Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: An Unthinkable Execution - The America Thayer Case

Episode Date: July 9, 2023

In this episode of Body Bags, hosts Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the tragic saga of America Thayer, a domestic violence victim from Minnesota, whose horrific demise parallels historical methods of capital punishment. They explore the gruesome details of her death, shedding light on a disturbing trend of bystander apathy in today's digital world, the intricate mysteries of the crime scene, the decoding of brutal injury patterns inflicted by seemingly innocuous farming tools, and the critical role that evidence preservation plays in court.  Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Time-codes:  00:00: Introduction. 00:35: King Charles I. 01:35: Decapitation as a homicide method. 02:35: Joe’s experiences with complex cases involving dismemberments. 04:56: America Thayer's abusive relationship. 07:45: Jo reveals the shocking public execution details of America Thayer, drawing historical parallels. 10:00: Afternoon timing of the crime and its filming by bystanders. 13:42: Machete's typical uses, design, and historical agricultural significance. 15:30: How the murder and decapitation could have occurred within a car's confined space. 18:35: The systematic procedure of crime scene documentation. 19:20: The gruesome crime scene specifics inside America Thayer's car. 23:10: Was America Thayer dead before decapitation? 24:20: Explanation of the morgue process: including body cleaning and external injury identification. 26:45: The role of autopsy photographs in court proceedings. 27:15: America Thayer’s cause of death. 31:50: National Domestic Violence Hotline: [phone] or visit thehotline.org. 32:20: Outro of the episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. My wife says I've got a lot of useless information in my brain. And she doesn't necessarily say that in a disparaging manner. Particularly, it comes in handy when we go to do trivia. And it's something I enjoy. And I love to read. And particularly, I love to read about history.

I'm thinking we have just had coronation, or the Brits have, as I'm laying the sound down right now. And I believe it's King Charles III, if I'm not mistaken. And here's the thing about it. There's another king of England that I find far more fascinating. He came along at a very crucial time period when there was great turmoil in Great Britain over religion. His name was Charles I. I've been fascinated by him because he didn't seem like necessarily a brutal dictator or anything, but he died very brutally. He was actually publicly executed, and when he was executed, he died as a result of an executioner wielding a large bladed instrument over his head. It hung in the air for a moment, and it fell upon his neck and separated his head from his shoulders. Today on Body Bags, I'm actually going to chat about a cause of death that to this point

I have yet to address, and that is a homicide by means of decapitation. Today we're going to talk about the homicide of America Thayer out of Minnesota. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. My buddy Dave Max joining me right now. Dave, how you doing, man? So far, so good. A little curious as to why we're going to do this story, though. Oh, yeah? Why is that? Well, all right, there's a whole lot to it. And when I say there's a whole lot to it, there's a lot of background. But when you come right down to the body bags portion of it, I'm asking this because I don't know, Joe, but is this one where you have to use two bags?

And I'm not being funny. Yeah. No, people have asked me that. Okay. I've had cases generally involving blast trauma, airplane crashes, every now and then a car crash where I've had to use bags, plural, in order to facilitate collection of remains. But most of the time those remains, and I remember one plane crash in particular that had multiple victims where we had these bodies that were just so devastated. At the time, we couldn't say, well, in the field, we couldn't say, well, this arm belongs with this body because they were so mangled. And so we would just organize the anatomic elements as best we could and then take these items back to the morgue and try to marry them up accordingly. I've had traumatic decapitations. Most of the time, these are involving motor vehicle accident. There's that classic scene, I think it's the movie, which one

is it? The Omen, the original Omen, where you have the photographer that is decapitated by a piece of glass. I've had motor vehicle accidents where you have something that will pass through a windshield because you have a victim that's in a static position. They're driving a vehicle, they're seated in a vehicle, their head is literally separated from their body. I don't recall ever working a homicide where the cause of death has been listed as a decapitation. It just kind of sets this apart, I think, in all of the cases that we've discussed on body bags. We actually are dealing with a domestic violence situation, Joe. The end result is part of the story, and it's why we're doing this. But the reality is. This is a domestic violence story that dated back several years.

The couple had been dating for seven years. And in that time period, they'd had multiple run-ins with police because America Thayer was in trouble with her boyfriend for whatever reason. And as a matter of fact, on the day that this took place, they were on their way to court. America Thayer's boyfriend, they had an argument. 911 was called. The police show up and there was a standoff at their apartment. And so he set their apartment on fire to try to get the cops to leave. And that was a domestic violence situation that kept, it was just going out of control. That's actually why they were headed to court that day

when all this happened. So we have several different police interactions with this couple and with America Thayer being, oh, and I don't want to say typical because that's so wrong, but she was the battered spouse. Even after all of the different things went on with police, America Thayer wrote the court a handwritten letter asking them to get rid of a no contact order because her boyfriend slash abuser didn't speak English. He was from Cuba and he needed her to help him. The no contact order was put in place so he couldn't get near enough to hurt her. And she wrote the personalized handwritten letter to the court asking that the no contact order be removed. And it was. Yeah. And it goes on for so long. And we hear so many of these cases. And by the way, just a little aside, I've seen the end result over the course of my career, what happens when these cases go on for a protracted period of time.

And I know our friend, Nancy Gray, she has a real special place in her heart for victims of domestic violence. And while I've got everybody's attention, there is actually a National Domestic Violence Hotline, and that number is 1-800-799-7233. Or you can go to their website, which is just simply thehotline.org. And if you or any of your friends are suffering in a situation like this, check them out and see if they can come up with some resources for you. But in this case, this has gone on, Dave, if I'm not mistaken, for at least a decade, perhaps a little bit more. And you've got this comfort level of escalation. You allow that old saying, give them an inch, they take a mile, give them a rope, they think they're a cowboy. And it just continues to replicate or increase in intensity, this sort of thing. And what's really sad about

America is that we find she was well-loved actually worked for My Pillow Company up in Minnesota. Her co-workers were just absolutely heartbroken when they found out about this case because I think the level of violence in this particular case is so over the top that it's hard for people to comprehend. Firearms and those sorts of things are difficult as well. But when you start to talk about decapitation, most of the time when you and I have a discussion on body bags about decapitation, it's an adjunct to dismemberment. We've covered, it seems like we've been watching dismemberment cases for some reason, just in the recent months, where people are trying to take apart a body in order to dispose of it. That's not the case here. This case actually

centers around America being not in a private spot, just keep this in mind, but in a very public location where she was decapitated in front of witnesses. I'd mentioned early on about Charles I. He was publicly beheaded, and this is something that has gone on for thousands of years as a form of execution. You know, the French allegedly perfected the process of decapitation vis-a-vis the guillotine. And they had actually had, well, their last, I think, public guillotining had taken place like back in the 20s. I remember for some reason seeing a still image of this event having taken place. And I've seen images of the fellow's body. And that was the last public one.

And I think that they were still using the methodology. I think their last one was either like in 76 or 77, but it was done in a sequestered area. And so it has still continued. There have been a number of public executions around the world. The Middle East countries, some of them still use beheading as a way of public execution. When you begin to think about this area that this took place up in Minnesota, it's a rather nice area, families, neighborhood, this sort of thing. And I can't begin to imagine what it would be like to be outside your home and actually have this thing happening before you. It has to be one of those

moments like, am I actually, you're frozen for a be one of those moments like am i actually you're frozen for a moment and you're thinking am i actually witnessing this is this actually happening and then your fears are certainly confirmed i think while this was taking place there were witnesses it took place at 2 30 in the afternoon but beyond that people were videotaping in this day and age where we all almost all of us have a cell phone that has a camera and the ability to upload things online for whatever reason to document every aspect of our life. Instead of helping this situation, you have, but you're watching a person who is obviously being beaten. You have a man standing outside a Chrysler 300, I believe. They're parked in a residential area.

I'm looking at a picture of it right now of where this took place. And the man is beating. You don't know that the victim is male or female. They're in the front seat of the car, but they're taking a pounding. And rather than go to the aid of who is being beaten and try to put a stop to this, pull out your phone and start videotaping. And as this crime takes place, you decide to videotape the entire thing and then upload this for all the world to see.

It is the most graphic, gruesome video I've ever seen. And all I could think of, Joe, is are we trained monkeys that instead of trying to help, we think about how can I take advantage of this? Yeah, it seems like it. Sometimes the monsters out among us are not necessarily the ones wielding the weapons, are they? And the word that comes to mind is interdiction. And it's easy to say, well, you know what? That's something that the police should do. It's old, it's time. People say, I don't want to get involved. You wanted to get involved, but you wanted to get involved from a videography standpoint. That's the road that you chose. You

were not compelled toward the action. You were not motivated to interdict. And maybe, I don't know, they thought that they were going to take a beating if they ran over and interdicted instead of videotaping. Our reactive mind seems to be in neutral, stuck in neutral for some reason because of these things that we carry in our pockets with us everywhere and that we have to push it out there. It's brutal at every level. And I know DA will be very pleased that they have a videotape of this when trial comes about because this is something you're documenting an actual homicide. She was initially, from my understanding, the perpetrator was standing outside of the door. for some reason he had a dumbbell in his hand just imagine this he had taken the dumbbell and had begun to beat her in the chest with it apparently and then there was a head strike the witnesses said they saw him produce a large knife at that moment in time. And I think knife actually translates into machete.

And for those that are not familiar with a machete, it's a single-edged weapon. It's got a very heavy spine on it. And the reason machetes are built like they are and constructed like they are, they have been used for years and years, particularly, I think, in the Philippines. Those individuals down there used them as weapons. but they were also used as a farming tool. And do you know specifically what crop they were used with, Dave, famously? I would think sugarcane. Yeah, you're absolutely, you're right on the money. Yeah. And, you know, coming from South

Louisiana, they grow a lot of sugarcane down there, and they were used to harvest sugar cane with. So, you can take it and the weight of this blade and how it's constructed, and the cutting edge is very long on this thing. It's not the same length as, say, for instance, as a sword, but it's certainly bigger than what people might think of a bowie knife. And you can wield it and swing it almost like a bat, if you will, and chop with it. So it's a chopping instrument that can, you know, you can put a very fine edge on it and slice right through sugarcane. If anybody has ever had any experience with sugarcane or maybe even bamboo, you know that it's very resilient. It's very tough. And so they had to create this blade

in order to facilitate this. Machetes are very popular in the Caribbean as well. Cuba, they grow a lot of sugar cane there. And so, you know, they're used worldwide and some people carry them as a defense tool. My father, I even remember, sent home when he was in the Philippines, he was in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam era and sent home a machete to me as a little boy. And it had a handle that was carved out. What I was told was the second hardest wood in the world and some wood called monkey wood, and it was black. The color of the wood is actually black and very resilient, had a brass handle on it i'm concerned about the area

and not concerned that's wrong term i'm thinking about person here the victim uh america in the car he's already beaten her with the dumbbell and now he's got the machete and he's going to decapitate her we already covered this at the beginning so I'm not throwing out anything you don't already know. But I'm trying to picture how he could get the momentum, the power necessary to swing the machete to be able to decapitate her in the area provided. I was thinking the same thing. Because, you know, the way the witnesses have described this, and if anybody at home, I mean, you can do this at home. You know, you just go and visualize with your vehicle, a sedan perhaps. It doesn't have to be a sedan, but I think this is a Chrysler 300. So, it's a four-door car.

If she's positioned in the front seat, the momentum that it would take, the velocity that would have to be generated in a very short stroke because it would be a short stroke, but you're inhibited because your arm has a certain length to it and you add this long blade. You couldn't do this in one fell swoop. People would say, well, I have a knife that's so sharp it'll cut through anything. Yeah, but still, you're not just talking about simply cutting a piece of paper here. You're talking about multiple layers of tissue, soft tissue. And then you're talking about going through the spinal processes in the back of the neck.

How long, I think, did this take? And that would be something that would have to be assessed in the morgue. I do know this, though, Dave, that when this happened, not only did these people that were bearing witness to this event see America brutalized. You know what they saw next? Her bloody body being drug from the car by the perpetrator, placed on the ground. And then the same individual grabbed her head that was now removed from her body and laid it immediately adjacent to her bloodied corpse outside of that vehicle. I never really minded working really bloody scenes within structures, within homes. Certainly, I didn't mind working them outdoors. Being a forensic investigator, a death investigator specifically, you have to document the environment.

But you know, Dave, one of the things that I never really ever got used to was climbing inside of a vehicle. I never liked it because it's constricting. there's nowhere let's say for instance you're standing at a crime scene where you have remains that are in a living room or you're outside of a home in an open field you can kind of orbit around the specific area where everything has taken place you have a kind of freedom of movement you can take your photographic images we follow the points of compass. That's kind of how you do it from macro to micro. And you do all the points, kind of 360 degrees all the way around the body. And then you tighten in and you do that again. And then you do the same process with looking for trace evidence and all these other things. You're documenting bloodstain, the dynamic, what kind of dynamic you're looking at and this sort of thing.

But when you're inside of a car, I always felt like I was going to miss something, you know, because there's so many little hidden areas, little grooves, contours, and you never can quite get positioned in there. And this one other element, particularly as it applies to America's homicide, is that it would have been absolutely bathed in blood in that environment. The shocking part of this, as we've talked about it, saw something taking place, that a 911 call would be made saying, this is going on and there are two guys running towards the action. That would be the appropriate 911 call. Now, that's not what happened. There's a call that came in at 231 to 911. It was a female. The perpetrator of this crime was supposed to be in court that day for a previous attack on his significant other, America Thayer. And he was refusing to go to court. They had a friend in the car with him and he gave witness to this argument that took place. Now that was it between 2 PM and

2 31. We go from, he won't go to court. America is crying because he won't go to court and he's going to have to go to jail now. And again, she's crying for her abuser. If you're in an abusive relationship, get out. She's crying for her abuser because he won't go to court. She doesn't want to go to jail. He gets mad at her. The friend gets out of the car and that's where we see them together in a neighborhood. Broad daylight, Alexis Subrit gets out of the car and starts pounding away at America Thayer. He first uses a dumbbell, then breaks out the machete. 911 gets a call of a knife stabbing, but at 2.31, a 911 call is placed by a woman who is right there at the scene. This is happening in front of her house.

She reports that a male, a man, has just pulled a body out of his car and it has no head. The 911 caller said the male got out of the car, was chopping at something in the car with a huge knife, tossed the knife into the grass, took what looks like a head with hair out of the car, threw it on the ground, then pulled the body out of the car. The man is then described as heading eastbound down an alleyway, and she described the man as wearing a white t-shirt and a hat that is the exact description of an eyewitness account of what took place on that day and it sounds like something out of a horror flick it does you have visions of somebody in some horrible mask wielding a machete is what and's what, you know, what really struck me the most is not necessarily the level of

gore, perhaps, we're staying in the horror vein here, is the fact that he began hoofing it away from the location. That tells me, Dave, that there's an awareness on his part that he's done wrong. Now, what do you do, Joe, as an investigator, as a forensic investigator? Where do you start with this? Because you've got to determine so many things about this. I mean, it's obvious there's a body with no head, but you have to put this back together in such a way that in court it can be laid out for the average person to understand what took place and who is truly at fault.

I don't even know where you begin with that. I am curious though, do you start with determining was she dead before her head was severed? That's going to track back to the morgue when her remains are finally examined there in ideal circumstances. The ideal circumstances of lighting, where you have all of the instruments that you're going to need, chief among them is x-ray. I think in order to not just examine, but to document, it's very difficult to do this at the scene, I think, as accurately as you could back at the morgue. Here's the thing. We've got two weapons involved here, and they will both have been collected at the scene. Here's something thing. We've got two weapons involved here, and they will both have been

collected at the scene. Here's something that folks might not know. Did you know that even in homicides, if you have a good relationship, if the police, the police investigators have a good relationship with the ME, and this is just one of the reasons you need to play nice with one another in our field, the ME, the pathologist specifically, will say, look, y'all please bring the weapon to the morgue. And one of the reasons that you do that, because generally the police will collect, say for instance, the aforementioned dumbbell that was utilized. They collect that independent of the body. Now, if you have a knife sticking out of the body, first off, you never remove the knife.

You know, that's something that will be collected at autopsy. But in this case, you would have had these two elements of the dumbbell as well as the edged weapon, this machete. So, when you get them back to the morgue and the police can bring those along, what will happen is that after the bodies are cleaned, or in this case, America's remains would have been cleaned, you're going to look for patterns externally on the body. What are the patterns going to tell you? Well, you can have patterns with the dead, okay? But what the dead do not produce are contusions because the dead don't have the ability to hemorrhage. With these bruises and with overlying abrasions, you can actually, let's say, if you think about the shape of a dumbbell, many dumbbells today have flat surfaces all the way around the circumference of both of the weighted ends and so if you're

striking somebody with that it will leave a very distinctive pattern that's going to have edges and margins and all those sorts of things and what we will do many times is take the alleged weapon and have it immediately adjacent to a contusion and take a micro photograph of that at autopsy. And it demonstrates kind of a pairing up of these items, you know, where you can actually see, oh, okay, I can draw this conclusion now. I've got this kind of, I don't know what it would be, an octagonal shape on the end of it where it's got eight sides, perhaps. You can see the edges in the contusion might very well match that pattern. That's important because when you get into court, now you have eyewitnesses

that are saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. I saw this man, the accused, wielding this dumbbell at first, and he's pounding her with it. I saw that. He puts the dumbbell down, then he picks up this blade, and the next thing I know, I see him chopping, you know, as you stated. And you get the pathologist on the stand. And the attorney during the examination will say, listen, doctor, we've had previous testimony here that said that they witnessed this dumbbell being utilized to beat America as she's sitting in the seat. Do you see evidence of that? And it's at that point in time. That's why autopsy photographs are so important.

You say, oh, yeah, well, as demonstrated here, you can see we have the alleged weapon here, this dumbbell. And do you see how these margins kind of match this pattern? And he'll go into great description relative to that. Here's one of the underlying things that you have to consider. You might have contusions related to this beating event, but what do you have that demonstrates that she was still alive at the time her decapitation took place? And that's key because, Dave, I'll go ahead and bury the lead here and say that her cause of death is not blunt force trauma.

Her cause of death is listed as decapitation. So, this is going to require kind of a layered dissection of the skin where these chop because, and this is key as well, because horror movies just a moment ago where, you know, you think about these movies where this monster will wield a weapon and the head will go flying off in one. That's not what happened here. You're talking about an individual that's using this weapon in order to chop with. So, for every chop, if she is still alive, guess what you're going to have? You're going to have hemorrhage in that wound. There's a high probability that every time this individual chops, they're not striking the same edged weapon injury that they did initially. So, you might have a strike.

They draw back, again, confined quarters. Remember what we were talking about in the car. And then they drive it home again, and they might be approximating that area, but they're never going to match that up. So you get like the first strike. Maybe you're looking at it. It's hard to tell the order, but I can tell you this. If you have one strike and you've got hemorrhage in that first area of insulted tissue,

you know that we're alive there. You got any hemorrhage in the next one? Yeah, yeah, there's hemorrhage here. You get down to the third or the fourth, there's no longer any hemorrhage in the next one? Yeah, yeah, there's hemorrhage here. You get down to the third or the fourth, there's no longer any hemorrhage. And then suddenly, the head is off the body. He's removed and she's dead at that period of time. But this is the really gruesome part about it. Unless she was unconscious, and we know that he struck her in the head, and you could tell that, I think, based upon how extensive the hemorrhage was in the brain from

the dumbbell strike. She may have had an awareness that this was happening to her. It's so very troubling. When everything is said and done, you have eyewitness testimony, obviously, but you've also got the video that somebody took instead of providing help. And I'm sure that helped prosecution as well. When everything is said and done in court, his defense was that she was the troublemaker and she was breaking up with him. I mean, it's crazy that you actually have, how do you defend this per, you know, but I know it's the court system anyway. Yeah, he's guilty.

The shocking matter is that there was any, that we had to go through all the court process. The man chopped her head off in broad daylight after beating her with a dumbbell. How is it possible that we have to consider this? I think what's really telling here, Dave, is the fact that not only was he found guilty, this Alexis Sabaret,

not only was he found guilty, but he was, Dave, actually found guilty of premeditated. I was going to ask you about that, Joe. It was first degree premeditated murder. How is it that they could determine that when it took place in a car after he beat her with a dumbbell? How can they go with premeditation that looks sounds like something that he got mad in the car and just started beating her and then decided hey i'm gonna go ahead and do more damage she's already dead kind of thing he showed up with a weapon not just one but two now you can say well he was in he liked to exercise so he had dumbbell but did he have a whole weight set in there he had that

one weight how did he get her into that car to begin with how is it somebody that's so threatened by this man somebody that they're looking to end this thing she she wants out how are you going to get her into a car i think that there's at least some indication that she was wrangled into that car through force perhaps that he got her into that car by threats. And this, trust me, this is not the first time he's put hands on her. It's not. It's a sad tale that goes on every single day. And as we speak right now, right now, my friend, this is happening somewhere else,

right now in this country, in multiple locations, where you've got domestic abuse going on. But he was, in fact, found guilty. I don't know if there's any solace that can be found in that, but he's off the streets at this point in time. And of course, you can't bring her back. You can't bring America back. This person that was beloved and that loved, obviously loved him in her own way. She stuck around him for so long. But I just want to, again, close with this. And just as a reminder, if you or anyone you love is going through domestic abuse at this point in time, if you're having problems, there's help for you. The National

Domestic Violence Hotline can be found. That phone number is 1-800-799-7233 or go to thehotline.org. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. You're listening to an iHeart podcast