Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: ARSON - Revenge, Money, Cover-Up Crime, Pyrophilia.

Episode Date: August 17, 2025

Arsonists set fires for may different reasons; revenge, money, cover-up a Crime, pyrophilia. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss how the crime is investigated, the evidence left behind, and why burning up the scene of a crime to get rid of evidence, often creates the evidence needed to catch the perp.        Transcript Highlights00:00:00.00 Introduction - Fire 00:05:08.55 Getting hurt at fire scenes 00:09:59.88 Four sources 00:15:06.98 Watching fire 00:20:04.78 Arsonists use fire to make money, cover up a crime, render down a body 00:25:09.86 Somebody laying on their back, clothing on back many time is intact 00:30:17.15 Using fire for revenge 00:35:16.22 Memory of first time faced with a burned body in morgue 00:39:58.89 Linear surgical incisions to prevent body from splitting open 00:45:05.58 Most people die from smoke inhalation 00:50:17.55 Being short of breath, sad way to die 00:55:02.50 Treating the body with respect 00:59:47.19 Personal story, conclusion   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bodybacks, but Joseph's Got More. You know, I don't really know how man originally discovered fire. We always have this image in our minds. I don't know what you guys. I have it.

of, you know, these kind of cromagnon-looking creatures that are sitting around in a cave, and all of a sudden one of them, you know, strikes a rock against another rock, and suddenly they discover, you know, fire. I've always thought that maybe it was a lightning strike, perhaps, this kind of natural manifestation. Maybe from the sweet lord above, something caught on fire, and they were amazed by it, and they took it, and they kept it. And it provided so much for them.

It provided, it split the night at that point in time. No artificial light. Suddenly they had naturally occurring light where they could see in the darkness, those things that were out there. Suddenly they had access to warmth when it was very, very cold. Can you imagine being in the midst of the ice age or at the end of the last ice age and you're freezing to death? But yet you have this clove that you can sit around and rub your hands in front of.

They learned how to cook, perhaps, with fire. But now, in the modern context, fire represents many other things. We can manufacture things with it. We can fuel things. Industry runs on it. But in my world, fire, fire generally comes down to this. Something is being destroyed that maybe a criminal otherwise would not want to be found. Today on body bags, we're going to have kind of a brief primer, a brief discussion on fire and arson.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Bodybacks. Dave, the scariest I have ever been at any type of scene. For me, this is me personally, okay? Let me run down this, let me break this down to you. Where cases, not where there was an active shooter still running around, or there was an angry crowd, or something like that, because I had my share of those. It was always involving structure fires.

First off, since I was a little boy, I've always been fascinated by firefighters, not cops. I was not one of those kids that wanted to be a cop. I always love firefighters. And when I was little, I don't know if you remember this. Do you remember Texaco Fire Chief? It was like the gas. Yeah.

And they used to have Texaco Fire Chief. Texaco used to sell firefighter helmets. and they were old-fashioned helmets and you could get the deluxe model that had a radio that you could put in your inside. Oh, my goodness. No. My uncle, who I regard in my life

is the closest thing I really ever had to a father. He bought that from me. And it was one of the most treasure gifts I ever had. And I always like firefighters. I like firefighters as a death investigator because firefighters are fascinating in the sense that they don't, it doesn't matter.

them if they get dirty they don't care and they're they've always got some new piece of equipment that they want to something like that it's like i could have the worst decomposed body in the world that is down a ravine and there's a whole group of them over there saying doc you don't have to go down that hill we've you know we'll send jim and bob down there and we'll you know we'll fashion this new kind of knot we'll put them you know put them in the basket and we'll bring them up or we'll dig out the hole around this area for you, you know, and it was always amazing. And, you know, I'd always have friends that were police officers out there. And they'd just be kind of standing back because, you know, firefighters and cops have this interesting relationship. And the

cops were like, I'm not going near that. I'm just not doing it. You know, firefighters, you know, of course, the old adage about them is, you know, they, and when everybody else is running away, they're running in. Right. And so this world that around fire has always been terrifying me, the only times I've ever been injured at crom scenes have been at fire scenes I've had wow uh okay here's something cool a little trivia about Morgan I actually had a beam fall uh yeah and strike me in the head and it was still on fire it had a little it had like a small flame on it and the whole thing had burning embers on it wow completely doused it um I had a nail go through my boot into my foot.

Really old pair of boots, by the way, I should have, I should have thrown those away. And I actually had electricity arc off of a puddle of water onto my foot. And I'm tingling in my leg. Yeah. And I fell backwards. It stunned me for a second. And that was because there was an electrical line and they hadn't cut the power yet. Oh.

And they'd pull the line down. So that's as close to death as I've really come. I've had shots fired over my head, but it was not, there's something about being in that world, that world of all that remains of a building, a structure, a car. There's kind of this infamous bridge down in New Orleans called the Huey P. Long Bridge, named after the governor from back in the 30s. And Dave, this thing was really narrow. It had two lanes on either side.

And as a matter of fact, the bridge is this gigantic metal structure, steel structure, and there are entire families that have made their living off of this bridge as sandblasters because the thing always has to be referable. And in the middle of this bridge, going across the river, at one point in time, there is a train track. And the train track also consists of the world's longest train trestle. and it starts way on one side of the Mississippi River and it continues on to what they call the West Bank

and I don't know if it's still the longest or not but there was a guy that was in a Corvette that was driving over the top of it racing somebody on this thing and these lanes are really narrow and Dave he hit the curve on one side and this is hundreds of feet in the air above the Mississippi River down below he hit the curve roll the thing over

and it's when they had those they were like the new total fiberglass bodies on the scene well i got there and the whole thing had been engulfed and it's windy up there it's like really windy and i thought that i thought that everything was out the fire was doused and dude i got adjacent to the scene and all the cops i mean all the firefighters are wearing respirators right and they were like looking at me and i walked up and i found out why they were wearing respirators because this fiberglass was burning in there and dude they had to take me back and the EMTs had to put me on oxygen because I was inhalating this thing or inhaling, I'm sorry, inhaling this gas coming off of this or the

product coming off of it. It's a weird world. You walk into any kind of home that has been destroyed. And I may have mentioned this before on body bags, but you walk into it. And as a death investigator who knows a little bit about arson, very little, I walk into that environment and everything looks black and charred. I can't make out detail. I've even lost bodies inside of houses because I can't tell where the ceiling that has caved in or the furniture that is burned down. I can't delineate between the body that is also charred that is in there. it's a weird kind of it's the most unique environment that you ever go into and people often forget about arson investigators as being part of the forensic community you know they think i don't know

what they think about arson but to me they are at the top of the heap because they have to know something about everything most of them are firefighters and cops um they testified they are top end experts in their field. They understand chemistry. They understand physics. And they also understand how to run a homicide investigation. And so their skill set is something that most people don't understand and they are amazing. I love talking to them because I learn. I just try to keep my mouth shut, which is hard for me, keep my eyes open and just listen. But you know, one of the rudimentary things that you have to learn is kind of the nature of fire. And we don't normally, you don't give fire much consideration.

You've seen pictures of me and my family. We go out even in the wintertime on our boat and there's an island not too far from where we keep our boat and we take firewood out there and just build a big bonfire and sit around the bonfire. Most people don't think about that. What is fire? What's the nature of it, you know, kind of how it works? So fire itself has four components to it. And so let me just kind of run these down to you. You have to have a fuel source, okay?

And sometimes the fuel source can be rolled into what's also referred to as accelerants. That's like if you, let's just say you're using a charcoal grill, all right? Well, the charcoal in there is fuel, right? But in order to initiate that charcoal into a sustainable fire or have it burn, you have to put lighter fluid on it most of the time. All right. I know that there's the brands out there that say you don't. need it. But that's how they lie. They lie. So you get it started like that. And so the thing burns. But you also have to strike off a match or use a lighter to get the thing initiated.

Well, you have to have fuel in order for that to happen. No, it seems simplistic. You have to have heat. And what I mean by that is heat is a product of an actual burning fire. So that's heat is one of the components. You have to have oxygen. Remember, how many times have we heard about there being a fire in a location where the fire literally runs out of oxygen in a room and completely consumes it? And so it dies, all right? That's the reason, for instance, like with, if you've ever heard of a halon fire extinguishing,

they use them on boats, you can't see it. It's invisible. Actually, the autoerotic case involving halon canisters, a guy was inhaling the stuff. And what it does is it binds with the oxygen, and it's an oxygen depravant. And so it just knocks the oxygen down. So you have to have oxygen, all right? And then you have to have an uninhibited chemical reaction. And this chemical reaction has to be ongoing.

If you think about going to chemistry class and you're demonstrating and you see this immediate reaction where something bubbles over or you have this reactive change in color or whatever you're working on in the lab, that's kind of a one-off kind of thing. But you think about fire. Fire is truly an ongoing chemical experiment because it has to be sustained. And if you're absent any of these components, it's going to go out. I mean, just think about it. with back to the idea of heat, if a fire dies out, there is an insufficient amount of heat being generated in order to burn the fuel that's existing there. So those are essentially the four main components of fire. And without that, you don't really have a fire per se.

Now, you might get like a flashover where an individual might, be in a room and I've actually had this happen day where they come in and arsonists has come in and they spread gasoline right in a room and this one particular future rocket scientist did this with a couple of gallons of gas the windows and the doors were closed in the room and this idiot strikes a match and of course it kills him but after it burned off you know that gas that was on the floor and everything. It was non-sustainable. First off, the room that he was in had a marble tile floor. Oh my goodness. That's not going to burn. Wow. Yeah. And the ceiling was it had asbestos. So I don't know where this guy did his research or whatever. Wow. But it didn't,

it didn't burn. You know, it was non-sustainable, but it killed him. So, you know, you have to be in a this kind of sustainable environment for it to to actually continue to thrive in this environment because absent that you're you're not going to you're just not going to have the end product of a fire that is burning before you you know where you think about sitting around a campfire and one of the some of the most fun you'll ever have at a campfire is actually taking a piece of wood when it's beginning to die down and placing the foot on and you're sustaining that. You're sustaining that uninhibited chemical reaction,

and it's burning up before you. The fuel is literally vaporizing in the air before you. You're receiving heat off of. You're receiving comfort. You're roasting marshmallows or weenies or whatever it is that you're doing. Were you a firebug as a kid? Did you like light matches in the bathroom? I mean, I'm thinking you're like Andrew was, man.

But I just, yeah, well, maybe Andrew and I, your son have that in common. I don't know. But have you ever noticed that fire is a weird thing in sense that it has almost like a hypnotic effect. Yes, on some people, it does. You sit there and you just, have you ever seen anybody at a fireside and they'll just stare at the fire and they'll just kind of rock back and forth? You know, at Christmas time, when they put the thing on the day, they run the thing with the fire burning and you hear popping and crackling. I don't ever, Dave, I promise you, I watch stuff on my phone. I rarely have ever turned.

and I've got a huge TV in my house. I rarely turn this thing on. But yet, if that thing's on at Christmas time, I'll find myself like in a trance just listening to pop and listen to Perry Como singing in the background. Those dagblasted chestnuts. They're roasting over and open fire, man. Wow. So, yeah, and it's an amazing thing.

But here's the rub with fire. Fire does, in fact, provide us with many of the essentials that we, are depended upon in this life that we couldn't survive without it nowadays in modern times we always have access to it i can't tell you how many spare matchbooks i have in my house and lighters and all these sorts of things and you know if i had to i could you know i could take a flint and i could strike it and I could create a fire. But fire also has one other element to it. It is arguably the most, if not, one of the most destructive forces in the world. All you got to do is take a look out west during wildfire season. Take a look recently at the Palisades out there around

Malibu in that area. And it gives you an idea of what happens when fire burns out of control. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our life. time. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're

finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There are two images from the Vietnam era that will always stay with me that I've seen in the news, and I know many of you guys have. And those images are the young child that's running down the road and she doesn't have her clothes on. And she was in a village where her village got hit with napalm, which is essentially gelaginous gasoline.

And it doesn't matter what you do. You can't extinguish it. As a matter of fact, that that young girl became a grown woman and she survived. The other image is of the monk that we've seen images of from Southeast Asia in protests for peace. He goes into a lotus position and has poured apparently accelerant all over himself in his robes and has set himself ablaze and sat there and never moved. And no pun intended, those images are burned into my brain. I can't unsee that. And when we're in the world of fire investigation and viewing things from the perspective of what crime has been committed, arson itself is a category that stands alone among all the others because it's used for a variety of reasons.

And, you know, when, you know, obviously the girl in an apalm strike that was a product of war, that's not arson. You have this monk that was doing this in protest. That's not arson. But it has a level of lethality and it has a level of destruction that criminals have come to appreciate for a long, long time now. Because they believe that if they set something ablaze, that they're going to. eradicate any opportunity for us to collect evidence at a scene. And I've often held that if in fact you can go back and conduct your investigation thoroughly, I believe that arsonists leave more evidence behind by starting fires. You know, they use particular types of accelerant,

whether it be kerosene, gasoline, gasoline, fuel oil. I've seen fire started with electricity, intentionally set, phosphorus triggers, all these other things that are out there, and you're getting into high-end things. You know, you start talking about electrical fires that are intentionally set as opposed to somebody running down to the local, you know, stopping rob and getting a gallon gasoline and coming back home and douse in a place. It's a bit more sophistication involved in that. And so arsonists actually come in all shapes and sizes, but their motivations are really varied. I mean, you've got, I think, most popularly, you think about people destroying things for money, insurance money, and set houses on fire, structures on fire, business is on fire, and try to collect off of that. Of course, you have in our area in death investigation, you have an individual who's dead inside of a house. the house has been just engulfed with flames

and what they're trying to do is trying to render down that body so that there's nothing left that we can go back and examine it's amazing to me how many times people do that they burn a house down to cover up the murder of somebody they shot in the head in their recliner and it's like dude you realize how long it takes to render a body down things I've learned from Joseph Scott Morgan by doing body bags it's like it's not going to happen if you're going to go to crime school that should be like day three

don't do this yeah and but yet they persist don't they Dave I love him yeah I mean like you think about you remember the case Tara Grinstead out of yeah I do Georgia we covered that for you and it's not just me Nancy she was missing for so long yeah and you know when they and I remember I think I did an episode of body bags on that case because there was a lot of a lot of static about a couple of years ago both those fellows were in court again but anyway you know she was found in an old pecan orchard uh down in in south Georgia something I learned about pecan wood at that particular time that I was fascinated by that I did not know uh did you know that next to hickory pecan is the hottest burning wood um

that's out there. And the fact that they had scrap pecan wood out there that I believe that they used as fuel source for her body because keep in mind, human bodies are not fuel sources. All right. They're not. They make lousy fuel sources. So it requires you to put the body with a fuel source, stack fuel source on top of the body, underlay the body with fuel source, put it in accelerant on the body.

and you begin that process of rendering down a body. And Dave, they burned that lady's body for so long that they were only able to find little bits of her left behind. That was almost a successful attempt at criminal arson there. That case, you know, Joe, that one case with Tara Grinstead. I'm glad you brought it up because that was one of those ones where I learned when you were talking about the different. I don't know that much about a lot of the things we end up talking about

because I'm not learned it in that area. But when you start studying a case and you start breaking it down and you're going, why did this not work and why did this work? And it's amazing to me how some of the stupidest people can come up with the best ways. And some of the smartest people are so stupid when it comes to crime. But I will tell you, firing up something, I used to think was a good idea until we started doing this show. I, you know, I'm not a criminal.

I'm not going to be burning stuff down. I would have thought, you know, hey, If you're going to ruin your prints and everything else, go ahead and light it on fire. But actually, you're actually, may as well pour super glue on it. Yeah, yeah. And you are creating, that's why I always say you're creating, creating more evidence, I believe. Right. And, and listen, if you go out, here's another big one, and this is kind of a broad assertion here.

But if you go out and purchase a gallon of gasoline. for this express purpose, that goes to intent, you know, which is kind of the body of a crime. You know, you're thinking about did you intend to do this? It's really hard to explain a way while we have you on CCTV taking a gallon jug or taking a gallon gas can or five gallon gas can and filling it up with gas when you don't normally do that. And then suddenly there's a blaze in your backyard. You walk out there and there's human remains there. So it kind of, you know, the act of actually doing that, even more so than going out and buying a gun, because there's a lot of reasons you can say, well, I went out and bought a gun.

I wanted it for a home defense. Maybe I've had it laying around the house. But, you know, you get a lot of people, and I've covered these cases where individuals will show up, and they'll have in the back of their pickup truck several cans that are empty, top them off, and go back. And it's within just a short bit of time that they're burning. a body. Right.

So, you know, you've got this idea of eradication of evidence. And yeah, clothing burns away to a great degree, but did you know that like when we have bodies that have been burned, let's just say, just imagine in your mind you've got somebody laying on their back, all right? And you pour gas all over the anterior or the front of their body, strike a match. and the anterior portion of their body envelops in flame, right? Well, do you know the clothing on the backside, many times is intact. It doesn't just all burn.

I mean, just think about it. We talked about oxygen just a moment ago. So if the body is in contact with the floor or the ground, fire is always going to seek oxygen, all right? And so it's not going to go, it might burn for a second if you've got gas that has kind of leached into the ground around it, but it's not, it's not really sustainable. It's not going away all of the clothing. Clothing is a big part of like getting bodies identified, learning where they come from. Also, if there's any trauma, because, you know, if you've got somebody that's been shot in the back or they've been beaten, you're not destroying that evidence, that physical evidence that exists there. so when you get these really sophisticated guys like you know i know i've mentioned this book on air

again i'm going to do it again because i want everybody read it murder in coweta county um there was a guy that was murdered back in the 30s i think or the 40s i can't remember in Georgia and uh the guy that facilitated that uh had his what he referred to as his hired men which were these two African-American fellows to tend the fire and they constantly pumped wood into this fire pit with this guy's body in it and they turned the coals they turned his body in there almost like they're cooking wow and the body begins to render down until there was nothing left but ash and you know how they retrieved in that case they retrieved what became known in that specific case this is a concept in law you hear the term the corpus delecti which means the body

Dave they found one little chip of bone that was caught in an eddy in a creek where they dumped these burlap sacks because they even went to the to the trouble of taking shovels digging out the hole and putting them into these sacks going to the creek and dumping the sacks wow in the creek and then burning sacks but that one little bit of bone was evidence and this is before and that's kind of an assumption scientific assumption because biologically back during that time they had no way to tie it back to that guy all they knew is that they had a bone or a piece of a bone even but they used that and you know that was the only case that was the first case I think maybe in American history where the testimony of an African American man was used to put a white man in the electric chair and he died they they they fried his ass So, yeah, and it's kind of a seminal case. So murder in Caledia County, you ever get a chance, read the book.

There was a movie that was done with Andy Griffith and Johnny Cash back in the early 80s. But the book is fantastic. And it talks about, and Fire plays a big part of that. Then we've got another group that you've heard of Pyromania, which is... Yeah, yeah, it's not dead. But yeah, yeah, Fire Brigades, you know, got it made or whatever it is. But, yeah, pyromania is a sexual affectation, you know, where they have this idea that they get gratification from watching fire. I'd mentioned before the show that I won't go into all of the details I was talking.

I was at a conference one time, and I was talking to these investigators. And they had mentioned how this one fellow, that they had worked this case, fire battalion responds to a fully engulfed home and there's like family of five burning death in the home and I'll put too delicately he's standing in the street fully nude and fully aroused when they arrived fixated on the fire so you know did he set the fire show do you know I mean did he do that or yeah he specifically for his own sexual education and so wow I never read about that case. That was just passed on to me from then. I was thinking, you know, I talk about the, there's no basement in the house. There is. It's just endless. It's bottomless. You think you've seen it all. And then, you know, you get to that point where, you know, you haven't. And then other people burn for other reasons. You've got, you've got these revenge burnings that take place where people and these are where, you know, I'm going to destroy you. I'm going to destroy you. I'm going to eradicate everything.

I reflect back and I know that some of our listeners will remember this precious child back then that his dad and mom were in a custody battle and the dad set this kid on fire and scarred him for life. And that has happened many times over the years. There was one movie I can't remember which one it was where the lady, I think it was, that people are going to remember this movie where, you know, her husband was, you know, running around on her and she took all of his clothes, knocked the window out of his Mercedes, put his clothes in the car, poured gas in the car, and she strikes a match and sets the Mercedes and the clothes on fire, you know, in the driveway. So, yeah, I mean, you have, you have this idea of revenge as well. So concealment of crime, revenge, revenge, personal monetary gain, you know, know you can have that you have people that contract to do arson there are people that are skilled at it believe it or not well in the movie goodfellas it showed uh you know the guys over there

burning the uh burning the club remember yeah for insurance money yeah absolutely it was that was joe pesci and yeah uh Henry Hill's character uh did that i tell you one of the most chilling chilling chilling depictions of an arsonist is actually Mickey Rourke and people might not remember this He played that role in the movie Body Heat. Oh, wow. William Hurt. And he gives one of the most chilling recitations on arson that you've ever heard. And he was depicted as a pro at doing this.

And there are people that can do this. And they sell themselves as somebody that can cover up their crimes and not, you know, not be caught by virtue of them. They essentially cover all of their bases. But a couple of things that you're looking for and that we look for at, scenes most of the time with fire, with arson, is that we'll have individuals that will take, say, for instance, an accelerate. When I say accelerant, just think gasoline, for instance. It can be any number of things.

But arson investigators look for things like splash patterns. For instance, if you take a bucket of gasoline and you toss it on a wall. and, you know, it's sheetrock wall, gypsum, you strike a match and you set it a blaze. Well, did you know that you can actually, those arson investigators can actually follow the splash pattern on the wall? That it'll burn into it. You can see it where if you, you know, if you think about splashing a wall with something, striking a match, and putting it to the wall, you'll see the pattern of splash, kind of how it. and most of the time another rule of thumb that we use wherever it doesn't happen every time but wherever you see particularly in a structure the most damage has occurred that is going to point

you toward the point of origin of the fire because it's burned the longest you know unless you have like a store of gasoline in the house or something that's explosive that does more damage most of the time you're going to have an area that has more damage than any other location. Those are just like a few of the things, you know, that you kind of look for at a fire scene. If they're trying to determine exactly where the point of origin is. So source, point of origin, what utility did they use to start this with? Did they just take like old newspapers and pile them up in a corner? anything else that's flammable, and they set that ablaze.

If you get in there and you've got furniture that's burned in place, but it's all askew and maybe in one corner, you get an idea when you walk in there that, okay, the furniture was actually intended to be the fuel source because, you know, you're not going to have like your lazy boy and a sofa stacked on top of one another. Right. And it doesn't matter. I mean, if it catches on fire, that's not necessarily going to mean that the, lazy boy is going to fall off of the sofa. It's going to burn in place most of the time.

Now, the firefighters might pull it down, but you'll have it all kind of congregated in that area. You look for those little cues like that at a scene. And you also look for a position of the body. You know, what is it that stands out about a body if you're dealing with a body at a scene? What is it that's there that kind of stinks? And I don't mean that literally. I mean that in the sense of from an investment What is it that just doesn't seem right in this particular environment? You know, for us in death investigation, we see what remains of this. We see all that's left behind. The big question is, who and what started this inferno?

A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it.

He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors. And you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I still have a memory of the first time I was ever faced with a burned body in the morgue. There's actually two things. I stand correct. I remember two things that I saw in the morgue related to fire. The first one's kind of standard stuff. It was still shocking for my young eyes to behold at that time. because I realized I was looking at a human being that had been burned.

And it was, it was a homicide and a subsequent arson where the structure that they were in was set on fire after the individual had been shot. And the fire had been really, really hot. And my first reaction was when I saw the body, and I mean no dismal. disrespect by this, but it looked to me in my untrained eye. It looked like something that had fallen off of a grill into the charcoal briquettes below. And it was, it was black. The body was black, drawn. You could barely make out any clothing that remained. No facial features. hair was all gone. The hands were claw-like.

And I remember looking at that body, and it gave off, to be perfectly honest, it gave off the smell of burned meat. And I remember I couldn't, and this is my personal recollection here. Again, for the longest time, I couldn't eat. I couldn't eat grilled to meat. I have a distinct memory of that. And I was, you know, this young, virile, you know, guy that I loved, I loved a steak. I loved hamburgers, all that stuff.

Still to do this day, but I got past that. But I remember being kind of pulsed by it. That was my first. And then on top of it, I had to go into that body with a scalpel and open the body. And so, because I was the autopsy assistant. And so you kind of get a double dose of it. Now, if you can imagine, Dave, even more horrific than that was the first time that I ever assisted in the autopsy on an individual that had been burned in a house fire and had, I'm doing air quotes, had survived for a month on the burn unit at a hospital. in New Orleans.

And for any of you out there that have had family members that have been burned and been subjected to intense heat, you're going to understand what I'm saying. It's a real specialty in medicine to be able to deal with burn patients. It's unlike anything else. It's, I guess you get satisfaction from it because you know that you're trying to help them, trying to help them move on, trying to reconstruct their lives. if they can survive because it's once particularly once a certain percentage of your body is burned there's high probability you're no longer going to be able to fight off all the little nasties

that are outside trying to attack you many folks die septicemia you know there's a myriad of things that they die from but dave i remember this this one fellow and he was massive and when i say massive, he may, at that point when I saw him, may have been the biggest body I had ever seen come into the autopsy room. So when we were observing him, I remember talking to the forensic pathologist. And he was saying, this is what it looks like to be on a burn unit, be a patient on a burn unit. And we had the reports before us. In life, this guy had been 185.5. pounds. So he had been in the burn unit for a month. And what happens is many times these people go into renal failure and they can't out process fluids. And he was so swollen, Dave.

Well, along with the swelling, what has to happen because the skin on these individuals actually splits. So in advance of that, the surgeon will come in and they make these linear incisions in the body and they're all over the body. You've never seen the like of it. It is, it rivals anything I've ever seen in the autopsy room and they will make these surgical incisions that are rather lengthy all over the surface of the skin because if they don't, the skin on its own because of the tension and the retention of water and fluid in the body, they will begin to split open. So they have to make incisions all over the body to try to stem that. And eventually the body just, it cannot, it cannot function to a point where it's a survival

event, survivable event, and they're going to be, they're going to die. And many people, I always have this question. It doesn't necessarily revolve around fire-related deaths. But you have these events where people will say, well, they were in the hospital for a long time. Why did you have to do an autopsy? Well, yes, you're absolutely right. The injuries are documented. everything has been x-rayed and photographed and you've got the treatment records surgical records

we've got in case of burn victims we've got every time a skin graft has been attempted i mean just it's voluminous there's always charting going on but we're still going to do the autopsy the reason we're still going to do the autopsy is that this is a homicide this is a homicide and if you don't do the autopsy even if a person's been in the hospital for protracted periods period of time, when this thing goes to court, a defense attorney will look at this and say, well, how do we know what really killed this individual? You're saying that just based on the doctor's notes here, that it's a, you know, that yeah, they got burned, but yet you didn't do an autopsy, how can you prove that? And you kind of head that off at the past by having a

forensic pathologist look at not just the records, but actually taking a look at the body in total there in the autopsy room. And for me, for me, it was, it stuck with me that first body that I saw a lot of them after that, but that first body that I saw that came off of a burn unit that had been treated for a protracted period of time, it stuck with me. You know, it really, it made me think. It was one of those cases where when you look at the individual, and I don't, think about this a lot, where I go around saying, I hope they didn't suffer.

A lot of families say that and you don't really know if people suffer, but I look at that and that's one of those cases where you think, I hope they, I hope they weren't aware of this because it's so, it was so grotesque and horrible, you know, when you see this. And I've, that part of me within me and I don't think I'm, I'm not, being sadistic when I say this. That's one of the reasons I think that people that have murdered others need to be present for autopsies. And I know that's, it's not legally possible, you know, because people are presumed innocent until proven guilty. But you want people that have done great harm to individuals to understand what happens to subjects. And when you see somebody

that's burned like this, subjected to severe heat, intense heat, it really gives you pause. It's like you want that individual to see what they have done because they're, they're not going to go through this. Their family's not going to go through this. And it's really, you know, really throws up the stop sign in your spirit, you know, where it's so over the top, Dave.

But Joe, what about the term burn to death? Yeah. We've heard that said by people on, you know, talk shows that, you know, on crime that the body, the person burned to death. And that's not true, is it? In most cases, it's not.

Now, you have, like I just gave you the example, I gave everybody an example of the person that's on the burn unit. Right. They, most of the time when you have a homicide or let's just say it's an accidental death. Let's just don't, let's don't necessarily say homicides. Let's just say an accidental death as related to, to fire. most people do not burn to a crisp and die like that. Okay, that's not how it necessarily works.

It's not like the last scene in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know, where people are incinerating and that sort of thing by the presence of God coming out of the Ark of the Covenant. So that was not a documentary? Is that what you're telling me? No, that was not a documentary. most people in our world that are subjected to to a fire an environment involving fire are going to die as a result of smoke inhalation almost i'd say probably 99% maybe not that may 95% of those deaths and it it's from inhaling those bits that are in the air and you're not it's not like you're just inhaling smoke. Most people don't understand the components. Smoke is a product of things burning up. It's actually

this, it's actually one of the sub-components of fire. You're talking about when fuel is vaporized. Okay. So when it's vaporized and it extends out, that if you're in that environment, you're, you know, you're trying to get your breath. What did they always tell us when we were kids? If there was a house fire, you're supposed to go, you're supposed to do what? You're supposed to go to the floor and crawl along the floor because that's where the remaining oxygen is all that stuff floating up in the air and they're absolutely right is toxic so it's not and this is not if you're let's just say you're in a house or you could be inside of a car all of those elements within that car which are manmade really let that hang there for a second that are man made are going to indwell that environment and they're going to

burn. And remember how we said earlier on where I was talking about an uninhibited chemical reaction. Well, if you've got like carpet, okay, you've got some kind of synthetic carpet in a house and it's burning. Did you know that one of the major components of carpet is petroleum? It's petroleum based. And so how does all that bound together? Well, it's very complex chemically. All right. So once you, once heat is subjected to that, you kind of free. all that stuff up that's in the carpet and all of a sudden it's floating around the air. Dave, you can find things like arsenic floating around, you know, in this environment. So when you get, when you get, you know, people breathing in and a fire, you'll see these components on their toxicology that are coming back.

And it's amazing. It's this litany, this list of stuff that's kind of free floating around in their blood that they've taken on. not to mention the absence of actual breathable oxygen in this environment. One of the main components that we're looking for, though, you know, that's going to lead to death is going to be, you know, carbon monoxide asphyxiation. It literally turns the body cherry pink. The skin is pink.

Nail beds are pink. The eyes are pink. You open up the body. the viscera, the organs have a pink hue, the blood when you draw it out. It looks like the only way I've been able to describe it to people, think about a manufactured piece of candy that's like this brilliant pink color that was created in a lab. The first candy that comes to me, I used to love these when I was kids,

were now-lators or what they were called, and they're kind of hard taffy. And there was a pink one in there. That's what the viscera looks like throughout the body. The blood is even that color. And the carbon dioxide turns the blood, absent the oxygen, that color. So if we see that color manifesting itself just visually, we're going to run a test. It's called a carboxy hemoglobin level. But when you see that pink, automatically the alarm bell goes off.

And you know that this person has inhaled carbon dioxide, along with this myriad of other things, you know, in the environment, and it's, it's non-compatible with life. The balance gets so out of whack because we require a certain amount of oxygen. And, you know, we don't live in a pure oxygen environment anyway. You know, people talk about the oxygen air. And yeah, it's there. So, but you're breathing in these other components, all, you know, there's an nitrogen out there. There's carbon dioxide that you're rebreathing sometimes. You know, plants take up carbon dioxide. They produce oxygen and that sort of thing. And so all these elements are kind of floating around. But it's so.

sustainable with life. When you get in that closed environment, like a home, and you're literally swimming in a chemical experiment at this point, Tom. And the fire that's in there is like the bunton burner you would have in a lab, only it's visible. You're in the midst of it. And you're trying to gas for air. And there's nothing really left for you to grab hold of, to breathe, that sort of thing. And as heat increases around the body, most of the time the person is going to die within a few minutes and there is an awareness if you don't don't try to shade yourself into this idea that there's there's no awareness that you're dying I mean if anybody has ever struggled with breathing if you've ever had pneumonia or anything like

you know what it's like to be short of breath if you ever had a heart event you know what's like to be shorter breath same principle here there's an awareness it's a horrible way to die because your body, your brain is screaming. I need oxygen. I need oxygen. So when they finally die, then comes the heat. And I think that that's where this idea that people say, well, they burn to death. And it's kind of convenient to say that because you've got a fire. You've got this event that occurs where the house is caving around them. They're surrounded by intense flames. And people think they burn to death. There are cases where people have literally been had gasoline thrown all over the body. Hey, there was just a case for a member day back in Virginia

last week, that house of the representative in Virginia, the guy walks up with a bucket of gasoline and throws it on this guy and flicks a match on him or strikes a lighter or whatever this nut job does and set this guy on blaze, his poor guy. I don't, at this moment time, as we're talking right now, I don't know what his status is. I pray for him and his family. I hope he's okay, but he was talking, you know when he left but you know he's on the burn unit somewhere and this is a this is going be a long uphill battle for him but it's he but go ahead Dave I'm sorry I was going to ask you about Mercedes Vega yeah out in Arizona in Maricopa County it was one of the stories that you had sent and I thought if we could just briefly if she's an exotic dancer right yeah

and they find her on the highway yeah in the car yeah okay and the car is a blaze at that point. All right. Now, if you find a car with a body inside, yeah. I'm going to assume that the person was not there of their own free will. Yeah. Wrong assumption if you're an investigator, but I'm not.

I'm a journalist. So I'm just thinking out loud. How do you go into that? As an investigator, you're looking at a dead body in a car. Murder, suicide, accidental death? Well, yeah. I mean, can you be overcome with smoke so that you couldn't get yourself out of it? Can it happen that fast?

I think that, well, that's an excellent question. I think that the circumstances would have to be just right. Say, for instance, if you've got a fire that start, let's just say it's an accidental fire. There are people who die in car accidents as a result of a fire catching, a vehicle catching fire. And it's like, and this is really horrible. I didn't talk about these, but you have what are called entrapment fires.

Where a person can't get free of the car, you've got like maybe engine block intrusion, the line, the fuel line gets clipped, it sparks off, and the person is literally sitting there. And then in those cases, there have been those cases where individuals literally do burn to death. But in her case, where you have a body that's found in a car, and a car and the body are both burning, my, when I hear hoofbeats, I'm not going to think camel, okay? I'm pretty much going to think that this individual has probably.

sustained some kind of lethal injury and the people that perpetrated this wanted to burn the car up in order to get away with it. So with her case in particular, I think that it's important to understand that when they would do an examination, the ideal circumstances to do this examination would be not to remove her from the car, not to remove her from the car. Yeah, you would the idea would be to take the car with her body in it, put it on to the back of a flatbed, like a wrecker flatbed, tarp it up, covered in tarps, and take it to the crime lab and process the car with the body in it. Have you had on a side note? Have you ever had a tarp fall off in your transport?

Let's see. I heard about it. No, I have not had that happen. I've never had that happen. I've heard of cases non-associated with offices. I, that I'm aware of where the flat, part of the flap came loose. And it's like blowing in the wind as it's going down. You have to be very, very careful because.

It would be, yeah, it would be, there have been cases, there was a famous case that I'm aware of. I think it was in South Georgia where delivery service actually failed to secure the rear door. And the body on the body gurney came out of the back of the car and came out of the back. It was a hearse, but it was a van, a van hearse. You know, there was operated as a private contractor, rolled out into the middle of the highway and turned over, and then a car ran over the body. It hit it. So you have to be very, very, you have to treat, not just from an evidentiary standpoint, but for the dead and their family, you have to make sure that you're treating these bodies with the utmost respect, particularly, I mean, the body, the person that that body represents has gone through enough. The family will soon be going through enough once they're notified of this.

But we do know this. We do know that the body holds a lot of evidence that you have to be able to assess. You want to get the body into a prime ideal set of circumstances. One of the interesting things that we see with fire deaths, have folks ask me about this a lot. had one lady told him asked me she said how was it she phrased it to me one time she said

what's what's boxing got to do with fire and I didn't I didn't register with me what she was saying and I was at a conference like a true crime thing and we talked about it and she had said I've heard that their bodies move and fire

I was like oh you're talking about the pugilistic position. And so as a body is subjected to fire, and you can't really draw any conclusions, of scientific conclusions, like were they alive versus dead when the fire started? All bodies are going to do this. But the bodies at the joints, even at the hip flexors, the knees, the feet, the elbows, the hands, it's all going to draw up. And the back years ago, when they began.

began to see this, the powers that B looked at this and said, wow, that looks just like a pugilist. And of course, pugilism is the old term for boxing. And so when you'll get these people that have their hands that will clinch, their hands will clinch, and they'll draw up. I'm going to conclude this episode of body bags with something I don't normally do. I'm going to tell a story real quick. And you can actually see it. It's in the first chapter. of my book, blood beneath my feet. And I was really at the end of my career. I had had enough and was really struggling with PTSD and these things that I was going through. And one night, I was in the middle of Georgia 400, and I worked a case of a young man that was in a Ford Ranger,

and he slammed into a bridge abut. And it was pouring down rain. His car had caught on fire, and he was entrapped. As I'm trying to work the case and examine his body, something happened to me that changed the course of my life and certainly my career that day. As the rain kind of dripped down off of my face and down my glasses, I couldn't see real well. I leaned into the cab, and this young man was entrapped,

and he had burned to death in his car. And as I reached over, tried to do it. detective, his seat belt was buckled. His left hand brushed my right cheek. And instinctively, I reached up, grabbed the wrist of this clawed hand, and it snapped off in mine. I sat there in the rain. No one else is with me. Cops are off doing their thing, and I considered what I was holding in my hand just for a second, this burned claw that was left behind. I walked off into the night, I sat beneath the bridge, and I wept, shaking uncontrollably, asking myself, what in the world was I doing? Why was I here? That was after a 20-year career, and that night,

my life changed. It changed because I knew that I could no longer do this, and fire played a big role in that stop sign. We all have stop signs in our lives, don't we? Those warning signs that pop up. In a case like this involving fire was my stop sign. And pretty soon thereafter, I had to give it up, had to hang it up. So fire will always be part of who I am. It will always be part of those things I talk about. It will always be part of the stories of the the dead. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Bodybacks. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA.

Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. and I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.