what's called a morgue pack. A morgue pack is not a body bag. It is a plastic wrapping that goes around the body and it has strings with it where you can tie the body off. It's tied around the neck and it's tied around the waist. It's tied around the feet and it almost looks like

kite string that comes in this thing. And they'll be placed onto a gurney, and they will be covered. Have you ever seen those coverings that funeral homes use? They look like carpet. They're furry-looking. And in grand calligraphy, embroidery calligraphy along the side, it'll have the logo of the funeral home on this thing, and they're pushing it. You see it at crime scenes many times. People that use contractors like this, they'll be be pushing the body so that's the way this would

have gone down and then they they because most nursing home facilities don't have morgues so they the funeral home literally comes to the room removes the body off of the bed, places the body onto the gurney, covers it in this thing that identifies the funeral home, goes down the hallway, places the body in the back of the hearse. And it could be a van. And then they drive off. But then. There's more to the story. But wait, there's more. The family has to now deal with a phone call.

And where does this phone call come from? Does it come from the workers at the funeral home? Probably not. They're going to get a funeral. The family would then get a phone call from the local emergency room, perhaps the charge nurse. And they're calling to say, hey, look, this is so-and-so with, you know, the local general hospital. Your loved one is here. We're trying to save her life.

And the family's thinking, oh, my gosh. Well, wait, we were told she was dead. You got the right person? Yeah. And then why are you calling us? And so that's the kind of thing that. That would be just devastating. It is.

And, and that's, you know, this brings us back to the cardinal signs of death, you know, with Constance in this particular case, the fact that the level of attention that is actually required in something like this is not attended to perhaps. And it's not the hospice staff that pays the price for it because yeah, they're, they're providing care. But I doubt that, you know, anybody at the nursing home actually sat around and celebrated holidays with Constance over the entirety of her life or laughed with her or cried with her or celebrated life with her. It's the family at the end of the day that where this really comes into play. And it's I think that it is a cautionary tale. And I'm so sorry that the family went through this.

But again, as we always say, you know, the devil is, in fact, in the details and particularly when it comes to a death investigation, it's important to remember, never, ever assume anything. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.