Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: Blood, Shovels, and Antlers Decoding a Disturbing Crime Scene

Episode Date: April 15, 2023

Levi Axtell, a Minnesota man, murdered elderly Lawrence V. Scully, whom he accused of stalking his young daughter. Scully was convicted in 1979 of sexually assaulting a 6 year old girl and went to prison for 2 years. When carrying out the crime, Axtell used unconventional weapons in his attack – a shovel and a large moose antler – leaving a gruesome crime scene behind.  In this episode of Body Bags, forensics expert Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the perplexing case of a brutal attack involving a shovel and moose antlers. They explore the difficulties faced by forensic investigators in differentiating between injuries caused by these unconventional weapons, while also examining the chaotic nature and rapid timeline of the assault, as well as the psychological aspects driving the attacker to use such odd weapons, and how the investigation unfolded in this bizarre and gruesome case. Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart Show Notes: 0:00 - Intro 1:05 - Background and overview of case 2:22 - Moose antlers being used as weapons. 3:55 - Levi Axtell and Lawrence Scully had been in conflict for years and Axtell eventually got an order of protection from him. What does that mean and what does it take to get an order of protection? 6:45 - Finding registered sex offenders in your area. 8:00 - Axtell got an order of protection from Scully which was then dismissed leading to heightened frustration and alertness. 10:10 - Scully’s criminal history. 13:05 - Axtell’s previous offenses. 13:50 - How did the whole situation escalate? 14:25 - Imagine a scenario where a blood-covered man confesses to murder at a police station. 15:30 - The role of 911 in reporting crimes. 16:40 - The police must ensure the safety of the suspect and others in the vicinity. 19:40 - Start asking questions. 21:10 - The suspect is agitated, how does that affect his interaction with the police? 22:30 - The use of a shovel in this case and how that may be used as evidence by Axtell's defense. 24:25 - Has JoScott Seen people use garden tools as weapons? 27:00 - How do forensic experts analyze and decipher complex crime scenes with widespread blood, defensive injuries, and splatter? 31:35 - How do forensic experts distinguish wounds from unusual weapons? 36:00 - How does the unique shape and weight of a moose antler influence its use as a weapon and the resulting injuries compared to other blunt force weapons? 39:10 - How the short time frame and frenzied nature of the attack may impact how police or forensic experts approach and investigate the crime scene. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Many of us find ourselves in positions throughout life where we use those things that are at our disposal. We use those items that we have access to in order to complete a task, perhaps. I guess that some people would call these tools of convenience. I'm going to speak about something that we've referred to in forensics as weapons of convenience. Today, we're going to talk about a man who, out of sheer anger and rage and maybe a healthy dose of suspicion, attacks another man and ends this fellow's life with a moose antler. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.

Dave Mack, my buddy who's a crime reporter for Crime Online, I don't know that I ever envisioned myself speaking about a case involving a moose antler, when I saw the story and I began to dig into it a little bit, I was shaking my head saying, did I just read this correctly? I'm kind of a frustrated historian and I love history. I love Native American history and I love learning about tools and things that were used. And I'm thinking, who in the world would even have access to a moose antler? And as I began to dig further and further, this story just really captivated me. And I began to think about instrumentalities of death. And boy, do we have one today. Usually when you are talking about a crime, boy, you don't want

to say killing people is normal, but there are normal aspects to a murder, things that we are accustomed to hearing. Certain types of weaponry comes to mind. But when you start mentioning a moose antler, when I picture an antler, I think of a deer antler with a hard bony type structure with points on the end. And in that, I could see how somebody might use that antler as a weapon. But moose antlers aren't like that, are they? They're kind of flat. They're dish-like in shape, I guess, to a certain degree, or bowl-like presentation, and kind of concave, I guess, rolling outward. And they have prongs all along the edge, but they're not necessarily sharp prongs. But you can look at this thing and tell that if this animal that's

arrayed with these things chooses to do harm, they could do great harm. There's all kinds of stories about how aggressive these animals are, particularly when you've got a cow with a calf, they will spare no one. And you hear that a lot in the animal kingdom. But moose have that reputation as an animal you don't want to cross paths with. They can be aggressive. They're very territorial. And territory is interesting in this case because it involves a geographic location. It's not in Canada. It's in the United States, but buddy, you can almost see Canada from there. The area where this case actually occurs is within the range of the North American

moose population. We don't have them all over the place. You and I are all southern boys. If I saw something that big with a set of antlers on it, I'd fall over and die. Down here, we see white-tailed deer. That's about the extent. And we see antlers laying on the forest floor. If you go for a hike, you'll see them.

They're shedding. But I don't know what I would do if I walked out into a forest and looked down the ground and see something that could be potentially, if you put them both together, six feet in width and can weigh up to like 30 pounds. It's astounding to me the size of these things. That's just not the type of thing I would think to convert into a weapon of mayhem. So adding that to the mix, we can actually back up a little bit here. The actual story centers around a 27-year-old dad and a 77-year-old retired guy. They have actually been butting heads for quite some time.

Levi Axtell is the 27-year-old dad. Lawrence V. Scully, the 77-year-old dad. Lawrence V. Scully, the 77-year-old, and in this case, the victim, Mr. Scully, in 1979, was convicted in Minnesota of sexually assaulting a six-year-old girl. He was convicted and he was sentenced to prison where he was there for a little over two years. He was released from prison in 1982. Since that time, it appears that Mr. Scully has lived a normal life, has not run afoul of the law that I can find. And I'm looking for this. I'm not seeing anything.

I'm seeing that Mr. Scully ran for mayor in 2014. He lost. Other than that, we don't have much until 2018. In 2018, Mr. Scully and Mr. Levi Axtell had their first encounter, legally speaking. Mr. Axtell, again, this is five years ago now. Axtell's 22 years old. Scully is 72 at the time. And Mr. Axtell had a reason to seek out protection from Mr. Scully is 72 at the time, and Mr. Axel had a reason to seek out protection from Mr. Scully,

and he got it. Now, Joe, you know what it takes to get an order of protection, right? It's not something that you just simply walk in and say, I want one, and they hand it down. It requires some demonstration to the court that there is a need. And of course, since Scully had this prior conviction as a sex offender, it's certainly going to catch the eye of the court that there is a need. And of course, since Scully had this prior conviction as a sex offender, it's certainly going to catch the eye of the court. A citizen walks in and says, well, this is my reasoning for it. And apparently, according to the perpetrator here, Levi Axel, he opined that Scully was stalking his daughter. Now, I think at the time, his daughter was less than two years old, but she was being taken to a daycare. His idea was that Scully was sitting in his van

outside of the daycare watching the comings and goings of small children. Dave, you're a dad. I'm a dad. Do you remember what it was like when you're particularly a new dad? You're hypersensitive to anything in the environment. You're always looking for something that could go sideways with the child. Those things that you can protect them from in the little environment that you created home. But then you begin to think about all of these things where you're taking your child and handing them off to someone else to take care of. And your mind can run wild with possibilities.

And apparently that's what actually happened. Yeah, I think so. And if you're a registered sex offender, those lists are very easy to get in the public domain. I don't know that this happened, but I would imagine this new father probably did a little digging, and look what he came up with. He made a claim in 2018. Mr. Axtell claimed that Mr. Scully, sitting in a van outside of the daycare, and as you mentioned, under two years old, she was a little over a year old at the time, toddler being taken to a daycare, and Mr. Axtell said Scully was sitting there in his van, and he called it stalking. He called it attempting to groom his toddler.

My wife goes online and finds out predators living in our area. You can pull them up now and see which sex offenders, registered sex offenders, are in your neighborhood. And I encourage everybody to go look. I would never discourage anybody from doing that. The police can't be with you 24-7. You have to be your own proponent here where you're going to go out and you're going to actively see who's in your area. And it can be done by zip code. I've done this when I'm about to buy a house.

I'll look up the zip code and I'll see, well, who's living near me? I'm not going to put the money on the barrelhead here if I've got somebody that's a registered sex offender living next door. That is probably what happened because of the fact that Mr. Axtell actually claimed he believed that Scully was grooming his toddler. He was granted a protection order. And that order of protection, as you mentioned, not easy to get. He did get it. But the part that we don't know is while Axtell got the order of protection from Scully, it was granted and then dismissed. Weeks later, it was dismissed. So I don't know what transpired. I don't know what it takes to get one dismissed, but it was.

So that's where we sit. A couple of years after that, we have Mr. Axtell posting online that he actually said, quote, the only cure for pedophiles is a bullet. He posted this on his Facebook page. OK, so you have a convicted sex offender in 77 year old Mr. Scully. We have a 27 year old dad with a six year old daughter. And we have a dad who is very territorial and protective of his daughter, as I believe most dads are. I think Mr. Axtell took it one step at a time and kept going further and further and further, and maybe worked himself into a bit of a frenzy, not saying he's right or

wrong in terms of what his thinking was. I don't know what he was thinking, Joe. I don't either. And obviously, his own perception was that there was a threat. Now, how he acts out on that threat, that's going to be between him and the courts at the end of the day. We'll find out more about that. His idea, at least in his mind, that there was, in fact, a threat. He's obviously been watching this guy for some time. Dave, you said this started all the way back in 2018, five years after the fact. Now, his daughter at this point in time, she's several years older, obviously. And the idea that initially he's using the term stalking and grooming for a 22-month-old child, I don't know how that is necessarily possible because that's something that with

most investigations, if they're going to be kind of tracking an individual and watching their behavior, most of the time requires some kind of one-on-one contact with the targeted individual, with the child. I can't imagine that back then there was evidence of that going on. out the daycare, he's parking out there. We mentioned early on, if you're going to get this protective order, it really makes me wonder, did he do any kind of videography back then? Did he take still images of this guy's van parked out in front of the daycare? Did he capture the license plate in the foreground with the daycare in the background? Now, I could see that potentially being compelling to the court, particularly given Scully's prior history. But it's going to be very difficult to get that without some kind of substantive evidence. And the fact that they pulled it so quickly,

I can see how that would lead to a level of frustration that somebody already has kind of this heightened alert going on with them. I'm glad you pointed that out because this is five years ago. Scully is 72. Mr. Axtell is 22 at the time. Remember when you were 22. Sometimes that fuse was a little bit shorter than it needed to be. Scully is the convicted pedophile. He served time in prison for sexually abusing a six-year-old child in 1979. Now, flash forward, it's 2018 and Mr. Axtell actually goes to court and files paperwork to get an order of protection because he has seen Mr. Scully sitting in his van near the daycare, and according to the paperwork that Axtell filed to get the order of protection, he said, quote, he has been there many times stalking children in his van. He is a convicted

pedophile, and him stalking and attempting his van. He is a convicted pedophile and him stalking and attempting to groom my daughter is completely inappropriate and needs to stop. Now, the order of protection was granted for several weeks, but it was dismissed. That's where we are then. Joe, just so you know, there were a few other complaints about Mr. Scully during this time period. And it's important to note that no action was taken other than this very short-term protection order. That's important, particularly if you have a history that's ongoing. And if there are other events that are attached to this individual that are outside of Mr. Axtell's actions, that could be rather probative. If the court is being asked to issue

this order of protection for this child, and then there's other people that are saying things, or there's other instances, somebody might take a closer look at this as the investigation continues. Well, the sheriff actually said that there were other allegations that Scully faced during the years, but an investigation didn't reveal anything. And he said most of the claims were about harassment and trespassing at the gas station where Axtell worked. You pointed out they had an ongoing situation here. So, again, Levi Axtell at 27, Lawrence Scully at 77, Scully, the convicted pedophile, Axtell, the dad. When you look over the accusations that Axtell leveled, he was trying to do something. He was trying to get this man

backed off in some way. Axtell actually, in 2018, got in trouble with the law. Axtell actually was charged with and convicted of doing something to a pastor's vehicle. Did you know about that? No, I didn't know. I didn't know about that. I'm looking at the years here, and I'm looking at 2018, where Axtell has a young daughter. He is watching this convicted pedophile. He's making accusations with the proper authorities. And meanwhile, he actually is also getting in trouble himself.

He was actually not living a laid-back life, I guess is the one way to say it. We have a little girl here. We have a dad and we have the convicted pedophile. So how do we take all of this, Joe Scott Morgan, and end up with a headline that screams, Dad confesses to killing a man with a moose antler. I know this with such a levelose antler. I know this. With such a level of violence and a blood-covered confession, this is something that's going to have to be explored a bit further. So I'm just kind of imagining this scenario in my mind.

And the thought that is coming to me is being a young uniformed officer. Maybe you're on desk duty. Maybe the shift is coming to a close. Maybe you've just had one of those days where you just had more than you can stand as a police officer. And trust me, police officers have a lot of those days. And all of a sudden, you look up and what comes into your field of vision? You've got a young man covered, covered in blood. He drops to his knees in front of you, interlocks or interlaces his fingers behind his head, looks up and states, I have just killed somebody. I don't know what my reaction would be, Dave. How about you, man? I know that you have worked around law enforcement. You have

talked with plenty of investigators, detectives, sheriffs, deputies. You've talked to everybody and you know how criminal investigations are done. Mr. Scully is an elderly man. He's 77 years old, and his neighbor sees a man in a minivan, comes screaming into the driveway, getting out of his minivan and running in the house. She calls 911 because the guy smashes a vehicle in her elderly neighbor's driveway, but she immediately hears screaming coming from inside that house. Screaming is so loud that I think on the 911 call, the authorities could actually hear something going on in the background. That's what happened right before Mr. Axtell drove the three blocks from Scully's house to the police station. Where, by the way, and I wanted to ask you about this, Joe Scott Morgan, you've been

around law enforcement for your adult life. When a man comes in and he's got blood all over him and he gets on his knees at the police station, interlaces his hands above his head like he's doing an episode of Cops, and police are there trying to find out what happened, and he reeks of alcohol, do they immediately assume everything he's going to say is the absolute positive truth regardless of what he says? No, they don't. You have to treat everything with a level of skepticism. And the way the police would handle this initially, I think, is that if you see what appears to be blood, and no matter what they are saying at that time, they still have to assess this guy for an injury because you're

thinking, is he out of his mind? Has he injured himself? You're thinking about safety. You're thinking about this guy's safety. He's a citizen. You're thinking about the safety of everyone else. So, once he has been restrained, you're going to start, if you're the police officer, hopefully you're putting on your gloves, right? And you're getting this guy into a position, whether it's laying face down on the ground, whether it's standing him up so that you can do a full visual assessment. And they'll go from the top of his head to his feet. The police will run their hands through his hair to see if they can source the blood. If they pull it out and he's got free-flowing blood coming out of his scalp somewhere, they're going to look at the

back of his head, his neck, his chest. They'll look everywhere. They'll lift his shirt up. They'll look to see if this guy has any injuries. Let's just suppose that he is telling the truth and he's murdered someone. That's all fine and good, but if he's injured and he's injured bleeding out, you're not going to be able to get a statement from this guy. You're going to lose a primary source of evidence, at least the circumstantial evidence where he's making the statement. And it's exculpatory at that point in time. And you can find things out from this guy. So you want to ensure his safety from the beginning and just make sure that he's not injured to the point where he is going to die.

Because if you got blood on you, you got to have a source for it. Once they've established that this guy is not injured, a right-thinking person would look at him and say, oh, okay, we've got that checked off. Now, if he ain't bleeding, where's all this blood coming from? Does this marry up with the story? Well, I can tell you this, that 911 call, whoever rolled out on that call is probably radioing in at almost the same time as this guy standing in the lobby. Can you imagine this? Standing in the lobby, covered in blood, you got a guy out there at the scene. And I can just

imagine this conversation. Police go over to their own band. You hear the repeater kick on when they're talking to headquarters. But cops have the ability to flip over to another channel that you can't listen in on. They can talk directly to one another over this channel. They'll say, go to direct. And within this distance, this is almost like a line of sight broadcasting. If you're only merely blocks away, this is an easy conversation to have. So you're telling me, Jim, that you got a guy there at the station house that's saying he murdered a guy here at this address and he's covered in blood? Okay, I've got a few answers for you out here.

They're marrying this information up at this point in time. So once you've established that, hey, this guy is probably telling the truth, this person who has just made this confession becomes arguably one of the biggest pieces of evidence you have. And I'm talking about his physical person. He has to be secured. All of the clothing he's wearing has to be secured. You cannot allow him to wash his hands. You cannot allow him to wash his face. Because once you get him secured, you're going to take him into a back room and you're going to not ask him questions because at that point in time, if you start other than, are you okay? Once you

start to ask questions of an individual, all right, even if they're admitting something, they have to be Mirandized more than likely, and you don't want to hamper the free flow of information. Okay. Now you can ask them generalized questions, but if you start to get in, the police start to get in kind of probative questions and he hasn't been Mirandized, that can create a problem. You say, so you're telling me that you murdered this guy. Okay. All right. That's what you're saying.

Now, if you take a step beyond and say, well, how exactly did you go about murdering him? If he has not been Mirandized and he gets an attorney in there, then that can be a problem because he hasn't been made aware of his rights. And people don't think about that sort of thing many times. I'm glad you brought that up, Joee because that actually comes into play here one thing that seemed to really frustrate axtell well first of all he was intoxicated okay covered in blood he goes in gets on his knees puts his hands on his head and he is demanding that they handcuff him because he will hurt someone else what he's telling them and i'm thinking wait a minute he expected to go in make admission, they cuff him and take him off. But that didn't happen because the police

are trying to ascertain what's going on. What is actually transpiring here? And they're not going quick enough. That's why Axtell says, look, either you handcuff me or I'm hurting somebody else. And it's because of what you just explained. And is he in such a heightened state at this point in time? He's highly agitated, coming from what turns out to be a horrific scene. He's witnessed this. He's participated by his own admission in this. He's probably wanting to keep the demons at bay at this point in time. Because first off, you had mentioned that he's inebriated. We don't know at what level. Something else that can be explored by the police at that point in time. They will probably want to get a medical assessment on him.

I don't know that the police would have been even more shocked if an alien had landed on Earth and walked in. That's how bizarre this is. This is a very Hollywood moment. As a matter of fact, you and I had talked about this off air. It's like he had just watched the movie Seven. Spoiler alert, I've always wanted to say that on air. I've never had an opportunity

to say that, but if you've never seen Seven, one of the big scenes in this movie is where Kevin Spacey walks in to the police station. He kneels down on the floor in this police station, interlaces his fingers behind his head, and demands that he

be taken into custody. Admits at that moment, Tom, that he's committed all of these heinous crimes. It's almost like this guy had that awareness because it seems like it duplicates that scene in that movie. I wonder if they'll come up with that as a defense. One thing you got here, Joe, is the weapon he used, not just the moose antlers, but he actually used a shovel. And according to him, he pulls into the driveway and just grabs the shovel. He didn't show up with a shovel as his preferred choice of weapon.

He picked it up off the deck as he was on his way in. That's an excellent point because perhaps if you are of a mind here and you're trying to defend this guy, you're going to grab onto any scrap that you can, right, Dave? So, in this case, the attorney would say, well, this is demonstrative of the fact that my client is just in a heightened state of rage here. He's being fueled by anger. He's being fueled by alcohol. He's frustrated with the police and the courts because they won't do anything. He didn't know what he was going to do when he showed up there. To demonstrate that, he didn't even show up with a weapon. He grabbed a shovel off of the front porch that was laying there at his feet. And this, of course,

becomes what I'd refer to earlier. And we talk about this in forensics a lot. It's called a weapon of convenience. You see this a lot in domestic battery cases where people will get into a fit of rage and they grab the closest thing they can, not considering necessarily the utility of it. That's one thing if you grab a baseball bat because you can think about the use of it. It has a handle. It's meant for swinging. It's weighted at one end as opposed to, I don't know, a lamp. You got a lampshade. Yeah, you could do damage with it, but it's not the same as swinging a baseball bat.

Well, who knew that there would be a shovel on the front porch? He shows up. He grabs a shovel. It's obviously highly effective, but it's not necessarily the best type of weapon that you could utilize to bring about somebody's death. And that's exactly what he did. That's where the moose antlers come in. He uses a shovel, the neighbor on the 911 call hears the screaming. And by the way, we do know that 77-year-old Lawrence Scully didn't just sit there and

take it. He did have defensive wounds on his arms. He was trying to stop the blows from the shovel, which again, I'm thinking using a shovel as a weapon, you've got a couple of different things. You've got the actual shovel head that you could use to batter somebody with. You've also got the sharp end of it, the metal blade part that could be used almost as a cutting device, slicing with that one. And I'm wondering when you have done this your whole life, have you ever seen somebody use garden equipment as a tool? I mean, as a weapon rather? Yeah, I have. There's a reason. I'm an old soldier. One of the things that we were taught

early on, if it ever comes down to it, you can use what we refer to as an E-tool as a weapon. And the E-tool is essentially the little shovels that you carry in your backpack. You carry an E-Tool that's attached to your backpack, and it can be used not only to dig holes with, which unfortunately I dug more than my share, but it's also got a bladed end. But the difference with a military E-Tool is that it's small. It's much smaller than what you would think, say for instance, a garden spade or even a big construction-style shovel is. And you don't really know the shape of the shovel. Is it a spade-shaped shovel or is it one of these kind of big flat shovels that you would see somebody hefting gravel with, for instance? I do know this. The injuries that Scully sustained

are going to be some of the most complicated that we've ever discussed on body backs. many times when you're trying to assess injuries in the medical legal world you have a forensic pathologist that has a body on a table or maybe you're the me investigator that's out at the scene trying to make sense of this bloody mess that you have in front of you. It can be a rather daunting task. And in this particular case, what we're going to be looking at is a combination, I think at least, of both potentially sharp force injuries as well as blunt force injuries. I think we're going to have to break that down for them, Dave. There are so many different things happening here in this instance that I don't know how you as a forensic person go into trying to figure out what happened because there's going to be blood everywhere. You're going to have defensive injuries. You're going to have a big mess. I'm assuming you're going to have puddles of blood.

You're going to have splatter all over the place, probably on the ceiling and the walls. When you get to the scene, what are you going to do to divide and conquer the situation and figure out what happened? One of my big heroes in forensics of all time is a guy named Dr. Thomas Noguchi. And for those that don't know Dr. Tom, he was the chief medical examiner slash coroner for LA County. He's referred to by many as the coroner to the stars. And Dr. Noguchi stated that he had a problem when he first started working, going out to scenes involving these horrific cases. And keep in mind, he's the guy that actually did the autopsies in both the Tate and the LaBianca cases out in LA. He also did John Belushi and Marilyn Monroe. I mean, you name it, he was involved in these cases. But one of the things that Dr. Noguchi wrote about in one of his books, which I highly

recommend to anyone if you want a not-so-technical view of the world that we inhabit, that he had a problem when he would walk into the scene of focusing only on the bodies. This guy was so bright in such a simple way. He actively determined that when he would approach any scene, the first place he would always look was up. And I was always fascinated by that because he became so distracted by simply focusing on the bodies. He would be told that the bodies are in so-and-so room, that they're in this location. Can you imagine walking into that Tate crime scene after the Manson family had done their devilish work there and how brutalized these bodies were and how distracting that is as a death investigator? And you forget about everything else. And I'm glad that you mentioned this because,

yeah, the environment would have been covered in blood at Scully's home. So, using Dr. Noguchi's premise here, you look up, you're going to look for any kind of dynamic cast-off that might have come from a weapon. You're going to look to the sides, look at the walls, maybe the adjacent furniture. And then finally, you make your way to the body. The bodies aren't going anywhere, or the body, body in this case is not going anywhere. It's going to be there. You're not just simply focused on the body. And I think that this is key. I try to teach my students at Jacksonville State the same thing. Don't just merely focus on the bodies because as humans, our eyes are drawn to the body. And the worse it is, the more mesmerized you seemingly become because of the level of trauma and gore that you're seeing in front of you. And it's real easy to get distracted. And of course, we all know it's like driving a car, right? The more distracted you are, the higher the probability is that you're going to make a mistake or something's going to go wrong. So, you take the scene in total. And of course, in this particular case, we've already got an

alleged perpetrator that has walked into a station house and he is covered with blood. You can only imagine the surrounding area around Scully's body is going to be probably super saturated with blood. It's going to be all over the place. It's going to be all over the victim. There will probably be blood that is off in just the periphery in the immediate area where you might have it pool as a result of him bleeding out. This is a dynamic event. So, you're going to have the alleged perpetrator stepping in blood that's issuing out of the body. So, you might have bloody transfer footprints that are all over the place. You're going to have passive blood that's dripping off of any kind

of instrument that's being used. So, if you think about just standing there with a paintbrush in your hand that's saturated with paint, paint would drip off of the tip of it. It's the same way with an instrument, whether it be a knife or a shovel or a moose antler. It's just going to drip there. And that's kind of that passive drip. And then you have this dynamic distribution of blood that's all over the place as well, where it's cast off onto the ceiling and the walls. And famously, there's been a number of cases where perpetrators have actually cast off blood onto themselves, if you can imagine that, where they're drawing the thing back so vigorously, these diagonal kind of presentations on their back, where they're drawing it back over the

top of their head, and the blood deposits it back over the top of their head and the blood deposits diagonally across the back of their shirt. It's quite an amazing thing. So it's very easy to get distracted in a case like this. By our nature, we're drawn to the body. We want to try to make sense of it, but we have to take everything into consideration first. All right, Joe Scott, here's the actual question I want to roll out for you, because what we have so far is we've got a man in a police station, hands above his head, covered in blood, screaming for police to arrest him right now, or he's going to hurt other people and admits that he has used a shovel and antlers, moose antlers to kill a man. And my bigger question is they're both odd things to use as a weapon either one

but for real when you go in to start your investigation and as you mentioned you were talking about looking all around and you see the blood everywhere but now you've got injuries to look at how are you going to be able to tell the difference between a flat back of a shovel and an antler or the sharp edge of the shovel and an antler? Or what if he used the wood handle of the shovel and hit him with that or poked him with that? How will you, as the forensic guy, separate these wounds? It's very tough. First off, I got to tell you, it's not something that we would make that total assessment at the scene. It's impossible. And you're make that total assessment at the scene.

It's impossible. And you're going to wreck your case if you do that. That's why bodies need to go to a morgue. They need to go to an autopsy station. For folks that have never been into an autopsy room, it's lit much like a surgical theater. You've got these very brilliant lights that kind of blast away any shadows that might be indwelling there. And so, that's the first thing you want to do, eradicate all the shadows. And then, you're going to have to clean the body up. But of course, we'll document it with photography first in its untouched state. So, you photograph at the scene, you photograph at the morgue, and you photograph

before and after images, essentially. Because these injuries are going to be so over the top, Dave. They're going to be what we refer to as communicating injuries. This is what you're dealing with. If you just take the shovel alone, and I have had people that have been killed with shovels. I remember a fellow right off the top of my head that was beaten to death with a shovel, and the injuries were all about his head and face,

and that the leading sharp edge on the shovel was not used in this case. I have had another one, though, where an individual was essentially chopped with a shovel. Those injuries look completely different because the chopping injuries with the leading edge of that blade, well, it could look like an axe. It could look like a meat cleaver. It could look like a hatchet. And so, those are going to be closer to sharp force injuries. Let me kind of give folks at home an idea of what this looks like. If you have someone that is beaten, those injuries that arise from that are going to be what are referred to as lacerations. These are going to be jagged, irregular style injuries. And if folks at home will take their fingers and interlace them and then just kind of gently pull them apart, that's what we refer to when we look for something called tissue bridging. And that's how we delineate between blunt force and sharp force. So, with blunt force, you'll have these little strands of tissue that still connect to

either side of the injury. But if you have a sharp force injury, the edges are going to be very clean. The margins to be very clean. The margins will be very clean because you've got a milled edge that's cutting through that tissue. That's kind of how we delineate. Also, with lacerations, you're going to have contused areas because this is an impact area. It's not just the area where the skin tears because that's what a laceration is. The skin is kind of ripping in two. You'll have associated bruising or contusion around that area, more so than you will with an edged weapon. Now, the handle, you had mentioned that. If someone is being beaten with the handle itself

and you've got this weighted shovel head on it, and the shovel head doesn't even have to make contact with the body, you're going to get these linear contusions, which are quite striking, and you can kind of make those out depending upon where the body is hit. But now you know how I said that you've got communicating injuries. The story is that the perpetrator, alleged perpetrator here, had beaten him 20 plus times with the shovel.

And they say beaten. We don't know if it's actually beaten or these are chop injuries or if he was impaled in some way we don't really know we don't know what the condition of the shovel is but then quote unquote according to the sheriff he picks up a moose antler one has to assume the moose antler is just laying in the house i don't know maybe it's a decorative item these things as i stated early on they can weigh up to 30 pounds dave. The Native Americans use these as tools as like war clubs. So it's nothing to sneeze at. I'm picturing this in my head, Joe, and I'm thinking, okay, the shovel I get, but the guy has lost his cookies. He comes slamming in

the driveway. He's running in the house. He's going to do some major damage to this man. He's just reached his point of no return. He's alcoholed up and he's going in so i get the shovel but what drives a man to look and say i need to finish this guy off and the shovel just won't do that's not something i see as a weapon i've envisioned the thing sitting on a coffee table and you use it as a bowl to put your car keys in or something. I don't live in that north country up there. People in this region are very used to seeing, I would assume, moose heads on the wall and that sort of thing in a local watering hole or someplace that they go to a family's house that likes to hunt moose. They've seen the antlers. Maybe they understand the utility of the antlers. Maybe they've held an antler before and they say, wow, this is really,

it's weighted in a very particular way. So So it requires, I think, some familiarity with it. Because he didn't go out, it doesn't say that he picked up a pair of shoes and began to beat him to death with it, or that he even picked up a fire poker and started swinging. He picked up a moose antler. And the moose antler is designed in a very peculiar way. I said early on that moose can hear really well. Well, these things are dish-shaped, almost like an odd-shaped satellite dish that they have on either side of their head. They shed them periodically.

They grow back. I think in the fifth year of the moose's life, they're the biggest that they'll ever reach. These things are conductors for sound as well. And I would assume that when you pick them up there's a perceptible weight and maybe a balance to it maybe the alleged perpetrator picked some up in the past and said wow you know this might be something you could use as a weapon and you know he grabs the shovel maybe the guy is not dead yet and he says well i'm tired of swinging this long-handled shovel let me find something that's a bit more compact.

You remember when I was talking about the E-Tool earlier that you're issued in the military? That's more compact than a regular shovel. You can perhaps get a bit more leverage with it to direct that energy onto the body. And of course, there lies a moose antler. Now, I think for me, as someone that's never had any kind of experience whatsoever examining this kind of insult to a body, I'd be intrigued as to what these injuries look like, because they're going to look different than any other kind of blunt force impact. The edges of the antlers also have, they're not sharp, but they have these little ridges along the area.

In a couple of these images I've seen, some of them look like gigantic saw teeth, and then they'll expand to what looks like almost the diameter of a branch of a tree, but they're smooth and rounded on the top. So, what kind of injury could you expect? You have to imagine that the edge of the antler is actually what is going to be the contact surface. You're not going to hit them with the bowl-like structure. You're going to hit that individual so that they're being impacted by that edge with those little knobs along the ridge, and that in and of itself is going to generate a very particular type of injury. Joe, I had to ask you this because I'm kind of curious

as to how the whole thing comes into play. We have a neighbor that actually sees Axtell, his minivan, screeching into the driveway and sees him getting out and running inside, obviously grabbing a shovel off the deck as he goes inside. She then, while on the phone with 911, hears screaming, and while still on the phone with 911, sees Axtell leave the house, get back in his car,

and start the three-block drive to the police station. So, all of this takes place in a very, very short period of time. Will that have any impact on the way police or forensic people come in and address the scene, the speed with which this horrific terror took place? There's many times that you will hear, particularly behaviorists that look at crimes, they'll use terms like frenzied. It's a frenzied attack. And I think that when you go to kind of describe the scene, and trust me, my friend, it's going to be chaotic. It'll be chaotic in that environment.

The movement, you hear this guy screaming. By virtue of him screaming, he has an awareness that he's being attacked. You said earlier that there was evidence of defensive injury. So, he knows that this individual is coming after him. He would raise his arm. And can you imagine being impacted by a shovel on your arm? His arm very well might be sliced open with one of the edges of the shovel. He's going to have an awareness that he is being attacked. And of course, it ends up in his death. So there's movement here. There's a dynamic environment that's going on. I would imagine that you're going to have maybe broken furniture, certainly upturned furniture, depending upon how much is in there. If you've got trinkets on shelves, pictures on the wall, that sort of

thing, a lot of that stuff you're swinging. Next time you got to your shed, grab hold of your shovel and just consider it for a second and see how unmanageable this thing is. If you're trying to use it as a weapon, you'd have to kind of choke up on it like a baseball bat in order to facilitate. And then it's going to impede your ability to utilize it because you got the rest of the handle. It's not the most efficient weapon. And you could see how he may have gotten frustrated along the way. And so that compelled him to ultimately pick up this moose antler that just happened to be laying there and finally finish Scully off. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.